The Dark Comedy Review has at last been released, in this post we bring you the first story we accepted and the one that inspired the whole project. Daniel Ehiedu hails from Jos, Nigeria, and was only 17 years old when he penned “The Weeping Gods”. The story gracefully evokes the fantastical terrain and economic themes we were trying to capture in our first issue. Daniel is currently seeking an audience for his first novel and can be contacted at danehiedu@gmail.com.

The Weeping Gods

The Alhaji is pleased. It is not a good thing when the Alhaji is pleased. It means that our cages will be opened late today.

There are six of us. Six mindless slaves; servants of the Devil; acolytes of incorporated death who work all day and most of the night, plotting the downfall and ultimate liquidation of those who did not come to us first.

Six overworked corporate lawyers.

It is Dikeh who pokes his woolly head into my workspace—a molecular space I shamelessly call my ‘office’.

“Alhaji is laughing,” he whispers.

He is not really an Alhaji. We call him that because he insists on wearing flowing agbadas to work everyday, drawing them up about his legs like Cinderella as he sweeps from his Mercedes into his spacious office at Okocha & Okocha Ltd in Asaba, Delta State(Head Office). As far as I know, the Head Office is the only office we have in Nigeria, but I am only a rookie lawyer and cannot be expected to know too much.

My Nokia begins to chirp. I pull it out and check the little screen. “Baby-girl” claims the Caller ID. The first drop of color in this grey day.

Chinelo’s voice is warm in my ear, beautiful as she always is. She wants to know if my weekend will be free and whether I can come to her place in Warri. It is Friday night and hopes are high. I do not want to let my baby down.

“Perhaps,” I tell her. “But I may not make it tonight. A rainstorm.” In Delta State, the tip of militant Niger-Delta in Nigeria, a rainstorm is always coming. Rain is never a Deltan’s excuse. She knows this, and I sense a coming pout. “I will certainly try”, I assure her. If only the Alhaji will release my chains.

She signs off with a smacking kiss that leaves a foolish grin draped across my face. Dikeh comes back in.

“Who was it?” he wants to know.

“Your grandmother,” I tell him. Dikeh and I have been brothers since secondary school. It is my legal right to insult him.

As I start to shut down my laptop, warm as an oven from being on all day, I tell him. “She wants me to come for the weekend. Do you think the Alhaji will let us off?”

He shrugs his heavy shoulders.

Soon the news comes in, brought by Aisha, our haggard secretary. The deal with Chief Benson has been sealed, the weekend will be free and we will all have to follow the Alhaji to the Tinapa Bar for a small celebration.

I mentally curse the man’s ancestors.

Outside, it has begun to rain. Again.

\\\

There are eight workers in all at Okocha & Okocha: six lawyers, the secretary, and Adamu, the wizened clerk who claims to have been a Brigadier in the Biafran War. All of us lawyers have cars, and Dikeh quickly elects to take Aisha and nominates me to be the one to ferry Adamu across town to the Tinapa Bar. The others agree, naturally. I am the one who recently bought the big American car, the Lincoln Navigator my mother saw and nearly fainted at in the village last Christmas.

After the traditional arguments, I bundle a grinning Adamu into the front seat and run around the bonnet to take the wheel.

“Oga,” Adamu says emphatically to me, “this na very, very fine car.”

He calls me Oga, even though he is thrice my age. In Nigeria, as in every other place, the hierarchy of respect and seniority has a direct relationship with your bank account.

We drive through the now heavy rain. Adamu, who finds it an impossibility to shut up, regales me with tales of his exploits with Ojukwu, how they sat together in countless Army tents, plotting the strategy.

What strategy, I ask. The strategy, he says, as if there were only one strategy, like the alphabet.

He informs me of the latest exploits of the yahoo-yahoo on the Internet by the boys in Lagos, then assures me that the Amnesty for the militants is not working at all, that for every one AK-47 the boys turn in, the Chiefs have three new ones waiting for them.

And then, he asks me if I knew why it was raining.

I hazard him a glance before turning back to the road.

“No,” I say. “I have no idea.”

“Ah-ah,” he exclaims. “Your mama no teach about Osanga?”

Osanga? I assure him that I have no idea what he is talking about. He grins and pulls out his snuff box. Then he settles deeper into the Navigator’s bucket seat.

