Heat

They barely had any money and they barely worked. She had some spare change left over from a fake disability claim she’d filed at her last and final job, and he’d begun to sell his things: an antique table his mother had given him (which her mother had given her, and her mother’s mother had given her), his CDs, his guitar, and then finally the gold wedding band he found one day in the sand at the playground in the park.

I sold someone else’s marriage, he liked to say. Their love bought me groceries.

They somehow managed to pay their rent each month, but they couldn’t afford the telephone or to turn on the air conditioning. Unfortunately, they were living in Tucson, and it was the summer the rains never came.

It didn't rain, then it didn't rain, and then it didn't rain.

Sometimes they would go to the first matinee of the day at the nearby multiplex and stay until the night fell. The theaters were so cool with air-conditioning and darkness. They carried in backpacks full of sandwiches, potato chips, and sodas. One day he brought in a bottle of cheap champagne, and another time she smuggled in a bottle of white wine.

Life is food. Life is drink. They’d see one movie, then sneak into others, breaking into middles and ends, as if stories, the world, had no chronology. Afterward, the whole day seemed to be a fragmented blur of images—all of the movies mixed into one overall production, a romantic comedy that became an action movie that became a children’s musical that became a drama of inner city gangsters, as if life were channel surfing. They never got caught sneaking in. No one cared.

Each day they eagerly awaited the mail. They’d written jingles and advertising ideas and sent them to various companies. It was her idea. She said a friend of hers had done it once and received a bunch of coupons and free samples, and once she had even received a $500 check for the rights to a jingle. “You can get stuff just for showing that you like their product,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it sucks.”

They sang their jingles to each other as if their life was about to take a wonderfully dramatic turn.

Just buy Tide
In case there’s a mudslide
Or for your dirty uncle Clyde
Tide, Tide, Tide,
There’s no place to hide
So take this clean, fabulous ride
Just buy Tide

When they didn’t go to the movies, they went to the mall. He liked to sit in the food court and write letters full of false stories about his life. Once he wrote to an old high school friend that he saved a man who was being beaten with a baseball bat. He wrote his ex-girlfriend Sally that he had colon cancer. He told his old hippie friend Jack that he had married and was selling cars at his father-in-law’s car dealership. They were people he knew he’d never see again. Why not make them think twice about who he really was?

She'd become impatient with his “sitting around” and walk to Dillard's to try on clothes and sample perfumes. He'd find her there, each time wearing the same short, shiny dress that shimmered lightly over her body. She smelled fresh with perfume and smiled happily with a new shade of lipstick on her lips.

The clerks admired her, which pleased him. Her body a series of gentle slopes, effortlessness. Her bright blue eyes glinting with dares. She asked him in the teasing voice of a rich, spoiled girl if he would buy the dress for her, and he had to put on a gruff act and say no, then promise to come back next month to buy it for her birthday.

“Promise?” she asked.

“Promise,” he said.

“Double promise?” she asked.

“Triple promise,” he said.

Everything a game.

One evening they snuck into the pool at the Arizona Inn—an old hotel with quaint, shady bungalows mixed among spacious green lawns and bountiful gardens of flowers. They pretended they were Hollywood movie stars in the thirties, living decadently in the depression. The pool was small but luxurious, surrounded by a tall hedge for full privacy and lined with yellow and white striped umbrellas. She smoked a cigarette from a cigarette holder. He ordered a drink and charged it to room 113.

“You should be a porn star,” he told her.

“You should sell flies to fly fishermen,” she said.

“You should run for president.”

“You should be a professional bowler.”

The rain just wouldn’t come. Everyday, it seemed to try. Dark, portentous clouds full of crackling lightning would sweep over the mountains and cast darkness over the heat-smothered city, and they would wait, smelling the fresh creosote that saturated the suddenly moist air, ready to run through the soon-to-be-flooded streets in glee. But always, the wind picked up and the clouds blew away. And then the sky held only infinite, flat blue, and the wind rushed out as if an oven door had been opened.

Life is weather. The coupons and the free samples never arrived. He always thought that they’d both make it, together. Fame or something like it. Love, certainly. Yes, love. That seemed as clear and real as anything. But that summer was the last. He finally got a job at the university, working in the library. Health insurance. He said they could save some money, buy a car and drive it until they found the place where they were supposed to be.

“Do you know the difference between absinthe and sherry?” she asked. “You don’t hear about many artists finding their muse in a bottle of sherry, do you?”

First she hated the town, then she hated their house. The coffeemaker didn’t work one day, and she threw it against the wall, sending shards of glass skimming across the tile floor. She deserved more, she said. She wanted to be a model, she said. Then she said she was going to go to law school. Then she applied for a job at Dillard’s. “I deserve something,” she pleaded.

The holes in her t-shirt. The beautiful holes and her dangling arms. Her neck, a swan’s.

He only had himself to give. She left. Packed up her things in the middle of the night. She didn’t even leave him a note. A single blouse hung in the closet.

He heard years later that she’d married someone who had inherited a large ranch in Nevada. Cattle and oil. A man who liked to golf, drove a BMW convertible, played the drums, drank martinis. He imagined her driving through the desert in the convertible, driving fast, wanting to drive even faster, looking for him. Except she was staying still. Living in air conditioning. Buying dresses on the Internet.

He didn’t understand anything, how hot becomes cold, or cold becomes hot. She couldn’t be happy. He was the only one who knew that.

He still sent in ideas for TV jingles. He never got rid of his fan. Sometimes he went to Dillard’s on Sunday afternoons. It was all some blend of the three lives. The life he wanted to live. The life he was living. The life he saw her watching. He wished she were watching.

Mr. American

Will stood up and looked through the gap in the soiled floral drapes, forgetting the girl and her drunken ribaldry for a moment. The hotel was an old one, at the edge of town in a no man’s land between farmland and the highway heading to Des Moines. A slanted barn lay sketched on a hill covered with a scrim of snow. Cows ate the scrubs of November cornstalks in a field nearby, and a solitary tree, speckled with the last frazzled leaves of autumn, clawed at the sky. The afternoon sunlight was just beginning to fade into the slate grey of a late November evening, and in the darkness that lurked in the valleys of the fields outside, it seemed as if now there was nowhere to go. He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to stay in the room forever. Or in another hotel room with another girl.

The bottle of Cutty was like an hour glass.

“Hey Mr. American,” she said, an Asian accent from former times edging into her speech. “You’re Mr. American, that’s what you are.”

She laughed, a loud peal of crazy laughter, like she’d just discovered that everything that had ever happened in the world was a joke. Yes, yes, it is, Will thought. What can possibly be so serious?

“Mr. United States of America! Big blue-eyed son of a bitch!”

She drank off the bottle of Cutty Sark, then spit it across the motel room in one big spray, laughing again. He laughed too, drunkenly watching her face leap from one emotion to another. He could laugh for days, he thought. He wanted to laugh for days, forget all consequences.

“You oppressed my people,” she yelled, sitting upright on the bed and tossing her silky black hair over her shoulder. She pointed her finger at him, then fell back into the pillows as she lost herself in laughter again.

He tugged a blanket off the bed and rolled into the room’s only chair, its patent leather scrunching against his butt. The room was beautiful in the light, shadow-banded, all lines and gaps, but it smelled musty with carpet that had been spilled and smoked and probably pissed on. He reached for the new pack of Lucky Strikes he’d bought and tried to tear the cellophane off, but his fingernails were bitten down too short to get a grip. She drank from the bottle again, but swallowed this time. She hadn’t put her shirt back on, and her tiny, brown breasts lifted with each breath.

He felt a stab of guilt cut through his drunkenness as he thought about Deborah, his wife, but he chased the feeling away. He needed to touch the veneer of reckless beauty, know that his life was adventurous. Another stranger in an intimate moment—it had been such a long time since he’d sinned, and he needed to sin to help him understand his life, he told himself, immediately knowing how ridiculous that was. If he was going to fall, though, he might as well fall far.

“You Americans think you own the world,” she said. “Just because you’re taller. Just because you’re fucking fatter.”

“What else do you need to own the world?”

She shook her head, putting the bottle on the night stand. “I don’t know. You have to believe in something.”

“And what do you believe in?”

Her giggly eyes clouded with a moment of thought, and she looked around the room as if there was an answer in one of the corners. She looked vulnerable for the first time, like a little girl trying to figure out the world.

“I believe in myself. I believe in peace. I believe in love. I believe in beauty. How about that?”

“Big words.”

“What do you mean, big words?”

“I mean they’re beautiful. Big words are beautiful. Everyone should believe in big words.”

“Do you believe in big words?”

“Whisky. Sex. Sin.” He laughed, then noticed she wasn’t laughing. She even looked hurt.

“How about redemption? Glory. There’s got to be some kind of glory, or it’s just not worth it.”

“And what do you do to be glorious?”

“I feel glorious right now.”

“You sound like a fox.”

“I suppose I am a fox.”

“Or maybe you’re a gopher.”

She started laughing again, but he was tired of her jokes and turned away. Dry manufactured heat blasted out of a heater next to him, and he held an ice cube over a bead of sweat on his head. He felt gloriously drunk, as if he’d found his old best friend and was swapping stories of the old days. Before AA, back when he was a confirmed and unrepentant drinker, he’d prided himself on being an alchemist with his drinks, combining mixtures and pacing himself diligently so as to always maintain a perfect state of being, drunkenness inspired by clarity and wit, or so he liked to think. He never lost himself, rarely became morose. His drinking problem, if he had one—and he still wondered if he really did—was that he actually became a superior person under the influence. He felt a feathery joy that even the devil couldn’t touch.

He lay down on the bed again. He wanted comfort and love, but a kind of comfort and love that Deborah couldn’t provide. Deborah couldn’t fuck. She was loving, yes, sexy, sure, but they made love as if they were sitting around the dinner table, with good manners.

He put his hand on the girl’s upper arm, and she pushed it away. He put his hand on her arm again, and she knocked it off. He shrugged and laughed, like what’s going on. She put her hand to his chest, then rolled away.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Are you?”

“I asked you.”

He looked down at his hand to make sure that he’d taken off his ring. Now, he hoped that the ring was still in his front pocket, mixed in with his change and keys. He wouldn’t be able to explain a lost ring to Deborah, although he’d told some good lies in the past.

“I can’t take care of people,” he said to make sure not to get her hopes up, but he realized how true it was. The world required too much care.

“I asked you if you were married.”

“Do you want someone to take care of you?” he asked.

“I don’t want to be married. I hate men.”

“I’m a man.”

She flicked her finger at his forehead, laughing. “I’m stronger than people think. People treat me like a dummy. They don’t know.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

“There are three Laotian families in town. I’m in one of them.”

“No, what do you do for work?”

“Everybody in America thinks that all Asian girls are nice, do you know that?”

“You’re not nice?”

“They didn’t like it when I said fuck at Walmart. That’s where I work. I’m a
checkout girl. I check people out.”

“I’ve had similar problems myself.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Sure I have.”

“Then tell me about them.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I know you think I’m just an easy fuck, but we’re all the same on the inside, you know.”

“I don’t think you’re an easy fuck.”

“Why the fuck not? I am an easy fuck. Are you going to marry me?”

He didn’t know what to say, but then she laughed, a cackle almost, and he poured another drink.

He didn’t even know her name. They met at Tradewinds, the bar out on the edge of town where he was sure he wouldn’t see anybody he knew. None of his friends or clients would dare go in such a dive. It was a hangout for the people who lived in the trailer park across the highway. He’d stopped at the bar on an impulse, on the way back from a subdivision that one of his main clients, Burt McCallister, was building. It was a test to see if he could walk in and have just a drink or two, no more. Deborah had thrown him a party just yesterday to celebrate his one-year anniversary without a drink, complete with Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider and O’Douls nonalcoholic beer. When he lifted an O’Douls to his mouth, he could smell the old times, and he realized that the inexplicable ache inside him had never truly subsided. He’d grown in the last year, though, so he believed that he could handle his booze better now.

Two drinks, he promised himself. A fog of stale, old smoke hovered in the dim lights of the bar, although it was only early afternoon. A lit-up Spuds McKenzie dog was the brightest object in the room. A fat man with a ragged Fu-Manchu mustache sat glumly in a booth with a large dill pickle and a mug of beer, touching neither. The bartender, a plump girl with frizzy, blonde hair wore a baggy pink sweatshirt with a bouquet of roses embroidered on it. She swirled her straw lackadaisically around in a can of Diet Coke.

An Asian woman playing pool alone, an odd sight in the midst of these rough, very white Midwesterners. She jiggled a drink in one hand and pranced around the table with the cue stick in the other. Designer jeans that looked like they came from the 70s hung loosely off of her tiny, straight hips, and her long black hair draped over a white fuzzy sweater that hugged small round breasts. She caught him staring at her and danced toward him.

“Hey there G. I. Joe,” she said. “You want to play G.I.? Play a little pool with me?”

He smiled and shook his head. She batted her eyes at him and said, “No need to be scared of little ol’ me.”

“Okay, I’ll play a game.”

“You better be good to play with me. Are you good?”

“I think I am good.”

“But you’re not going to beat a girl are you? You’re not supposed to beat a girl.”

She first introduced herself as Mary, but then later, she told him to call her Elizabeth.

“Just like the queen,” she said.

“I’ll call you whatever you want,” he said.

She was regal, high cheekbones and a sharply pointed chin that framed eyes flickering with imperious delight. She swayed back and forth to the country music on the jukebox and lit one cigarette off the tip of another.

Sometimes he’d look up after making a shot and find her looking intently at him, her eyes fierce and clouded with some sort of infernal vision that lacked order and reason, but when his eyes met hers, her eyes darted away.

“You try too hard,” she said while he was lining up a shot. “You want to win.”

“Why play if you don’t want to win?”

“Why play if you don’t want to win?”

“That was my question.”

“That was my question.”

She was a crazy one, but he’d been around so many “sane” people lately that he took pleasure in her abandon. She didn’t take time to aim, whipping the stick up and jabbing quickly at the cue ball, smiling with the pleasure of a cat every time she accidentally made a shot.

The bartender lazily asked if he wanted another beer. He told himself to leave right then, walk out the door and continue his day as if nothing happened—a successful test—but the idea of another beer was already tickling him. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it he used to joke. When he put the cold glass to his mouth, he lost himself in the beery aroma, felt the itch to have another, then another, tasting them already, feeling that pleasant, uplifting thoughtlessness that was as close to heaven as anything he had known.
Her ass perched in the air. First she leaned into him. Then he leaned into her.

He looked at the motel’s clock on the bed stand. It was 5:00. He rarely came home later than 6:00, but he was too drunk to go home now. They rolled around on the bed and swayed in each others’ arms. Sometimes she laughed, but then her eyes drifted away. She shook her head lazily back and forth. He cupped his hand around her butt, spooned his body around her.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“What do you want?”

“I want everything in the world.”

“I can’t give you everything.”

“But you can try.”

She ran her fingers across his chest, tentatively, as if testing the situation, making sure it was safe. He caressed her body, so tight and skinny and exhausted. For a brief moment he thought he could take care of her. He rubbed his dick against her bush, trying to figure out if she was wet so he could put it in. He placed his hands on the small of her back. A tiny, light arch. She was limp in his arms. Then he was in her, almost as if by accident. She squirmed, bit her lip. She pushed against his shoulders, digging her fingernails into his skin. He was getting into his rhythm, feeling the thrust of his weight against her body.

She closed her eyes.

Darkness entered the room. He came as if that was the point of everything.

“I should go home,” he said.

“Yeah, cowboy. You should go home.”

* * *

The early morning darkness lay heavily in the room, blanketing the stillness outside. Gentle breezes streamed through the last crinkles of leaves clinging on to the trees, but the world was slumberous, satisfied, or so it seemed in comparison to his fitfulness. His limbs tingled and his head pounded, the images from yesterday still roiling in his mind. When he thought of Mary or Elizabeth’s leg draped over the edge of the bed, her eyes a messy slur of booze, he recoiled, cringing at his capacity for destruction. He had no idea why he had done such a thing, even though it felt all too typical. The same demons laughing in the corners of the room, chiding him. Gotcha stupid.

His leg pressed against Deborah’s warm and fleshy thigh. It seemed the source of all comfort. Will wouldn’t have imagined that his transgression could spark such an upswell of love for Deborah, but now he felt as if he were running frantically to find her, to protect her from all of the harms he had invited into their safe little world, to ask forgiveness.

He inched closer to her, imagining his finger tracing the frilly lines of her fine, silk underwear. She stirred, letting out a heavy breath, and he was afraid that she had woken up. As much as he wanted to make love to her, he didn’t want to see her yet. He couldn’t bring himself to look into her eyes because then he would have to see himself as a liar.
Before coming home last night, he’d gone through a meticulous regimen to sober up. He blasted cold water on himself in the motel’s shower, scrubbing himself hard with soap as if he could scrub away the entire afternoon. Then he stopped at a convenience store and drank two Red Bulls on the way home, practicing saying sentences without slurring his speech, tracing through his thoughts to see if there was any evidence on him or in the car, a receipt, lipstick, anything. He parked the car in the driveway and gargled a mouthful of Listerine, and then double-checked to make sure he’d put his wedding ring back on. When he entered the house, he scooped up the kids and kissed them, and then immediately started doing chores so that he wouldn’t have to interact with Deborah except in the most fleeting manner. He took out the trash, put a new ink cartridge in the printer, sat at the desk and paid bills. He bought a half hour before dinner time, just enough time to collect himself, to pee out the last remnants of the afternoon’s drinking.

Fortunately Deborah had her monthly book club with her friends, so she was preoccupied and in a rush to get out of the house, forgoing a good night kiss as she stuffed a dog-eared copy of The Corrections in her purse.

She always read the entire book, jotting down her questions and thoughts on index cards, despite the other women’s preference for socializing over serious book talk. She was the same when he met her in college, reading every book on the syllabus from cover to cover, annoyed that he scanned through chapters for the main ideas and somehow managed to get a grade almost as high as hers.

He’d always tended to find the easy way. In the town of New London, he was the designated heir of Campbell’s Lumber from birth, and so he moved in the town as one of the chosen ones, an odd kind of royalty as a blue blood in a small town, living a life unblemished by the struggles that most people endure to make it in the world. He spent his summers playing golf and swimming at the country club; his parents took him to France when he was 16. He occasionally consorted with the troublemakers, for the drugs if nothing else, but when his friends got caught for drinking or having a stash of pot, he somehow eluded trouble. He’d leave the party just before the cops arrived, or sneak out the back door when no one was looking. The more he slipped away from consequences, the more it seemed that nothing would ever happen to him.

He snuggled up closer to Deborah, feeling an erection push against his underwear as his hand snuck under the elastic of her panties. It had been years since he’d woken her up in the morning to have sex. It had been weeks, if not longer, since they’d made love. They no longer made love for hours, losing time. The business of their lives had taken over their desires. Usually Deborah woke at six to do yoga with a DVD, so they never got to lounge in bed together. He wanted to make love to her now, no matter the risk of waking the kids up.

He moved his hand onto her stomach, her skin still loose from having Lucy three years ago. He nuzzled his nose into her ear, breathing in the flowery scents of yesterday’s perfume. She squirmed, almost waking, and he moved his hands under her nightgown to her breasts, soft and full.

“What?” she asked sleepily, lifting her head off the pillow.

“I love you.” The words sounded forced, almost foreign, hanging in the air between them as an object that didn’t belong to either of them, but he meant them. “You’re so beautiful.”

A tired smile creased her cheeks. “That’s nice. I love you too.”

He tugged at her panties, pulling them down to her thighs.

“What happened to romance?” she asked.

“It’s been too long.”

She sighed. He couldn’t tell if it was a reluctant or welcoming sigh. He wrapped his leg over hers, her body toasty under the flannel sheets.

“Sex in the morning somehow seems subversive, doesn’t it?” he said. “We’ve become too old too fast.”

“Let’s just snuggle,” she said. “I’m still sleepy.”

Once, she’d been the daring girl at the University of Iowa, the one who didn’t mind telling frat guys to fuck off when they whistled at her. She was tall, ash blonde, patrician in her looks and demeanor. She read books, went to law school, didn’t wear make-up. He loved her for all of that, even though his mother, the matron of the local country club, was consistently perplexed that she didn’t revere femininity more. Other people resented Deborah in New London as well: her brusque, matter-of-fact manner collided with small town politeness, and no one understood why she continued practicing law after having children since they obviously had plenty of money. But she was so beautiful that she didn’t need the soft touches of femininity; she didn’t need adornments.

She turned her head back to him, arching her head for a kiss, everything about her so lovely, the age and wisdom of her eyes, even the lines beginning to form on her forehead. “I guess we can do it if you want to,” she said.

But just then, he heard David calling from his room. He yelled, “Dad,” louder and louder in a panic.

When Will entered the room, though, there was no disaster. David sat on the floor, a mess of heroic figurines all around him—Batman, Spiderman, firemen, policemen, construction workers, baseball players.

“I can’t find my sword,” he said, his voice wavering, threatening tears.

“Where did you last have it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, this is why it’s important to put things away. If you put it in one place, then you’ll always know where it is.”

He lost coats, toys, shoes, everything, and no matter what they did, he ran through life with disregard, in the middle of his own tornado, unable to listen to his teacher, stubbornly clinging to the ways of early childhood.

When he was in kindergarten, just a year ago, his universe was defined by the fantasia of playground games, where he could claim to be king of air castles, strike down bad guys with swats of an imaginary sword. Now the other kids were writing sentences, taking spelling tests, reading books, but David only knew how to write his name. He wrote it over and over again, as if it were the only word in the world. They couldn’t get him to write cat or dog or car or truck. In frustration he’d now given up trying to read books, instead narrating by the pictures to cover up his inability, stubbornly and angrily insisting that he was reading the text even as Will pointed to each word and told him that the sentences in the book were different than his story. Will had imagined that David would fall into step just he had. David was supposed to take over the lumberyard someday, just as Will had taken it over from his father, and his father had taken it over from his. But Will couldn’t imagine that David would ever be able to run the business.

“Don’t worry, you’re my special guy,” Will said, giving David a hug, wanting to get some love, a small bit of validation that everything would somehow be all right.

David inched a smile from his lips, then shrugged away, eager to return to his toys. He kept playing, as if he didn’t notice a thing, all of his toy heroes scattered helplessly on the floor.

* * *

Will drove by Walmart several days in a row before finally stopping. Ostensibly, he told himself, he was there to buy batteries for the kids’ toys, but he didn’t really know what he was doing. He stood in an aisle, peeking around the Pringles and mixed nuts, staring at her as she checked out customers. It was odd how different she looked now: another faceless, glum cashier, the polyester smock covering up her curves, canceling any hints of a sensuous body. Her tense lips barely stretched into the compulsory smile. He saw her mouth move perfunctorily through required statements: “Did you find everything?” “Thank you for shopping at Walmart.” She looked so uncomfortable, as if she might spit at someone. Nothing compared to the imperious girl who introduced herself with the names of British queens. The smock turned him on somehow, though, the undulating curves of her body beneath it as if they were a hidden treasure.

A bottle of Scotch and a six pack of beer were sitting in his back seat, just in case, but now he wasn’t sure what “just in case” meant. He nervously took a bag of honey roasted peanuts off the shelf in order to have something to buy, surprised that his hands were shaking with anticipation and anxiety.

He’d been driving home, trying to fight the temptation to have a drink. His father, now supposedly retired at 80 years old, but almost always around, had been in the office all day with the consultant, Noah, who Will had flown out from Chicago to help them come up with a strategy to deal with Home Depot, which had swallowed 30% of its business in just one year since opening in Ottumwa. Will had thought Campbell’s would survive because three generations of relationships would prove stronger than Home Depot’s cheap prices, but price trumped relationships, friendships. Noah was Will’s age but looked younger, slick and well-dressed in the way only a person who lives in a big city can be. Everything about him resonated minimalism, stainless steel, sharp corners, success. He called himself a business strategist. Every time he made a statement, he clicked on a PowerPoint slide and a colorful graph blossomed on the screen. Simple clicks, but every click seemed beyond Will, part of a new age, something he couldn’t be a part of, no matter what effort he made. Will thought the presentation would impress his father, be a demonstration of his modern-day business savvy, but the old man’s face stayed frozen in a scowl during the presentation. He interrupted the consultant and asked, “Do you know what flashing is?” The consultant had no idea, so Will’s father proceeded to explain flashing and other carpentry terms to him. “Being good with numbers doesn’t make you good at business,” he said. “I don’t know what a consultant is going to tell us about our business, especially if you’ve never done more than hold a hammer in your hand.”

Will had rarely done more than hold a hammer in his hand himself. “Don’t let this business fail,” his father growled. “Three generations. Make it last another three. No excuses.”

His greatest fear as a child was that the lumberyard would burn. He had nightmares of flames licking up high into the sky, firemen ineffectually spraying water on the crackling, dry timber. He knew that if the lumberyard combusted, the family would combust as well. Now he almost hoped that a fire would take it all away, if only so that they could go away, start everything over again, if that was possible.

When Will passed by the liquor store afterward, it was as if the odor of scotch seeped through the car windows, a siren’s song. He remembered the comforting scents of liquor and ash from his childhood, when he walked through the living room the morning after one of his parents’ parties in search of a half-empty soda in the festive debris. Glasses rimmed with dry red wine, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. The lipstick on the butts looked like little tender kisses. The rumble of laughter from the night before still seemed to echo. He went through the rote lines he’d learned in AA. You don’t need a drink, you just want a drink. You have to address your attitudes to change your actions. Think of the consequences. He should go to an AA meeting, but he didn’t want to drink their lousy coffee, smoke cigarettes, hear about others’ tragedies. The consequences.

His thoughts were a whorl in his head. He felt as if he were in a hurry to get someplace, but didn’t even know where he was going. He had to stop it all. Make everything quiet. Get the fuck out of here, out of life. Drinking had always helped ease his thoughts. That’s what he missed: Drinking made life go by in moments, not seasons or years. Staying sober wasn’t one day at a time, like the slogan, it was one minute at a time, each minute grinding along more slowly than the previous one. One minute. One minute. One minute. He even had to fight the urge to drink in his dreams.

An old boozer in AA told him, “You gotta enjoy your life. How can anyone argue with that?” The consequences. Will ran his tongue around his teeth, already tasting scotch, loving it.

He walked up to her register and lay down the batteries and peanuts and a pack of gum. He imagined his hands stroking the fine soft curves of her torso. She didn’t look at him. He noticed the name on her nametag: Lae.

“Hello Lae,” he said.

She looked down, frowning. Suddenly she wasn’t Mary or Elizabeth or any other name, let alone a queen. She had to be who she was, Lae.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

He almost reached out to touch her hand. “To see you. What time do you get off?”

“Late.”

“That’s not a time.”

She stared at him quizzically. She held up his pack of gum. “Fifty cents.”

“Do you want to chew a pack of gum with me?” he asked.

“That’s against Walmart policy.”

“But what is your policy?”

“I don’t have any policies.”

She rang up the items and placed them in a plastic bag. He saw her eyes pinch with the effort to appear cool, emotionless. She was afraid, timid even. A vulnerable girl. His hands stopped shaking. He could do whatever he wanted with her, he knew.

“Trust me,” he whispered. “I’ll be in the parking lot. I’m driving the black BMW, just like last time.”

Her eyes softened, she smiled, and he felt a tremble in his hand, knowing that everything was now in motion.

Patches of snow, soiled and frozen, specked the parking lot. People streamed in and out of the Walmart: fat people in Iowa Hawkeye sweat pants, snaggletooth girls with wispy peroxide hair, and teenage boys in t-shirts, too proud of their muscles to wear a winter coat. He sipped the scotch and watched them traipse back and forth, as if they were animals in the wild, big and lumbering, but harmless. They would drive from one amusement to another, exhilarated and frustrated and insatiable, eating and drinking and never quite at ease, always looking for a way to feel important—feel something—in this small place that felt so big to them. He wondered if he might be better off sitting in a carload of roustabouts, off to drink a keg, listen to some headbanging music, smoke a joint or two, and sleep through a night without any dreams of being a better man, for he didn’t see how he was much different from them, despite his topcoat from Brooks Brothers, his Cordovan shoes. But he was different; he’d never been one with this place. He should have moved to Chicago. Had friends like Noah. Stainless steel. Sharp edges. Sophistication.

He looked up to the sky, wanting to see something bright and hopeful. He almost drove home. He put his hand on the ignition. If his head wasn’t so woozy.

When Lae climbed into the car, she surprised him. He was in a daze, further into the bottle of scotch than he’d realized.

“Hey, Mr. American.”

“Why do you call me that?”

“Because it’s who you are.”

“And you’re Lae.”

“I’m who I want to be.”

He smiled, leaning over to kiss her. She kissed him, teasing her tongue into his mouth. Her breath was full of sugar.

“You’re either lonely or stupid or you’re falling in love with me,” she said.

“Maybe a little bit of all of those things,” he said.

She laughed as she grabbed the bottle of scotch from the seat and took a swig. “You can be just one of them, that’s fine,” she said. “Lonely or even stupid?”

“Okay then, I’m stupid.”

“I was hoping you’d say in love.”

“Maybe being in love is stupid.”

“You’re stupid, cowboy. You got to believe in love.”

He drove out onto the highway going to Johnston, an old coal mining town that was now practically deserted. He’d driven this same road with girls in high school, and with the same aims in mind. She lit a cigarette, then opened a window to blow out the smoke. She turned on the radio, smiling as she tossed her hair over her shoulder.

“You think I’m crazy, I’m not crazy,” she said.

“Why would I think you’re crazy?”

“A lot of people think I’m crazy. You think I’m crazy?”

“Crazy is in the eye of the beholder.”

“That sounds crazy.”

He turned off on a gravel road as simply as if he was pulling into a restaurant’s parking lot. The sun was going down, orange streaks limning the scuds of grey clouds. He’d driven out far enough that all he could see were rolling hills with stubs of corn poking through the sheets of snow, a pond sealed with ice. A lonely grain silo stood impassively on a hill, like a lighthouse, silhouetted against the sky. A farmhouse overlooked the world from a perch on a shadowy hill nearby, but there was nothing else around.

He turned and looked at her. The happiness had drained from her eyes, and she suddenly looked upset.

“Can’t we go to a motel? Like last time.”

“I don’t have much time tonight.”

“You want a date, but you don’t have much time?” Just then, he saw her looking at his hand, and he realized that he’d forgotten to take off his wedding ring.

He leaned over and kissed her, pushing his hand underneath her winter coat, but she pulled away.

“Oh good, I get to have an affair with a married man,” she said caustically.

“Come on, you knew we were just having fun.”

“You’re rich, aren’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“You drive a fancy car.”

“You might say that this is my parents’ car. My dad’s car. I’ve done nothing to earn it.”

“Your parents are rich, then you are rich, right? That’s the way it is in my family. I have to give my paycheck to my dad, but I don’t want to.”

The gravel on the road seemed to clench with frigidity, but the car was still running, the heat blasting so that they wouldn’t get cold. He took the bottle of scotch from her. He wanted to get off. It was a simple transaction now. Her body was available, or he hoped it was. It didn’t matter if she was crazy. Either she wanted him, or he’d have to come up with something she did want. He nuzzled his head into her neck, tonguing her ear, but she moved her head back.

“Where are you from?” she asked. “I can tell that you’re not from here.”

“Why so many questions?”

“Hey, I just want to know who you are.”

“I am from here. I’ve always been from here. I don’t think I ever even thought about leaving, but I should have left.”

“You’re a big man in town, right? Why would you leave if you’re the big man?”

“To make something of myself. To do something for myself.”

“My high school math teacher told me, ‘You could make something of yourself if you only applied yourself.’ Apply yourself, Mr. McAllister said. You have to apply yourself. I told him that I applied make-up, but he didn’t laugh.”

“You should have listened to him. You’re smart.”

“How do you know I’m smart?”

“I can tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because I’m smart.”

“Then what are you doing with me? What are you doing here? Poor little rich guy.”

She giggled, but he didn’t like her words, poor little rich guy. He wanted to get things moving. She was still wearing the polyester smock. He moved his hand under the smock and fingered the strap of her bra. When he kissed her, she barely responded, as if she were a mannequin. Her body felt limp in his arms, even as he tongued her ear, squeezed her ass.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She shook her head back and forth, her lips closed tightly in a frown. She wasn’t going to talk.

His erection tightened in his pants. He could only think about stripping her clothes off and fucking her. He turned her back toward him and kissed her, not caring whether she was into it or not. Her body felt loose and lifeless beneath him as he took off her coat, unbuttoned her shirt, and lifted her breasts into his mouth, but he didn’t care if she enjoyed herself or not. Her head tipped back as if she were far away when he entered her. His head mashed against the head rest and he smelled the leather of the seat against his nose. He nibbled the skin on her neck, bit gently at her ear lobe to get a rise out of her. He thought he heard her sigh. He was so drunk that when he came, it felt like nothing, like he’d taken a piss.

He pulled up his pants and sat back in the driver’s seat. He could only think of leaving now, and wondered how to drop her off without any dramatics and return home.

“So we’ve fucked two times now,” she said, leaning her head against the window. “Do you want my phone number? We go to a movie?”

Her eyes gleamed at him like headlamps, angry, crazy.

“Remember those big words I believe in,” she said.

“Let’s keep this real.”

“You thought I didn’t really believe in love, huh? Easy girl in a bar.”

“Everyone believes in love. But you know—”

“You can’t tell the truth, can you? You don’t want to know the truth.”

“Maybe I just don’t believe in your big words, all right? There’s nothing wrong with that. Success. Love. Happiness. Health. I don’t know what the fuck they mean.”

“Just another stupid guy, huh?” she said. “You’ve got those words in your pocket, but you don’t even know it. You are success, dumb fuck.”

“Listen, let me give you some money.” He pulled out his wallet, fingering a $50 bill. He held the bill in the darkness between them, the car’s green digital clock lighting it up like a prize.

She looked at it, studying it for a dazed moment, and he waited for her to take it, imagining a nice hug of thanks, a warm coda to their affairs, but she squealed with a tight, chilly fury. She slapped at it and punched it and screamed. Her knuckles rapped against the bones in his hand, and the bill fell to the floor.

“I’m not your fucking yellow prostitute, motherfucker!”

“No,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me–”

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” she said in a rapid slur.

“That’s it. I’m going to take you home,” he said, starting the car.

He felt the sting of a slap on his face. She swatted at him, clawing his cheeks with her nails, and then she lurched at him, like a wild animal, biting him, her teeth clamping down on his ear. He felt a fire burst on the side of his head, blood dripping down his neck. He tried to shove her away, but she kept biting and clawing, as if she wanted to rip his skin off. Every time he pushed her away, she flung herself back at him. He didn’t want to hit a woman, but suddenly he had to, so he jabbed her hard in the stomach, pounded several punches into her side, and then wacked her on the side of her head.

He got out of the car, flung open her car door, grabbed her by the neck, and yanked her out. She tumbled onto the road and rolled to the edge of the gravel, near where the berm sloped into the grassy ditch. He jumped back into the car, locked the doors with a click.

She turned over on her back, her legs akimbo, not moving, like a child pretending to be dead. A dog barked madly in the distance. A light came on in the farm house on the hill. He had to get out of there. As the car’s wheels spun in the gravel, he looked in the rear-view mirror for her, but now he couldn’t see her.

He’d later trace through his thoughts, try to figure out what he was thinking, but there were no thoughts, only flight. He remembered cresting the hill coming into New London and seeing the string of fast food restaurants, their neon lights shining with surety, promising 99 cent hamburgers, combo deals for $2.49, and he knew that he was all right. He stuck a piece of gum in his mouth, his deep breaths returning to a normal rhythm, and took out his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his neck. He’d say that he nicked his ear on a nail. A nail was sticking out of a board at a construction site, and it scratched his cheek, then caught on his ear. Everything would be all right.

Days passed, and he barely thought of her, but then there was a short article in the New London Herald about her disappearance. The newspaper article provided little info. Her coworkers said she was crazy, always talking about Hollywood, so the police wondered if she had moved away. Her parents were trying to raise money for a reward. “She was a good daughter,” he father said. “She wouldn’t run away.”

He hadn’t thought that she could be in any danger. Maybe she didn’t trust the people in the farm house to help her or give her a ride. Or maybe she believed in him, unable to think of a world uninhabited by all of her big words, so she just couldn’t believe that someone was able to simply drive away. He hadn’t thought about how she would return to town, but then it seemed obvious to him, how she might not call a friend on her cell phone because she was embarrassed. Or maybe she didn’t even have a cell phone.

He saw the posters with her photo stapled on telephone poles around town, but people tore them down, or wrote “Chink” on them, or didn’t even look at them. He found out where her parents lived, out by the railroad tracks, in a tiny house streaked with white paint that had mostly chipped away. There was a lone tree in the yard with a dog chained to it. A rusted bike lay on the sidewalk. Across the street was an old Sinclair gas station that still had the green dinosaur on its sign. A Coke machine’s red light blazed out of the dark, empty office. He didn’t murder her. He’d just driven away, after all. That wasn’t a crime. She could have helped herself. He couldn’t quite make himself believe in his rationalizations. Maybe she did leave town.

It wasn’t until the spring when her body turned up in the ditch, not far from where he left her. The winter had set records for snowfall, so she’d been covered for months. The police called her death accidental. She hadn’t been harmed they said. They didn’t know why she was out there on the road.

He remembered how the wind had stiffened with the winter’s first true chill that night. A cold wind sifted the fine rain as he drove back to town, and then flurries of snowflakes wheeled in the air, as if playing with each other, dancing. He’d noticed her coat on the seat, but he didn’t think about the cold for some reason, even later that night, when David pressed his nose against the window and watched the snow jabbing and darting in the street lights, hoping that school would be cancelled the next day. He’d tossed the coat out the window without a thought, preoccupied only with getting home, recovering—or escaping rather. The two words meant the same thing now. They’d always mean the same thing.

The Names of All Things

This was written ages ago, started when I lived in Tucson in the mid '90s. I've submitted it to numerous magazines, but only received a few "sorry, but send me more" kind of rejections. I've probably given up on submitting it now.

Hills shimmered like quartz in the heat. One street towns sidled up against the highway, each skyline nearly the same: a Texaco, a ramshackle convenience store, a McDonald’s, and a used auto dealer or two. Motels promised hot showers, cable television, air conditioning, free coffee, and a swimming pool for only $39.99. Jim’s sunglasses made everything soft and green, as if the world was made of pillows. He was always startled at how the edges of things cut into his eyes when he took them off.

Sometimes they would stop driving at sunset. Not when the sun flooded the sky with its bright oranges and transcendent purple sweeps, but after that, when the brightness was just beginning to pale into a gray, cool sky. They liked the quiet eeriness of the world then. They pulled off at rest stops where bare-footed kids ran yelling around picnic tables and people stretched outside of their cars and splashed water over their faces in restrooms. They were caught in a drift of cars heading north, almost like birds migrating in the spring, except they weren’t in sync with any season.

There was one sunset when a bank of clouds mottled in pink and gray stood proudly over the jagged reaches of the mountains as evening took the world over. The lights of solitary traffic scudded across the horizon, and he held Crystal close to him. He felt a drunken rush of clarity, as if he was right in the center of the great sweep of life, but not moving. He held her chin in the palm of his hand. A touch, a dare, laughter. He couldn’t imagine that either of them would ever die.

* * *

Crystal’s eyes widened as she talked on the pay phone, a gleeful, sinister smile sneaking out of the corner of her mouth. She was talking with Penn, her best friend, and Jim could tell she had news—bad news, maybe good news, but whichever it was, she was excited. She stood squarely in jean cut-offs that hung loosely on her tiny hips and kicked her clunky military boots against the curb as she toyed with a damp curl of hair. She’d dumped a bottle of water over her head several miles back to cool off, and her pale skin looked fresh and newly washed, like she’d just finished swimming on a hot summer day.

He turned to the Chevron cashier, a gangly boy whose round blue eyes shined with innocence. The boy reminded Jim of himself at that age: wan cheeks dotted with pimples and meek eyes ready to please. He probably had a Playboy centerfold stuffed under the bottom drawer of his dresser, felt God’s eyes watching him when he masturbated, and then promised never to sin again.

Nothing matters, Jim wanted to tell him. You can do what you want, and it’s best if you do, a lesson Jim wished he’d learned sooner.

“Where’s the nearest campground?” Jim asked, bowing his head down so that the boy wouldn’t see the childhood scar that dipped down from the corner of his mouth. He’d started to grow a beard to change his appearance. He also wore a Chicago Cubs baseball cap pushed down over his forehead to cover his face, and he usually wore his sunglasses, even indoors.

“Which way are you heading?”

“South, down to Sedona,” Jim lied. As part of a paranoid plan of his, every time they stopped, he asked for directions, drove out the way the service station attendant told him, and then took the first road in the opposite direction. He’d once heard of a convict who eluded the police for weeks because he traveled in a gradually expanding circle. It’s only when people travel in one direction that they get caught, Jim concluded.

“There’s a KOA about ten miles from here, just off the highway” the boy said enthusiastically. “They’ve got a swimming pool.”

Jim pulled bills that were all moist from the heat out of his pocket. The boy stuffed a bag with their provisions, and Jim nodded his head absently, watching Crystal as the boy mentioned other KOA amenities—hot showers, video games, a big screen TV. She jogged across the parking lot to the car, her long shadow trailing her in the tail of the orange sunset. She ran clumsily, her feet slapping down awkwardly on each step, like a colt.

When Crystal’s father found out about them, he threatened to file a statutory rape charge against Jim and take away her apartment so she’d have to live in the dorms at her prep school, Lester Preparatory Academy, a fancy name for a dubious school that promised to straighten out wayward rich kids. They tested the kids for drugs, took them on occasional survivalist desert treks, had a stable full of horses, and dished out tough love along with new-age, touchy-feely group sessions and organic, vegetarian meals. Oddly enough, however, students could also qualify for the privilege of living off campus their senior year if they achieved a 3.5 grade point average and went a year without an infraction of any sort. It was a reward system that Crystal took full advantage of. She was seventeen years old. Jim was thirty-three. Crystal insisted that her father would be relentless to the point of absurdity in pursuing them. “If the police don’t do what he wants, he’ll hire private detectives. He’s a control freak. He wants to control my life.”

Jim didn’t think that a statutory rape charge would stick, but he didn’t know anything about the law. He didn’t think he was hurting anyone, and that was good enough for him.

They had $500 from the sale of his junk of a car, and Crystal had pawned several hundred dollars of her mother’s jewelry that she’d stolen when she returned home for her last visit. They drove her Volvo. Jim knew that her credit card could be traced, so they took out the maximum cash advance just before they left: $5,000.

As Jim loaded the sack of groceries in the car, she sat in the front seat, smoking a cigarette and fervently scribbling in her journal. She held the pen tightly, pressing down hard on the paper as if she was carving words into wood.

“What did Penn say?” he asked.

Crystal blew out a stream of smoke. “He’s freaking,” she said in a belittling tone. “He showed up at the school with a detective, of course. They asked Penn questions for an hour. She played dumb, said stupid stuff like, ‘I don’t know where they’d go, Crystal’s always talked about going to Mexico.’”

She giggled at Penn’s cunning. “Penn said my father was smoking. He hasn’t smoked in five years.”

He tapped the point of the car key on his knee, clenching it with the worry he’d been raised with. He’d never done anything terribly bad as a child, but his parents were the sort who caught him whenever he did and then punished him unequivocally. They were good Lutheran Nebraskans, their childhoods marked by hard work on poor farms during the depression. They knew little about joyfulness or mischievousness, and even less about waywardness or extravagance. When he got caught for throwing eggs at a house with some friends in the ninth grade, he overheard his mother praying for his soul. His father pointed at his belt and said, “For each action, there is a consequence.” Reverend Lowry, his minister, invited him in for a talk in his office.

In Crystal’s household in Laguna, however, her father relaxed with a joint by the pool after work, her mother liked to swim nude in the swimming pool, and Crystal had cell phones in four different colors to match her outfits when she was only thirteen years old.

Crystal dug into the grocery bag and fished out her bottle of Evian. An ornery smile twisted from the corner of her small mouth, and her eyes danced with excitement.

“We’re still beautiful, aren’t we, Jim?” she asked, taking a drink of water and then putting her hand on his.

“Of course we’re beautiful. We’ll always be beautiful.”

“We have to be beautiful. It’s a requirement of mine.”

When he put his hands on her side, he felt the lightness of her body. Her ribs were like feathers, her shoulders as narrow and delicate as an antique chair. They kissed, big slow kisses and then small playful ones. Her body held a jittery energy, even in moments of tenderness. She nibbled at his neck, then nestled her head into his shoulder and stroked the hair on his arm with her hand.

They drove toward the mountains, flat black silhouettes cutting into the sky. They watched the sun go down, fighting to stay up, then dipping down as if its light was beign drained. He thought of Geronimo hiding from the cavalry in the Chiricahuas and how he seemed to become invisible. His movements were so mysterious that some people thought he was a ghost. He hoped that they could disappear. He hoped that disappearing was still possible in this world.

* * *

When Jim lived in Omaha, where he’d spent his life before moving to Tucson, he’d take off on the weekends. Pack a couple of sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, and just get in the car and hit the road. He simply didn’t want to see Omaha’s circling sprawl of beige housing developments, its malls, its WalMarts. At first he looked at maps and had set destinations, but after a while, he took whatever road pleased him. Sometimes he’d end up just weaving through small towns not far from Omaha, and other times he’d find himself crossing the South Dakota border, barely knowing that he was heading north.

He played pool in Albert Lea, Minnesota, and won ten dollars. He held a man back from beating his girlfriend in Sioux City and ended up getting stitches on his chin. He spent an afternoon staring at the North Platte River, the strange, slow crawl of its water, getting stuck in a stagnant pool, then crawling again, with no notion of a destination. Once, he drove to Milwaukee, five hundred miles. He stopped for a drink at a Ramada Inn lounge on the outskirts of town to celebrate his trek and ended up getting drunk and going home with a woman who wore tight red jeans and matching red cowboy boots. He couldn’t remember her name, but he woke up alone in bed to the sound of a screaming baby and stared at a piece of wallpaper peeling away from a corner of the wall, trying to figure out why the air smelled different in Milwaukee than it did in Omaha.

He was in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. Like staying up all night and watching the morning sun rise. The world churns awake and those who have slept rise and enter the rhythms of their routines, but he stood apart, alone in his experience. As he lay in bed listening to that screaming baby, he thought about how he rose each morning in Omaha, stirred a cup of instant coffee, poured Wheaties into a bowl, read the paper. The routine was the same each day. He hung up his coat in his cubicle at Ameritrade, the brokerage firm that made a promise of prosperity to all for $9.99 a trade, where he’d worked in the marketing department since he graduated from the University of Nebraska. Every day, there was the ring of his computer turning on, the flat fluorescent light that permeated the still office air. That morning in Milwaukee, though, he was so far removed from it all—the slightest movement of time, distance, and circumstance, and all familiarity became so quickly faint. His existence, like everyone’s, could so easily be lost.

He always imagined that he’d buy a house in Omaha—plant trees and flowers in the yard, decorate the walls with objects that spoke the essence of his spirit. Omaha was his place, after all; he’d never really known another. But after his parents died in a traffic accident on their way to visit his younger sister, Amy, in Dallas one Christmas, there was no one there for him anymore. He’d stayed only because he thought he should be nearby because his mom had diabetes and his father had a heart condition.

After the funeral, he got in his car and drove, away from Omaha more than anything else. He drove through his savings and a credit card. He turned a new car into an old one, but the beauty of it all drew him along. Fields raked across the horizon. The wind ran over bent, brown grasses and brushed the shoulders of solitary green trees. He fell asleep under a sky smeared with stars and spent afternoons watching clouds coil up into the sky. He breathed in August’s wild, sultry heat and wondered how long it would take to forget the names of all things, to look at a world unconstrained by the requirement of acting like he knew it.

Tucson was nothing more than a coincidence. His car surrendered to the heat of the desert. For a moment he had nowhere to go, so he stayed.

* * *

“When we get to Montana, I think we should get jobs on a ranch,” Crystal said as they sat having lunch in a truck stop. She had a way of speaking in which everything she said suddenly had the potential to come true, simply because she said it. The beautiful trait of a spoiled girl, Jim thought. He liked it. She had absolutely no knowledge of a world that wouldn’t be delivered to her on her terms—she could jump off a cliff and expect to land safely. He absorbed possibilities just by sitting next to her, and he preferred not to question any of them.

“Can you ride a horse?” he asked.

“I took riding lessons when I was a kid. My father insisted on it.”

Their plan was to arrive in Montana, sell the rest of her mother’s jewelry, and then work until they had enough money to rent a small farm and grow organic vegetables. She’d recently extended their idea to include breeding dogs and mass producing folk art for unknowing tourists. “We’ll talk in accents, tell them we speak in tongues, sell New York hipsters rotting boards with paintings of Jesus on them,” she said. She was collecting rusted metal she found along the roadside to make into frames for her paintings.

He didn’t particularly care where they ended up, though. Each time they passed by a town, he asked himself the same question: “Could I live here?” The answer was always strangely yes as he imagined himself as a clerk at the truck stop or a car salesman or an accountant. It didn’t matter what his occupation was because it all seemed like a dream within a dream, an experiment of relativity, the insignificant thoughts of a man watching the world go by at 75 miles per hour, able to fantasize about the choices of existence, flip off God, and then speed on.

“I bet we can find a nice little house to rent in Missoula,” she said, cradling her coffee cup in her hands and taking small, birdlike sips. “With a yard. A big yard with a tree and swing.”

“We’ll have to get jobs, save money.”

“I’m not working at no McDonald’s.”

“I didn’t say you had to.”

“I’d rather be a stripper. Strippers make good money. I think I’d be a good stripper.”

“So be a stripper,” he joked, knowing that she’d never do such a thing. She was too prideful, too much of an elitist.

“I don’t have any boobs,” she sighed. “I think you have to have big boobs.”

“All shapes and sizes.”

He grabbed her cigarettes and took one out. The good thing about being on the road was that health no longer seemed relevant. Life felt as if it was held in a moving abeyance without consequences. He ate Twinkies for breakfast and snacked on beef jerky throughout the day. Smoking felt like it built stamina and whiskey tasted like a health remedy.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Be a substitute teacher again.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll have your ass if you pick up any young snatch.” She smiled, raising her eyebrows devilishly. She liked to play a game of jealousy, casting him as the handsome older man who every woman was after. “You robbed the cradle once, you’re bound to do it again.”

She lit her cigarette. She’d rolled the sleeves of her t-shirt above her shoulder, and little beads of sweat ran down her arms. In the course of their travels her dark auburn curls of hair had lightened in both texture and color, and her face had tanned to a tawny brown. She appeared so much more vibrant and healthy than the first time he saw her.

A substitute math teacher at Lester Preparatory Academy was the first job he got after he arrived in Tucson. He wasn’t required to do much more than maintain basic order in the classroom, hand out worksheets, and collect them at the end of class. As far as he could tell, the school’s main value was providing random drug testing at a cost of $20,000 a year. Every class period, the principal would come into the class and call a few students out to urinate in a jar.

Crystal was a pale, tiny creature, closed tightly into her own fantasy world as she sat in the back corner of the classroom. Her distant blue eyes shined with an enigmatic, private intensity that dignified her in comparison to all of the other MTV-styled, spoiled kids who clamored at his desk with cunning pleas to leave the classroom. She didn’t act up or gossip like the others after she’d completed her work; in fact, she took out a book and sat quietly reading it. When she handed in her homework at the end of class, he tried to catch her eye, but she didn’t look at him. She breezed away and he saw her sitting under the speckled shade of a mesquite tree behind a tool shed, blowing the smoke of her cigarette into the flat brightness of the Arizona sun.

She was just one of many students, and he didn’t think much of her after his week-long stint at the school, but as he was walking into a Safeway the next weekend to do his shopping, he felt a small tug on his elbow. When he turned, he saw her staring at him, a wide smile stretching across her face.

“Hey math teacher,” she said, a warm hint of conspiracy in her voice. “Will you buy me some beer for a Friday night?”

Her eyes widened flirtatiously and she swayed back and forth on her oversized military boots. She knew how to work it. She’d quickly sized him up as the kind of guy who wouldn’t report her to the authorities, the kind of guy who didn’t really count himself among others. She told him she wanted Pacifico, and then, slipping a twenty dollar bill into his hand, said she’d meet him at the back of the parking lot. The only thing that occurred to him as he loaded his cart with two six-packs of beer was that there would be a carload of her boisterous, giggling friends outside, all of the kids who he wouldn’t let go to the bathroom.

But when he walked out she was sitting alone in a white Volvo sedan, and she matter of factly said, “I’ve got some pot if you want to come over. Leave your car here. I live nearby.”

Her apartment was an odd blend of teen spirit and suburban design. The living room was filled with white, oversized, poofy furniture—”My parent’s old stuff,” she said with a hint of complaint in her voice. In contrast, strings of colored plastic beads hung from each doorway, dried flowers dangled from the walls, and a striking collection of hand-crafted masks covered one wall. “Every time my father goes on a business trip to Africa or Asia or somewhere, he brings me a mask,” she said. She didn’t turn on her air-conditioning because she liked to be hot. Instead, fans ran in every room. They reminded her of old movies, she said, and the time her father took her to Mexico when she was young.

“Everything’s an extreme with me,” she said proudly. “I was put in Lester because I was doing heroin, just skin pops. My old boyfriend Jackson introduced me to it back in Laguna, but I wasn’t an addict. I was still getting good grades in school. My parents wanted to get me out of my environment, though, so they stuck me here. My fucking parents are hypocrites. I mean, my Dad was friends with Jerry Garcia in the sixties. Now I think he’s in the fucking CIA.”

She stood at the window smoking a cigarette, her body a shadow in the darkness, the thin cloth of her cotton print dress lying loosely over her chest. She looked like a young girl, just about ready to go to bed, but then she turned toward him with the look of a woman who’d experienced the entire world.

He traced the gentle outline of her jaw, and she turned to him as if she’d been waiting. She kissed him lightly at first, timid or playing with timidity. He grasped the light angles of her hips and pulled her tightly against him.

After they had sex, his sleep was fitful. He saw his mother’s scolding face, her gray eyes set like stones, and he heard the rigid rules of life that his father had never conceived of breaking. When Jim did something wrong as a child, his father would bat his hand on the kitchen table, refusing to hear his excuses. “No excuses. There is no excuse.” An old Lutheran’s code of life, a creed that had certainly kept the old man out of trouble.

As the sun shined through her bedroom window in a gentle, flat sheet of warmth the next morning, she curled up against her pillow and he watched her chest rise with each breath. One of her arms rested against his side, and a lambent joy traipsed warmly through his body. The whole world’s rules were outside, unable to catch him in this moment of beauty. It didn’t matter if she was seventeen or thirty.

* * *

They were making crazy time, stopping only to piss from all of the ice tea they were drinking. They traveled in and out of the shadows of clouds, dark spots on the land like big blankets dropped from the sky. No Luck Gulch, Dead River Run, and Muerte Road passed by, markers of brave pioneers’ bad luck.

He looked over to Crystal, who was sipping languidly from a bottle of tequila, distant and dreamy-eyed. She’d been counting coyotes earlier, bringing her tally for the trip up to six. Her goal was ten, but she wasn’t looking at anything now.

“Hey,” he said with a tone of urgency, trying to inch his way into her. “Check out that motorcycle behind us.”

She turned and looked out the back window. “What?”

“I think it’s your father. He’s finally caught up with us.”

She allowed herself to crack a smile. “My father doesn’t look like that. He’s got much better taste.”

The man sat perched on the motorcycle, shiny and gold with bulky luggage compartments on the sides, his bulging belly pushing out against a silky white pullover, sun glaring off of his sunglasses. He actually looked the opposite of how he imagined Crystal’s father. She told him that her father was a fitness freak, svelte and muscled, and that he presented himself with the accoutrements of an upscale bohemian: a fine Italian leather satchel, wire-rimmed glasses from France, and casual linen suits. Her father seemed like a nutshell of contradictions: an international businessman who disappeared on business travel for weeks at a time who voted for Green party candidates, a libertine who randomly exercised a strict moral code and collected guns from Nazi Germany. A confrontation with him seemed eerily inevitable.

“If that was your father, you know what I’d do?”

“That’s not him. My father would hire someone to chase us.”

“You think he’s on the phone right now, organizing a big stake out at the border? Maybe he’s not even looking for us.”

“He’s looking for us. Trust me. No way he’s going to let me get away.”

“He shouldn’t hire someone. He should be coming himself. What is he doing? Is he going to work each day? Is he having sex with your mom, smoking joints by the pool? What kind of father is your dad?”

Her eyes clouded over with thought, and she retreated back into a private place he couldn’t touch.

“Maybe we should get married in Las Vegas,” she blurted out of nowhere, as if providing the solution to a problem they’d been talking about.

“Married? What are you talking about marriage for? I thought you didn’t believe in marriage.”

“Well, maybe if we get married, he can’t do anything.”

“I’m sure he can do what he wants. He can make you come home.”

“We could do it just in case. I mean, you know, it won’t be like marriage. It’s just a precaution.”

“A precaution?”

“Yeah, I’d be yours. Legally. What could he do?”

“It sounds a bad premise for marriage of any kind.” He didn’t know what to say. He felt her tensing up with anger.

“Oh, fuck,” she said, blowing out a sigh.

“Fuck what?”

“Fuck you. I was joking. Ha, ha. You didn’t get it.”

She shook her head, shutting her eyes as if she had a migraine. He reached out and put his hand on hers, but she turned away, leaning her head against the window.

“So let’s get married,” he said.

She didn’t blink, didn’t look at him.

“I was just joking,” he said. “You didn’t get it.”

* * *

He woke up early to the strange sounds of someone scraping a suitcase along on the ground and then slamming a car door shut. His mouth was dry and thick from the beer last night. His underwear stuck against his thigh with dried sperm. They’d gotten a motel room because they were tired of sleeping in the tent each night. The room, which last night had been so warm and comforting with its perfumed, Lysol-scented motel smell, was now sacked with the debris of their trip. Half-empty bags of chips, bottles of water, beer cans with cigarette ashes stuck to their lips. He felt a tension he’d felt so often in his life: something chasing him, a vague but powerful force, like an agent of God ready to sweep in and pin him down. Everything was watching them, it seemed; all of the beings and objects in the world knew that they were easy prey.

Rain specked against the motel window and he peeked out and saw a tirade of dark gray storm clouds swirling in the sky. Warnings filled the air like gnats swarming near a light. It had been a day of worsening nerves. They’d driven too far, let the gas dip too low in the tank, a small bit of recklessness that exposed something larger, something more ominous, or so it seemed.

Crystal was still sleeping, clutching the sheets tightly to her neck. He stared at the gentle slope of her forehead, so delicate in the early morning shadows of the room. He shook her shoulder lightly until she let out a weak, groggy moan, and then her sweet blue eyes opened briefly and shut.

“You up, baby?” he asked. “We’ve got to go, we’ve got to go now.”

“Why?”

“Please, let’s go.”

“It’s dark,” she said and rolled stubbornly away from him.

“No, it’s just the clouds. It’s already ten o’clock,” he said, but it was really only 8:30. His mind was reeling with the thought that somehow they fucked up. Crystal shouldn’t have charged the hotel room last night; she’d violated the rule about not using the credit card. Jim had worked in marketing, so he knew the vast network of databases that existed. The details of anyone’s life were readily available, whether they bought Cheerios or rented porn. Everyone was just part of a customer segment to be mined for data. Visa might be sending a report to the FBI right now. His stomach balled up tightly as he repeated,

“Nothing matters, nothing matters,” over and over again in his head.

She wouldn’t get up, though. Despite her lets-save-the-world politics, he wondered if she could genuinely help anyone out.

He stared out the hotel window at the sprawling, dusty truck plaza below, filled with semi-trucks and mammoth RVs. Only a hundred yards or so beyond the parking lot was a rambling trailer park. He remembered that a friend of his mother’s had sold her house and spent each winter in a trailer park in Arizona. The entire park was full of retired people from all over the Midwest, and they carpooled into town each day to take water aerobics, yoga, and Latin dance classes. “It’s ridiculous,” his mother said. “They’re just trying to be somebody they aren’t.”

“But who are they supposed to be?” he challenged impatiently.

“Themselves,” she said.

“What if they find themselves in a yoga class?”

“They know who they are. They don’t need yoga.”

He wanted to tell his mother that no one is just one thing because being who you’re not supposed to be is a part of being who you are, because everyone is this and that and something else besides, a paradox mixed with another paradox, questions jousting each other tirelessly, madly. He felt himself clenching his jaw, as if he were about to give her an angry lecture. For what had his mother’s life really been but a boring pattern righteously stapled to each day. He’d never known how to tell her that without being mean.

Crystal finally got out of bed at 10:00. She stood in the dark shadows of the room in her white silk nightie, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“I love sleeping,” she said.

If he had a gun, he would have fired a warning shot in the air. He was angry at how proud she seemed of her slumber, how she didn’t even feign recognition of his needs.

“It’s time to go now,” he said.

“Come on, don’t act like my father with all of your deadlines,” she said.

* * *

They drove through flat barren land, through towns called Wagon Mound, Segundo, and Starkville. The grass was bent low by the wind. Big yellow and red billboards advertising “Authentic Indian Jewelry and Crafts” hung over the highway, the word Authentic getting larger with each mile. Authentic Authentic Authentic. Crystal smoked one joint, then another. A teepee that was actually a gas station reached into a sky varnished with blue, and a group of Indian men with cowboy hats perched on their heads sauntered slowly across a dusty parking lot to a tin-roofed building that had a wooden sign with the word “Bar” painted on it in craggy, white letters.

He gassed the car just over the Wyoming border. A cordon of clouds, black and menacing, rose in the sky to the west, bullying their way over the mountains. Scribbles of lightning etched white electricity into the sky. He watched Crystal lingering over by the pay phones, a swirl of her cigarette smoke around her. She looked as if she was trying to decide something, picking up the phone and then hanging it up. She grabbed a magazine from the rack to quell her restlessness. She’d be the same when she was thirty or forty, he thought, lost and moving at the same time, impatient, yet believing that she’d suddenly found herself, because in movement, there is always possibility, the hope of arrival.

“It’s weird, huh, Indians wearing cowboy hats,” he said.

“What’s weird about it?”

“Come on. Cowboys and Indians. Indians aren’t supposed to wear cowboy hats.”

“Those days are over now, right? They can wear whatever they want to.”

He thought briefly of stopping the car and fucking her right there beside the road. A pure, hard fuck, something he’d never really done. He’d always been the type of man who tried to please women, one who was more concerned about his lover’s orgasms than his, which meant that he never seemed to please anyone. No one ever felt the passions that were in his bones, not even himself. He grabbed the cigarette from her hand and took a smoke, but then she took it back. He watched the smoke coil out of her mouth. He didn’t have it in him. It would be too much trouble.

They drove across a grassy verge studded with low-lying bushes and their shoots. The land was staked out in the heat of the sun and left to die, the ground scabby with rocks, everything hard, even the sky. Cattle dotted the plain in the distance, moving so slowly they looked like rock formations.

All of the coils of highway were crammed in his head. Mountains, forest, wind, and sun. The world splayed out in tangles of ribbons. They’d made themselves dots on the horizon, less than dots.

The thunderstorm swept down over the car as if it were chasing only them, ramming the car.

“It’s catching us. Go faster, you’ve got to go faster,” Crystal yelled frantically, suddenly excited and giggling.

Jim pressed his foot down on the gas and watched the speedometer slowly work its way up to seventy-five and then almost eighty, fighting all of its own mounting shakes and rattles, unable to push any faster. Then bullets of rain pounded on the windshield so hard that they couldn’t see a thing.

He pulled over, and before he knew it, Crystal had jumped out of the car and started dancing on the berm of the road. The rain pasted her white dress against her tiny spinning body, and her spindly legs jumped up and down against the pelts of water as she whipped her matted hair through the air. He climbed out of the car to get her, but lightning stabbed against the mountains.

“Crystal, there’s lightning,” he yelled.

She shook her head at him, pressing her wet hair back over her forehead and then opening her mouth to catch the raindrops. She pirouetted slowly on the roadside, kicking her leg up to a passing truck. Jim remembered the rules of lighting: It generally strikes the highest objects on flat prairies. Crystal and he were the same as trees at the moment except for a church a hundred yards or so down the road. The church looked like it was abandoned, its steeple weathered, white paint stripped bare by the wind.

“Get back in the car,” he said, marching toward her.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes, but it’s dangerous.”

“What does dangerous mean, Jim?”

He reached out to take her by the shoulder, but she darted away, skipping away like dice thrown in a game of craps, ready to ricochet.

“Come on, we’re so close now,” he said. “We can spend tonight in Montana.”

She ran circles around him, taunting him with her laughter. “Jim’s a scaredy cat.”

An ominous rumble of thunder sounded overhead. He was tempted to go back in the car and wait for her little high jinx to exhaust themselves.

“Jim, you’re missing everything.”

“I’m not missing a thing.”

“No one cares, Jim. There’s not a fucking person in the world who cares. My father’s probably not even looking for me.”

For all he knew, it was true. They weren’t running away from anyone. He turned around, looking at the hardscrabble landscape, all of the godforsaken death it promised. No one cared about their actions or their crimes, or if their actions were even crimes.

He called after Crystal again, the rain smacking against his face so hard that he could barely see her. He reached out to grab her, but she danced away, laughing. He ran after her, but she dodged him, and he slipped on the gravel, feeling a sharp tear singeing his leg.

Her feet ran past him, and then she jumped in the car. The wheels spun in the gravel, and then the car looped by him on the highway, her face stretching into laughter in the window. She zigzagged along the road and then stopped after about fifty yards. He got up and steadily made his way to the car, limping, hunching his shoulders every time the thunder cracked. Just as he reached the car and put his hand on the door handle, though, she peeled out, flipping him off in the rearview mirror.

She stopped again. He walked toward the car. She peeled out. She stopped again. He walked forward. The scene repeated itself several times, and each time the pain in his leg pinched more acutely, as if his tendons were burning up.

He heard the motor of the car idling, but he didn’t walk toward her. She had to come to him. He knelt down. Gravel dug into his knee, and he felt the rain seep through his clothes to his skin. It seemed as if he was the only one in the universe, as if the rain would just keep coming down and soon he would just dissolve into the mud, his disparate cells slithering into other disparate cells. Nothing matters, he told himself. But he knew that he was wrong. He needed someone to lift him up on his feet. He needed someone to tell him who he was.

“Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge.”

He could almost hear his mother reading the verse in her flat but breathy tone. It had always been comforting to hear her read the Bible, the solidity of her belief making the world seem like such a safe place. But his parents died with fright, a semi-truck careening toward them as their car spun around helplessly on an icy Oklahoma intersection. All of the careful planning of their lifetime together couldn’t stop that truck. There’d been no time for a prayer. They might as well have been deer walking through a forest, unaware that a hunter had them in his sight.

He tried to pray. He wished he had a gun. He wished he knew what to shoot.

When he looked up the car was gone. There was only the deserted church, its ragged steeple aspiring to the heavens, and the silence after the rain.

The Last Twenty Years of Cass Erksine's Life

This story was first published in Ink Magazine, a literary magazine published by San Francisco State University.

When Jill died at last, resentful and bewildered to the end, Cass Erskine closed up his house, cancelled his contracts and took a boat around the world as far as Constantinople—no further because he and Jill had once been to Greece, and the Mediterranean was heavy with memories of her. He turned back, loitered in the Pacific Isles and came home with a dread of the years before him.

Her face was a contrast between herself looking over a frontier and a silhouette, an outline seen from a point of view, something finished—white, polite, unpolished—it was a destiny, scarred a little with young wars, worried with old white faiths. And out of it looked eyes so green that they were like phosphorescent marbles, so green that they paled the skin on her face.

The intimacy of the car, its four walls whisking them along toward a new adventure, had drawn them together. They talked from their hearts, with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ famed as an instrument of precision. He smoothed down her plain brown hair, knowing for the thousandth time that she had none of the world's dark magic for him, and that he couldn't live without her for six consecutive hours.

Anyone looking at her then, at her mouth which was simply a kiss seen very close up.

Violet's Policy

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review


Violet has a policy: Never wait longer than ten minutes for a man to show up. It’s now been half an hour. Twice now, she’s walked around the block and come back into the bar, ready to feign dramatic apologies for being late.

This one had such pretty, soft blue eyes, sparkling with all sorts of unspoken promises. He made her feel like he loved her simply by the way he said hello.

She wonders what will happen if she waits another 15 minutes, another half hour. If she walks around the block again. “I’m so sorry I’m late, please forgive me…” She orders a drink, and then one more.

Loving Sabrina

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review


Sabrina hates the word snatch. She hates that she has to shave her legs. She hates that her sister keeps asking her “when she’s goin’ to find a man and start poppin’ ‘em out.” She hates that no one from her high school in Cincinnati knows how cool she is now. She hates that modern science hasn’t developed a hangover pill, or if they have, the government won’t legalize it. She hates men who chat her up but are too chickenshit to ask her for her phone number. She hates men who are too chickenshit to chat her up but then ask for her phone number. She hates the fact that no man at this party has talked to her all night. She hates all of the fucking money she spent on this dress.

Fuck all. Just fuck all, she thinks.

Priscilla's Mother

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review


Priscilla’s mother always told her, “A man who wishes you ill is better than a woman who wishes you well.” Many people called her mother a bitch, but many of those people also admired her. Priscilla knew only one thing: She’d be nothing without her mother. It didn’t really matter if she was happy or not; she knew how to get what she wanted. That’s what was important.

The Suicide Note

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review


“Dying is just another way of saying I’m sorry.”

You Can Never Love Hard Enough

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review.

Veronica B’s Fact Sheet
Born: 1964, in Ankeny, Iowa, to Tom and Judith Belzer
First Cigarette: 1971
First Blow Job: 1972 (Tommy Hankins)
First Love: 1973 (Johnny Hankins)
First Baptism: 1976, Disciples of Christ Church
First Rock Concert: 1981, Pat Benatar,
at the Iowa State Fair
First Marriage: 1987 to Rocko “Skidfish” McCallister, bass player for SlingDick (Rocko lit Veronica’s cigarette from his before they kissed. SlingDick played at the reception, of course.)
First Child: 1988, Rocko Jr.
First Divorce: 1989
Motto: “You can never be tough enough. You can never love hard enough.”

Veronica presently resides in Chicago, where she drives a cab, sells punk rock memorobilia on eBay, and is taking courses to become a probation officer. She’s recently been baptized again in the Disciples of Christ Church.

All the Pretty Girls

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review.


“She thinks she’s pretty, but I’m prettier than her.”

“She thinks she’s pretty, but I’m prettier than her.”

“She thinks she’s pretty, but I’m prettier than her.”

“She thinks she’s pretty, but I’m prettier than her.”

“She thinks she’s pretty, but I’m prettier than her.”

No One Calls Her Princess Anymore

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review.


Somebody once told her that bitterness was easier than hope to hand down from one generation to another. That statement always stuck with her.

Her father, a trumpet player in Lawrence Welk’s orchestra who always wanted to play with Miles Davis, called her Princess growing up. Everybody called her Princess, in fact, even though her name was Peggy.

Her high school drama teacher back in Lubbock told her she had “that something.” It seemed like he knew everything. That’s the way he talked, like he was a man of the world, somebody who made important decisions.

She entered one beauty contest after another. She went from “Cattle Queen” at a small county fair in Texas to wet t-shirt contests in San Diego and Hawaii. After a while it seemed like all of life was a beauty contest, but no one called her Princess anymore. Her father phoned her every week, his voice far away and upside-down drunk, telling her to just keep trying. “True artists never give up,” he said. He was so hopeful, too hopeful, she thought sometimes.

Broken Pretty Woman

This piece initially appeared in the Big Ugly Review.

She changed her name to Simone when she moved to New York City. She changed it to Dallas when she moved to LA. Now she’s back to calling herself Cheryl since she moved to San Francisco, or Brisbane to be precise, although she’s trying to think of something better.

She sometimes likes to think of herself as the woman in the song, “Pretty Woman.” Some handsome, yet shy, man is watching her walk by. He yearns for her, and wonders if, as beautiful as she is, she might be lonely like he is. “Pretty woman, don't walk on by.…” And at the last minute, she turns back and joins him.

Or that’s the way she thought of things when she was younger. Didn’t matter if he was rich or poor as long as it was true love. Now she just wants him to say, “Come on baby, I'll put you up in a great condo. Swimming pool and jacuzzi.”

I should have studied harder in high school, she thinks. I should have gone to college, majored in something.

Portrait No. 1,019: Washed-up Australian Blonde

A washed-up Australian blonde, her voice full of old cigarette smoke, her down-under inflections now just a series of raspy trills, sits just outside of a bar just off of Mission Street, struggling to explain what happened, how it seems like she was just on that beach moments ago, wearing a string bikini, lapping up the googly eyes of all of those goggling men.

Sometimes she kissed the air when she caught a gawker gawking. Once she pulled down her bikini bottom and laughed. Another time she ended up, well, she ended up. She ended up many times, in fact. All of them good times, or most of them at least.

She still sees that bright, bright sun in the mirror each morning as she touches the crevices—the laugh lines, as she used to call them—trailing from her mouth, her skin so dry that she’s almost given up on it. She rubs moisturizer into it like an obsessive-compulsive freak, but nothing seems to do the trick. It’s a desert without an oasis. You’d think skin wouldn’t be so complicated. You’d think there would be better products for this sort of thing.

“You’ve gotta laugh the laughs when you got ‘em,” she says on her cell phone. “You can’t put your laughter in the bank, save it forever. You know what I mean?”

She reaches for a cigarette, fidgets with the package, and finally pulls one out. She listens, but doesn’t really listen. She still has so much to say.

“I was a party girl, but I didn’t go to too many parties. You can never go to too many parties. Have you ever met anyone who said they went to too many parties? You know what I mean?”

She wants to eat something, a Hostess fruit pie, some chocolate, maybe some chips. She digs around in her pocket for some change.

“No one on planet earth has ever said they went to too many parties,” she says, laughing so hard that her sunglasses fall off.

It doesn’t matter. It’s a foggy day.

Sleeping and Not Sleeping and Waking

This story was originally published in the Spring 1999 issue of the Berkeley Fiction Review. It was originally written in 1992.

Peter: I can't sleep.

Psychiatrist: How many people do you have in your family?

Peter: Six. I'm an addictive person. So. Would valium help?

Psychiatrist: What does your father do?

Peter: He's a tough man. He could've been a pioneer. He could've been a boxer. I drink beers to get to sleep, but now the beers don't work. I come from a happy family; there's nothing wrong with my family.

Psychiatrist: When you think of your life, do you feel you're a success?

Peter: I'd like to have energy. I'd like to sleep eight hours a night. The over-the-counter drugs, they make me feel weird.

Psychiatrist: So, you only have sleep problems?

Peter: When I was a child, I thought I would live a happy life. I thought I would make a lot of money. There's some chemical in me—it's metabolism, I'm different. I have too much energy. If I could sleep maybe. I should go to the country, lie in a field, touch green grass, smell. I wonder if valium would help?

* * *

"You'll be President someday," Peter's grandmother told him when he was a boy. Sometimes, even now, especially when he is in the shower, he imagines himself on the campaign trail, wearing a solid blue shirt and red tie, pounding his fist, speaking to America: The economy will grow; I'll restore faith in the American economy; jobs will be created, people will be happy, consumer faith, consumer enthusiasm.

He thinks of the Benson and Hedges advertisement: young, handsome people eating breakfast in a tiled kitchen, laughing, smoking, dressed casually. He wants to drive a car out into the country for the weekends and attend Knick's games dressed in a soft camel hair overcoat. He wants to occasionally smoke a large Cuban cigar after dinner and read the newspaper at brunch with a tall, slender woman by his side. He has thought about politics. He has thought about God. He's a young, good looking man, a lawyer in New York City.

* * *

A slap on Peter's desk. A stack of documents. Peter looks up: Dan. His gray hair sticks up like fine, wire bristles and crow's feet surround small squinting eyes. "The original Walker docs came from Morton yesterday. He doesn't stand a chance," Dan says, chuckling.

"This will wrap it up, huh?" Peter asks.

Dan shakes his head. "Walker is a worm. Worms squirm. I'm going to call him up, squeeze him a little."

Dan arrives at the office every day at eight o'clock. He owns a cabin in the Berkshires, and after winning a big case, he always buys his secretary jewelry. When Peter likes a man, he wants to be like the man, to absorb himself into the qualities that make the man attractive. When Peter likes women, he wants to own them, to make them admire him.

The cream in his coffee swirls up, then mixes, and the black liquid turns to tan. Peter arrived at the office at ten and told the head receptionist that the subway car had broken down. He didn't sleep last night. He stares at the crisp cuff of his shirt, a starched blue Armani. A rabbit gets chased by a cat, he thinks. The rabbit is almost caught, almost killed. Still, the rabbit can sleep at night. Peter's jaw clenches. His mouth pinches. His hands sweat.

* * *

Psychistrist: What do you think of when I say life?

Peter: I hate people who waste time. They don't see the importance of things, the way that things build.

Psychiatrist: How can you visualize escape?

Peter: There are so many words in my head.

Psychiatrist: What do you think when I say the word death?

Peter: Every problem can be solved.

* * *

1:00. Only six more hours. A board creaks into the silence. The pumping of his heart rings into the mattress; it skips a beat, thumps twice against his chest. 2:15. I must be getting sleepy. Gene Kelly dances and sings on the TV. The sheets slide off the corners when he turns to the other side of bed. Maria, the new secretary, speaks with a thick Brooklyn accent: lifting her on the desk, pushing up her skirt, her lips part, glistening with red lipstick. 3:05. His breath whistles through his nose. Four more hours.

* * *

"Really, you can't sleep," Nan says. "Why can't you sleep? Is something wrong?"

Nan stabs a piece of lettuce with her fork. A crumb sticks to the side of her mouth, and it annoys him, but he doesn't say anything about it. She lived on the same dormitory floor their freshman year at Dartmouth. She was chubby then, and even though she's lost weigh now, her face is still round and full. She had a crush on him that wore into a close friendship—she became his side-kick. She listened when he was tense about an exam, and she gave thoughtful, pained advice when he had a problem with a girlfriend.

"Nothing is wrong. I can't think of anything that is wrong. Everything is perfect."

"Something must be wrong."

"Nothing is wrong. Nothing is bothering me."

"You should take a hot tub and have a massage."

"I've tried that, it doesn't work."

"You should try warm milk."

"I've tried that."

"Are you sure nothing is bothering you? I bet that something is bothering you."

"Everything in my life is really perfect. I can't imagine changing one thing in my life."

Nan has a turned-up nose and soft, happy blue eyes. Most people who meet her would imagine her as one of the ones who seldom experience any of the tiresome vagaries of pain. Once they were both drunk and they started kissing and then they had sex. Quick, drunk sex. He woke up before her the next morning and got dressed. He never said anything about it, and although she seemed like she wanted to talk, she didn't say anything either.

He could sleep with her now if he wanted to. He had chocolate sent to her office last week—just so that he could feel charming—and she called him on the phone to thank him, speaking breathlessly and effusively. He has felt like touching her at times, putting his arm around her as they walk on the sidewalk, but when she talks, her words pull against him—he can't stand her relentless wanting, her pathetic aspiration of love.

"Well, I don't have any problems sleeping," she says. "I just put my head on the pillow and conk, I'm out. My problem is that I just can't get up in the morning. Maybe I have chronic fatigue syndrome."

"Why don't we go to a movie tonight," he says, realizing that he's actually thinking about after the movie. Her apartment is fluffy with pillows, flowered and clean. Her breasts stand upright in her business suit, and as she pushes a strand of hair away from her face, he tries to see her arching her back in ecstasy, pushing her hands against his shoulders.

* * *

Psychiatrist: Do you talk to anyone about your feelings?

Peter: I remember the feelings I used to have, and they were different. I don't like to masturbate anymore. I'm very bored with masturbation.

Psychiatrist: Fear is the emotion behind narcolepsy. Anger is the emotion behind insomnia. Are you depressed?

Peter: Everywhere I look there are people, so many people in the world. It seems to me that there are too many people in the world.

Psychiatrist: There is always an identifiable cause at the root of a problem.

Peter: I've never felt one with a place. I don't know how to get inside.

Psychiatrist: Cause and effect. Have you ever told your parents that you love them?

* * *

Double espresso. Peter sits at a table on the upper floor of a sedate cafe around the corner from the law office. Sweeping ferns hang in the window, purple lilacs bloom on each table, and Pachelbal's Canon somberly plays. His head buzzes with an odd, alert fatigue: his brain charges out of his head and then falls into languor.

You lie down, he thinks, close your eyes, and then you go unconscious, you go to sleep. You just fall off, your head goes somewhere else, and then you dream, for hours and hours, as long as a normal work day.

"I finally feel like a human being," a woman next to him says, her blue eyes opening up wide. Her body fits neatly into a well-cut, blue business suit. "I sat on a beach for a week and thought of nothing but getting an even tan."

"I envy you," her friend says.

He looks over the ledge at a couple who sit at a table next to the window. The woman has taken off her business jacket, and Peter can see the silhouette of her body from the light shining through her white blouse. Her arms, gangly in an elegant way. He can see the thin straps of her bra. Her cheeks smooth, fleshy. She raises her hand as she speaks to the man, so typical in his black suit, and Peter notices the white, rounded tips of her fingernails. A gold necklace. Gold earrings.

Everything seemed accidental, but of course it wasn't. He planned to get drunk, but since Nan didn't plan to get drunk, it all seemed spontaneous. Peter moved over and kissed her (she stuck her tongue in his mouth, he stuck his tongue in her mouth, the kiss was sloppy, but warm, reassuring) then laid on top of her, kissed her neck, her ear lobes, held her tightly, rubbed against her. The couch was big and puffy, it seemed to surround them.

The woman takes a small jar of Vaseline from her black leather purse and rubs it on her lips. She takes out a pocket mirror and carefully looks at herself as she moves the lipstick around her mouth. Peter notices her thin, orderly bra. She itches her side, moving the sheer white blouse up and down. The slenderness, the sleekness of the woman's lower back.

Nan kissed him goodbye this morning, looking at him warmly and expectantly, as if they had finally arrived someplace. He tried not to be brusque, but he was. He kept thinking of how thick her calves were and the way she tipped slightly when she walked. He wishes that he could talk to her now though. He would try to give her her pretty world.

* * *

"We're going to burn the fucker," Dan says. "We're going to roast him."

"Yes, I think we've got him."

"We've got him by the balls," Dan says. "I pointed my finger at him and I told him we're not afraid to go to court, because you know what, I said, we've got your ass and you're too stupid to know it."

"He can't get away now."

"This is what it's about," Dan says. "We smelled him out. Our hard work. Our productivity. Our genius. We smelled him out, we've got him cornered, and now we only have to aim carefully, to kill, but not to ruin the meat."

"I'll stay late tonight, do some research on that lien. Everything's going to be air tight."

"Let me tell you something. One win builds on itself, it brings security, confidence, aplomb—the win projects, clients can see it in your eye, women can see it in your eye, people want you to protect them. And you have to win enough so that a loss can only be a small dent, like an accident."

Words and feelings don't have history or future for Dan, and Peter marvels at his purposefulness. He can slap Peter's back, then call him a pansy.

"We need more from you," Dan had said just moments ago in Peter's quarterly performance review. Peter didn't understand, he was working 60 or 70 hours a week. "Pansies have limits. Workers don't," Dan said.

A winner doesn't see the limit, doesn't realize that a limit is there.

Peter picks up a pencil, reaches for a legal pad, and opens the law book.

HOLMES, THE COMMON LAW (1881)

Possession

To gain possesssion, then, a man must stand in a certain physical relation to the object and to the rest of the world, and must have a certain intent. These relations and this intent are the facts of which we are in search.

The physical relation to others is simply a relation of manifested power coextensive with the intent, and will need to have but little said about it when the nature of the intent is settled.

* * *

Endless apartments, banks, stone, stillnes—a brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust, currents held in a pause. He comes to the fifties, behind the great hotels. Old important clients, opera tickets, dinners in apartments with divorced hostesses, old tapestries covering hardwood floors. Papers blow, newspapers, packages of cigarettes, a flyer advertising a march through Harlem. He's never been to Harlem. A huge bus roars past. He feels carefree, the scarf around his neck, the open topcoat. Someday he will see his name mentioned in an article in the New York Times. The wind blows into his face. He lives in the most famous city in the world. A New Yorker, it means something. 1928 is carved in the cornerstone of a building. Peter runs his hand over the cold stone and thinks of the progress of the world, the pavement and architecture, the great men of history.

He crosses the street to a jewelry shop, where a girl with fine blonde hair lays things out in the window. She wears white gloves and arranges the pieces with great care. Their eyes meet and she's holding a gold necklace. Peter thinks of the excitement he felt when his family drove to the city when he was a boy. They drove from upstate New York every December to Christmas shop, then again in the spring. Peter would wake up the day that they were going to leave and kick his legs under the covers in anticipation. All of the bigness, the sounds, the importance of the city.

He finds himself at Times Square, where he stops, sits on a bench and stares at a prostitute. She wears a tight miniskirt and a fake fur jacket, but she doesn't look like the prostitutes in the movies. She doesn't smile. She shivers. He walks by her and their eyes meet.

"Hello," he says.

"Would you like to go on a date?" she asks. She looks him in the eye, giving no tenderness.

He is amazed that the transaction can be so simple. The Arab man has no expression on his face as he hands over the room key. Peter pulls the blanket back and there is a single black pubic hair on the white sheet. Her hair is dyed blonde, frizzy and dry. Her lips are flooded with red lipstick. He asks her to brush her hair back, put it in a ponytail, and wipe off her lipstick. Her breasts are large, stretching out the nylon fabric of her top. She doesn't look like a drug addict. He can not tell how young she is. He does not want to fuck because of AIDS. A hand job is fifty bucks. He asks if he can rub his dick between her breasts, ten bucks extra, she says, twenty if he comes in her face. It feels nice for a moment, her warm skin, but then he looks at her and she looks disinterested.

She washes her hands in the sink. He wonders where she comes from, if she likes living in the city. She said that her name was Mary.

"Do you sleep?" he asks.

"What?"

"Do you sleep at night?"

She screws up her face. "I sleep in the day."

He thinks about taking her shopping, making her beautiful. She could be beautiful.

"Will you sleep with me? I just want to sleep."

"That will be extra."

"Yes."

She lays on the bed next to him and puts her arm around him. His eyes are closed, but he can feel her eyes open and staring. Her weight next to him lulls him to sleep. That's all that it is, he thinks, weight.

* * *

Peter: My heart beats too fast, I have heart palpitations, there are pains everywhere in my chest.

Psychiatrist: Have you been taking the prescription?

Peter: Its side effect is orgasmic dysfunction. It is difficult to meet people. I met this woman at a party, she worked at Goldman Sachs, she had blonde hair.

Psychiatrist: What do you picture yourself doing ten years from now?

Peter: I want to be playing tennis. I want to be drinking mineral water. When I was a boy, I couldn't sleep one night, the Exorcist was on TV, my mother rubbed my back, her hand going around in a circle, rubbing around and around, around and around. She's proud of me now.

Psychiatrist: You should take deep breaths when you can't sleep, you should take a hot bath, exercise.

Peter: I used to believe in God. I believed that the world would be destroyed by fire. I wanted to be good so that I would be one of the few to go to heaven. I knew that I would be one of the ones to go to heaven.

* * *

Two pills out of the small, plastic bottle stuffed with cotton. Two white solid powders containing sleep. He pops the pills into his mouth. One sticks in his throat and he takes another swig of water. "Do not exceed recommended dosage," he reads. "May cause dizziness or sleeplessness." The chemicals flow through his blood, flow into his brain, and he imagines that the pills contain a not quite adequately tested ingredient—his body will seize up from sleep, a stroke, an aneurysm, and he won't be able to move his left side.

* * *

"One person's ceiling is another person's floor," Dan said. "Show me what you can give us. Show me how you give more."

"It would be nice if you could come home for Thanksgiving," his father said. "For your mother."

He can't remember if Nan said that she loved him.

Who can argue with more?

Give me give me give me. Give me some more.

His arm aches with the weight of his briefcase. He notices a black man walking past the steps to his apartment, a black man with a baseball cap on his head. Peter clenches the keys in his pocket and places one key between his first and second fingers. He takes both hands out of his pockets, walks boldly, and stares ahead as if he is the aggressor. If the black man makes a move, it will only take one punch to the face, and the key will gouge his cheek. Peter imagines the black man taking out a sharpened screwdriver, and Peter slaps it out of his hand, kicks him in the balls, and punches him in the stomach. The black man is on the ground. Peter's teeth are clenched like Clint Eastwood's, and he speaks in a tough whisper. "You've got to learn a lesson. You shouldn't hurt people. You'd better learn a lesson. I'm going to teach you a lesson. If you hurt people, sometimes they hurt you back. Do you hear me? You'd better learn a lesson. You should go back to school. You should get a job. I could hurt you right now. I could jab that fucking screwdriver right up your ass. Do you hear me?"

They walk by each other without the exchange of a glance.

* * *

David Letterman is over.

* * *

One should not sleep late one should establish a regular sleep schedule if one sleeps late, then one will have to go to bed late but if one wakes up early, then one can go to bed early new insights into patterns of sleep have come from studies with the ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPH but no researcher can yet say precisely what sleep "is," similarly,the immature adult with stomach troubles who requires special feeding and attention by his wife may unconsciously be forcing her to give him a kind of mothering that he never grew up enough to do without brain waves of hundreds of experimental subjects show that we fall asleep in four stages and awake in reverse order a fatal dose is from ten to twenty times the normal dose all the directions for the structure and functioning of our bodies are contained in our chromosomes which contains our genes these are molecules and parts of molecules and there are complexities and unknowns one must not arbitrarily assume such illnesses to be neurotic but seek professional diagnosis

* * *

"We've got to file those pleadings today," Dan says, angrily. Some men inspire fear in other men—they're born with that capacity. Peter wants to marshal his confidence, make it coexistent with each of his gestures.

He sits on the toilet, to escape the office. Words and images pass through his head again and again. I am a gifted person. He listens to men walk in and out of the restroom, the sounds of belches, brisk footsteps, diarrhea, hand washing. When he reads the words in the law books, it seems as if they won't go into his head. "I've been working hard," he tells himself. "I deserve to win this. I should win this." He rubs his face and flushes the toilet.

* * *

A thought becomes a thing the thing sticks in your head bounces around stores don't close not in a society in which mothers work do you actively seek out humor in your life and spend some time laughing every day compassion can also be a casualty the elderly find that their slumber becomes more fitful do you frequently act and respond in spontaneous manner rather than in a controlled and calculated fashion do you tell others beforehand how much time you have allotted for what you are about to do the body's natural tendency to seek equilibrium a bundle of 10,000 nerve cells light hits the retina and the message is carried to the brain a sleep-inducing chemical as yet unidentified accumulates during the time a person is up do you think predominantly in "I" terms with you at the center of attention the urge to doze grows stronger and stronger and eventually a person nods off cheap safe and efficient illumination throughout the darkest nights

* * *

Peter wakes up.

* * *

He takes out his wallet, opens it, and there's a crisp hundred dollar bill in it. But the man behind the counter will not sell him a beer. Peter tries to yell, but he can't. He's with a woman in a black evening dress, but she's a secretary, her skin is old, her nails are long and pink, she smokes. Dan laughs, his mouth wide open. Peter's mouth mashes against the secretary's mouth (her mouth is wide and moist); he reaches out his arm to put around Dan's waist; he kisses Dan (his mouth is strong and tight); they rub noses. The man behind the counter laughs. Peter runs out of the diner. Everything is gray and the buildings rise up forever. A large man wearing a ragged black cashmere jacket holds out a grimy hand. Peter is afraid of germs. He sees his grandmother crossing the street wearing a black dress, and he runs to her. He puts his hand on her shoulder, says "Grandma," and she turns and hisses at him.

His eyes are open. He sees darkness, feels his room. He must have been asleep. He's not sure if he has slept. Then, he's not sure if he's awake. Does he ride the subway into the office, the clacking of the rails, the people trapping him? Was he a child? How much money does he have in the bank?

Ten years ago he was an undergraduate, he slept. Ten years from now his temples might be gray, he might have a place in the country. He hugs the pillow to his head. He counts his breaths; one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand. He prays to the God he prayed to as a boy, "God almighty. God creating and damning, you who made Man in the image of God. Oh God, no I don't believe, I admit I don't believe, but I do try to do good, I will try to do good. I can not do good if I can not sleep. Oh God, give me sleep. I ask only for sleep."

If a caveman woke up in the middle of the night, the caveman would not look at a clock; he would not care what time it was. Fatigue mixes with a spark of alertness, his head pounds, no breath is deep enough to clear the lungs. He hugs his pillow. The caveman might wake up and be afraid of being eaten. The caveman would sleep with others, sleep around a fire, one caveman staying up each night to keep watch.

The birds start chirping. Sharp sunlight peeks through the blinds. The early morning cars pass by on their way to a new day of work. First one, then two, then they come regularly. Sunshine blares through the window.

* * *

Central Park is noisier toward the Harlem side. He takes off his jacket and tosses it over his shoulder, becoming hot in the morning sun's increasing glare.

"Nan, it's me," he says to himself. "Here I am, now."

Last night, he dressed in the blue wool suit he bought in London. He felt perfect, warm, debonair. The entire city was partying. He decided that he would drink all night, go from bar to bar. There were brilliant laughing faces at the first bar. He sipped a gin and tonic. In an artsy bar, a dark, dramatic eye blazed for a moment, then disappeared. He drank a scotch on the rocks. He gave a bottle of champagne to a woman sleeping on a subway grate; her sharp cheekbones made him think that she had once been beautiful. "Thank-you," she said, opening her eyes, then closing them.

"I've noticed that you haven't been all here," Dan had said. "We don't feel as if you're giving us your all."

Peter reaches up to his neck, but his tie isn't there. It was a silk tie, a Hermes, the first tie he'd bought after moving to the city.

A door of a brownstone hangs open, a gutted building, burned. He remembers the smile on his doorman Max's face when he gave him his Christmas present, the cuff links. Max always said yes sir no sir. Peter wonders if people sleep in the gutted building.

A black man with a black hat on his head plays an electric piano, "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head." Another man is slouched, sleeping next to him, holding a 40 ounce bottle of "Olde English." Peter puts a dollar into his can. He feels good. He puts another fifty cents into the can. This is not a dream, he thinks. He looks ahead and sees people going into a church, all dressed up. They're going to praise God. If there was a God to serve, he would serve that God, he thinks. He walks toward the church.

"The final push is always the most important moment," Dan had said.

The sun pokes at Peter's eyes, and he feels as if he is dying. Almost no one had ever not praised Peter. A woman stops him. "We need money," she says, "to keep the shelter open." Peter reaches into his pocket, but there is nothing. He pulls out his wallet, there is nothing. She stares into his eyes.

"I didn't sleep last night," he says, "I can't sleep."

She takes his hand. Her hand feels fragile, but it is warm. "I have a lot of money," he says. "I can make a lot of money, I'll give you money. Something needs to be done."

She smiles. Warm. Concerned.

"What is your name?" he asks.

"My name is Sally."

"I once knew a girl named Sally, it was in the fourth grade. I was very happy in the fourth grade. I liked studying geography."

She nods her head and walks on.

He walks by the church. A man stands in the doorway, a green robe, his black head shaved and shiney. Peter walks to a pay phone, picks up the receiver and hears a dial tone.

"Just organize yourself better," Dan said.

He hears music, yelling and clapping coming from the church. He dials Nan's number. It rings four times, her answering machine, Madonna. He thinks that he's not a winner, or he just doesn't want to win, or he's lost. Nan's friendly voice says, "Please leave a message after the tone."

"Nan, it's Peter. I want to see you, I've been drinking all night and I want the two of us to drive somewhere and just drive for a while, to the mountains or something. I've got to get out of here, I feel so fucking weird right now, I just feel so fucking weird. Please call me immediatly, I'm at a pay phone, but I'm going home now, I'll be at home—" and the tone cuts him off.

The man in the green robe shakes people's hands vigorously, grasps and hugs people. Peter sits down on the curb and watches the man hug one person after another, his large and joyful arms seeming as if they have all of the energy and answers of life. If there were a way out, he thinks.

He watches each person walk away after being hugged: a boy holds his grandmother's hand, two women laugh, an old man adjusts his hat on his head. Peter takes out his handkerchief and wipes a spot off of his shoe.

"I'm going to be President of the United States," he says.

His voice sounds as if it comes from outside of him, hollow and strange.

"President," he says. "President."

A siren cuts through the air and he closes his eyes, letting himself be carried away into the approaching funnel of sound. Who would have known? he thinks. No one could have known.

Mademoiselle in the Coffee Shop

She is the kind of person you look at and then keep looking at because you can’t quite figure how she fits together, leg bone to hip bone, stuff like that, because you look into her dark beautiful eyes and you listen to her speak (her voice smooth like a summer lake, yet laced with shits and fucks ), and although her face has an elegance like an antique porcelain vase and she smiles like she’s the one who knows what happiness is about, she walks with a clunky gait, the girl who never won the race in gym class, the girl who never had a crush on the high school quarterback, because the high school quarterback didn’t know who she was.

Her wrists are tiny, delicate. Her fingers are long and slim, the kind of fingers that demand the kind of gloves Audrey Hepburn would wear. She’s never had reason to ponder the existence of God. She’s above that shit. She’s danced wildly through the night, but she prefers to stay at home and paint her fingernails with her girlfriends. She could drive in a car forever, stop in every thrift store in every small town to search out old vintage dresses. Derrida bored the fuck out of her in college, and then college bored the fuck out of her in college. So now she’s making lattes, toasting bagels.

You know this shit, how do you know this shit? You know it like you know that most people riding a bus at 8:00 on a Monday morning are wondering when it’s all going to end, that most people regret the times they didn’t sin more than the times they did. But there’s so much more to know, and you’ll never know it, the details—how her leg bone connects to her hip bone, how she kisses a man the first time, or the last time. And why it is that you’ll remember her years from now, and you never once spoke to her.

A letter found at the corner of Haight and Fillmore

July 4, 2000

Dear Lovey,
I’ve been drinking for some weeks, some months. Now I’m fasting. It’s been two years since our bad words, and I’ve visited all of the places I always talked about. Flipped pancakes in Alaska, worked on a cruise ship down in Mexico, drove a truck across most of the U.S., and did some things in some places that I’d rather not mention. I’ll tell you if you ask me, though. Only you. After that it’s our secret, like so many other things.

I was a “rough and ready man,” as you liked to call me. Or, as I preferred to see it, a man trying to live up to the legend he’d built for himself. Not such a bad thing, is it? I wrote some songs about it all, good songs I think, but nobody stops for long when I’m singing them on this street corner. It’s like I’m the only one who can hear the melody. It’s like everybody who walks by me needs a hearing aid, glasses, human emotions, a pacemaker, new nostrils—do you remember all of our jokes? We were just gypsy ghosts on these streets, no matter how much noise we made. We scared people and then they forgot all about us. We meant no harm, even when we were doing harm. We were just surviving. Survival is always hard to explain to those it comes easy to.

Are you wondering why I’m writing? I am too. In our better moments, we talked about finding that place somewhere we would be happy—the kind of place that lovers talk about when they’re loving good. I see our little house, two bedrooms, a yard with a weeping willow tree, beers on the porch on hot summer nights, the blur of rain streaking down windows during a thunderstorm. We’re working jobs and coming home at night satisfied, like people are supposed to. A place like that requires a certain stability, though, and neither of us—you, too, if you’re honest—possessed such a skill.

Stability comes easier to me now. Fatigue has conjured its essences and benefits—shall I call it peace? I’m tired of praying to turmoil, tired of insisting on intensity. I’m on my way to possessing a brand-new wisdom (did I hear you laugh?), but I’m not sure what it is yet. I can only smell it. We of all people know that no one can really start again, but here I am, starting again. I found God (yes, I definitely heard you laugh). Nothing spoke to me in the wind, and I had no visions, although I welcome them. I just made a decision. I wake up every morning and tell myself that God exists and that he wants me to do good and I pray.

I used to say that how a man dies tells the story of how he lived. I don’t want to die alone. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m so often scared...

And so, I think about you, frequently, and in many ways, and sometimes with hate, but never without love. I know what love is now. I should apologize to you, but I won’t. I apologized so many times that another apology won’t matter much. I want to thank you. I never thanked you. I think of the small moments, the two of us sitting side-by-side at a movie, quiet and knowing. We liked to dream so many of the same dreams. I wonder if you’re still dreaming those dreams. I wonder if I’m still in them.

I wish I had a return address to see if you’d write me back. Come looking for me on Haight Street. I’ll be here for a while.

Love,
A happier man, a man for you

The Dry Life

He often told the story about his friend, Larry, who gave up drinking. “Larry jumped off the top of a four story building, right on Christmas morning. His mother was even there, right in the next room. Christ, the man was a doctor of all things.”

The point of his story was clear: Once Larry gave up his natural ways, got on the right track, there was nothing left to live for. Still, when Dad had a heart attack himself, he gave the straight life a shot. “For the sake of the community,” he joked. “If I die, there won’t be another.”

At first it seemed easy. He quit drinking alcohol altogether, replaced his daily five cups of coffee with two cups of tea in the morning, and for a while he was actually going to the YMCA three or four times a week to exercise. “I’m working on my abs,” he joked. His belly stretched the buttons on his shirt, and he patted it proudly, as if to make sure that everyone got the joke. Yes, he sung the praises of the clean life. When someone would pour a cup of coffee or light up a cigarette, he’d tap them on the shoulder and say, “You know that’s bad for you, don’t you?” He loved playing the role of the scolding sinner, the high moralist who actually had little faith in morality, or at least as it was defined in Oskaloosa, Iowa.

The good thing about his newfound healthy ways was that he was home every night. It felt like Christmas. Even though he didn’t talk much, he was one of those people who could make a room warm just by sitting in it. We ate dinner at the table, then he dried the dishes after my mother washed them. We sat and watched TV afterward, and he read. He’d taken up a fascination with World War II, the war he just missed fighting in, with an enthusiasm we hadn’t seen in him before.

“Those John Wayne World War II movies, they’re full of shit,” he said. “I’ve heard stories from the men that you wouldn’t believe. There were heroes in that war, sure, but heroes of a different kind. Those guys who went to Viet Nam act like they have the monopoly on atrocity. My boys in World War II just kept their lips tight about what they saw. They didn’t ask anyone to feel sorry for them.”

It was as if he was sticking up for a way of life, telling us stories about “his boys” on the beaches in Normandy, at Iwo Jima, as if he was telling us something about himself--that life inherently held horror and pain, but one had to move on through it, no matter what your methods. He wished that he’d been old enough to go off to the war, but I don’t know why, except that he never left Iowa and maybe the war was his one big chance. To either be a hero or just be someplace else. He got married at eighteen, like most did. Became an ordinary man, working first on his father’s farm, then driving a truck, then selling insurance, but always doing odd jobs on the side.

My mother said he just didn’t have another way to express himself other than drinking. She accepted his ways without complaint and set the standard for us all. The time he fell asleep in the snow drift and nearly froze to death. The woman who called sometimes at three in the morning. I knew, I picked up the phone once. But he gave Mom flowers, took her dancing every Friday night, and I heard him tell her how pretty she was thousands of times. He knew how to keep things right even when nothing was, a skill that many could use.

I thought the drinking was his way of revolting against God, however. He didn’t like the way the world had been made. “Full of mean tricks,” he said, “more like the devil created it.” We went to church each Sunday, because that’s what people in small midwestern towns do, and he volunteered to take the collection, standing proudly and solemnly at the end of each pew in the one suit he owned, a polyester navy blue suit that he wore with a red clip-on tie. Every once in a while, he’d wink at me out of his bloodshot eyes, like he was pulling one over on God himself.

“Just make sure to ask forgiveness the second before you die. Then everything’s all right.” Those were the only words of guidance he ever gave me.

First there was a wedding reception with carafes of cheap wine set on each table. It tasted like juice, he said, so he convinced himself that it was too light to be real alcohol. And people laughed at what he said, that didn’t help. He carried himself with majesty when drunk, slapping people on the back, telling stories from back in the day, wishing people luck as if he owned a piece of it. If you saw him, you wouldn’t have known that most of the glories of his life took place in the Elks card room or during the late night pranks he and his cronies performed. Once they stole every lawn ornament in town and stuck them all on the mayor’s front lawn. Another time, they rented a black limo and took it to Eddyville, a small river town of about 500 people nearby, and they told everyone in town that they were millionaires with big plans to build a factory, maybe open up a movie theater and a roller rink. Big shots for a day was all they were. When we’d come down to have breakfast before school, he’d often be sitting at the table with a cup of coffee and a burning cigarette. He just couldn’t wait to tell us what had happened the previous night, and we couldn’t wait to hear.

So it wasn’t a surprise when the car was found upside down in a ditch after a late February snowstorm. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, he never did, because he said the government had no right to make such a law. He lay crumpled right next to the domelight on the ceiling of the car, his drinking buddy Hank next to him, an empty bottle of whiskey right next to his head.

Some people said he did himself in. “He was asking for it,” I heard a friend of his say several years later. “That man wouldn’t stop.”

It’s hard to say. One man’s suicide is another man’s life. He taught me that. And he taught me that God doesn’t own you until that moment right before your last breath. I’m sure he asked forgiveness, but I don’t think he ever did anything wrong.

Cooking

Originally published in Gargoyle, Issue #45

I take a break after the lunch rush, back behind the Cafe Milagro where discarded boxes are strewn along the parking lot and there is no shade to shield the sun's rays. Lizards do push-ups on top of the dumpster, their craggy heads bobbing nervously up and down like they've just had a double espresso. Sometimes Richard, the dishwasher, joins me and we smoke a couple of cigarettes together. If I'm lucky, I can stay for at least a half hour before an order gets put up. It's cooler inside, but I find serenity in places where few people want to be.

Richard says that once he gets the money, he's getting out of Arizona, which is funny because he's never even been out of the state. He also says that once he gets the money, he's going to buy a GTO, and I guess he does save his tips for this pistol he's always talking about as well, so the man is indeed up to something.

"Why do you want a pistol, Richard?" I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders, almost as if he doesn't know.

"So I can shoot it," he finally says in that stupid cowboy twang of his.

The sun is so hot that it pales the very blue of the sky. That's Tucson. There's the feeling that everything fades here, color and spirits. The heat quivers around McDonald's golden arches, drapes a curtain over the horizon. Roads spread out in all directions, cutting infinity into a grid. Sometimes the winds will kick up and sweep the desert dust so high up in the sky that it covers the sun with an apocolyptic, dirty haze. You don't want to breath, you don't want to see, you just want that fucking 110 degree sun to come back, all bright and clear and full of the damnation that makes Tucson home.

I keep telling myself to start saving some money to move out of here. My friend, Dean, up in San Francisco is an apprentice with a tattoo artist, and every time we talk he tells me he can set me up in his digs. "'’Cuz nothing is ever going to happen to you there," he says. "You'll start counting the days to Target's Labor Day sale pretty soon."

"Fuck you, sister," I say, "I've got some shit going." But I'll think about his words all the next day—those cool Frisco chicks, mini-skirts and knee-high leather boots dancing in my mind. Me, a big city boy. Nightclubs. Fronting my own band. Superstar. I can hear the ring in that.

But there's always something preventative that comes along. I've got an achy-breaky motor in my Datsun. I'll buy a couple of CDs, new strings for my guitar. A night at Club Congress—one too many beers, two too many beers, and then oops, the bar's closed. I'll drive out to the middle of the desert, watch the blood-orange light of dawn rim the horizon's paper mache mountains and content myself solely by the vastness I see before me. Thoughts of Frisco start to tire me by then. I don't even own a suitcase.

Richard, though, he's an industrious man. A handyman at an apartment complex in addition to washing dishes, so he gets free rent, which sounds like paradise to me. He learned all of his Mr. Goodwrench shit on a ranch when he was younger, or so I make it out. Richard mumbles when he talks—he's either retarded or he's got a speech defect or he was kicked in the head by a horse, or maybe all of the above.

"Are you gay?" I'll ask sometimes, just to piss him off.

"Why do you think I'm gay?" he squawks. "You the one who's got the weird hair. You're sick. You're a sick puppy," he repeats, like he's stomping out a small fire.

"Nothing wrong with being gay," I say. "You just got to be who you are."

Each of us likes this waitress, Carol, who used to strip at the Empress. Every once in a while her old girlfriends come in, and the Milagro fills up with dancing duels of perfume, chicks giggling and cackling, born to wiggle, born to please. Old Richard will get a boner aching in his eyes, and I must say that I don't exactly concentrate on my cooking.

Carol, though, she plans to go to medical school. She brings in fat textbooks, memorizes words like nasal fossae, which are two irregular cavities in the middle of the face. I know because I quiz her with the notecards she writes her words down on.

"Nasal fossae," I say. "It's your nose. Your basic fucking nose."

"It's more than that," she says.

"How much more than that?"

She giggles, brushing me away like I can't possibly understand.

"Hey, I'll have you know that I got an A on my ninth grade science project."

"What was your project?"

She said it like she didn't believe me, but I knew I had me this one chance.

"It was all about how sound changes in helium."

"And how does it change?"

Shit if I could remember. It was like yesterday, yet already yesterday was too far away in the past. I could only think of Bakersfield, the place where my Pops was an insurance salesman, which was just before we moved to Tucson, where Pops became a ghost.

Richard and I like to watch Carol walk up to her tables, her tight black jeans digging into her thighs. Her smile will curl up on her face, warm as a mother's hug—she's well versed in the art of making promises that won't ever be fulfilled. We sit back and talk like we're just waiting for the right moment to ask her out.

"I'll buy her a carnation," Richard will say. "I can be a complete gentleman if I want to. My mom taught me a few things."

"Yeah, but it's me she wants," I say. "You can tell because she gets all nervous in my presence."

"She likes men, idiot. She don't like weirdos."

"Well the only thing you can do for her, bitch, is wash her dishes and stand guard with your little silver pistol."

We set a cigarette on top of a car one day to see if the sun's heat would light it. Richard smoothed down what's supposed to look like a Burt Reynolds mustache and I sang, Today I'll be, Today I'll be, Today I'll be today. Lyrics to a song I'm working on.

We just sat there smoking and watched it, and I thought that sooner or later the entire world would have to burn. The wind breathed like it was suffocating, then expired with a sigh. Stillness. Heat. But the cigarette wouldn't light, and after a while it was like we'd been hypnotized, like we'd let the edges of our selves evaporate in the air.

I didn't even smell the smoke in the kitchen, didn't hear the alarms. There was just Carol, running out into the parking lot, laughing and tossing her hair back, a thing of crazy beauty running wildly into the world. And then there was Richard yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” jumping up and down and slapping his hands on his legs.

A flame snapped up against the window like a whip, and then there was the sound of shattered glass and a certain rumble that felt like an earthquake. We both started laughing—ghoulishly, like we were watching a public hanging—because something had finally happened. We were free. Yes indeed, it was all over. The tempo of our listlessness had suddenly changed and the only thing I had to mourn was my backpack that I'd left inside. Tomorrow, we would all start anew.