\\\

Once, in the Sky, before the European god came, there lived only African gods. They were called the Skymen and they watched over all the people of Earth.

The Chief of the Skymen was Oduduwa the Terrible who made the Earth and Heaven from stardust and tears. He had two sons.

The first was Malik the Fiery Red, Commander of Fire. He was known all over Heaven and Earth for his prowess in battle and metal-work. He was respected second only to his father and he was feared greatly because Red Malik was known by all to be hotheaded and brutal, his anger terrible to see. All the maidens loved him, for he was extremely fine to look upon and he excited them with his hot passion and his fiery ways. Malik was a son worthy of his father.

The second son was named Rain Osanga of Sky-Blue, Commander of the Rivers and the Joyful Spring. He was nowhere as handsome a Skyman as his brother Malik, nor could he ever hope to defeat Malik in war or wrestling. He was not as talented at anything but weaving, and that was a woman’s job. The maidens paid him no attention, because in the presence of Malik he was like palm-wine in the Sahara. He was only good for weaving and charting the Rivers their course.

Unbelievably, despite all his woes, Rain Osanga was not a kind and gentle fellow. He hated his brother Malik with a fury and despised everyone else as much as he suspected that they despised him. Whenever Malik married another wife, he did not attend the ceremony as custom demanded. Instead, he left the Sky and wandered the Earth where he spent hours, even days, sometimes weeks, plotting the courses of his Rivers and guiding then to water the Earth.

It was on one of these occasions, when Malik was wedding in the Sky and every Earthman and Skyman celebrated in Oduduwa’s court, that Rain Osanga descended to wander the Earth alone. He carefully plotted his rivers, cursing the noise of the sparrows and mumbling to himself. And suddenly, as he worked the Benue to meet the Niger, he saw a girl.

This girl was by far the most beautiful daughter of the Earth. Her hair was black and her skin was golden and her nose was small and straight like an arrow. Rain Osanga was so astounded to see such beauty that he fell into his own River.

The splash startled the girl and she turned sharply around to see the Skyman crawling up the riverbank, muddy and wet.

“Forgive me, little,” said Osanga of Sky-Blue. “I would never mean to do you harm. It is not everyday that a man meets the beauty of the Earth wrapped in a golden skin.”

The girl laughed, and her laugh was the joy of the desert spring when the night has passed and the sun awakes again.

“You flatter me, sir,” said she. “Pray tell: who are you, and what do you on Earth, when all the Earthmen and Skymen are in the courts of King Oduduwa, celebrating the marriage of Red Malik to Chimamanda the Beautiful?”

“I would ask you exactly that,” said the Skyman. “Nevertheless, I will answer you and then you will answer after me.

“I am Rain Osanga of Sky-Blue, Commander of the Joyful Spring and the Rivers that water all the Earth. And now, pray tell, who are you and what are you doing here when all the Earthmen and Skymen are in the courts of my father, celebrating the marriage of Malik to Chimamanda?”

“Dear sir,” the most beautiful maiden said, “my name is Chimarobi and I am called Little Flower. It is against custom for a woman to attend her betrothed’s other weddings, as if she cannot wait her turn. I am betrothed to your brother Malik.”

When Rain Osanga heard her words, he lifted up his voice and wept. He had heard much about Chimarobi the Little Flower, the fairest of all maidens on Earth, and he had known that she was betrothed to Red Malik. But he had never seen her before and now that he had, he rolled upon the riverbank and wept.

Little Flower went to him, and placed her hands on his shoulders, so that they stopped their quaking. And gently, in the voice of the sparrow as it greets the morning sun, she asked what ails him so.

So Rain straightened himself, and faced her like a man, and said:

“I am Rain Osanga of Sky-Blue, Commander of the Rivers and the Joyful Spring. My father has married fifty virgins, and my brother Malik has married twenty, but I have not married a single wife. No, I married not a one, because I found no beauty in any of the maidens that passed before me. I neither loved nor desired one, until this day that I descended to the riverbank and have seen the Moon in the figure of a woman, with the stars of Heaven in her eyes.”

When he had spoken, Little Flower was abashed to anxiety, and greatly perturbed that the brother of her betrothed should speak so. She shrank from him. But he went to her, and he knelt before her, and softly he asked her if in truth she did not find him pleasing. For hate and malice had made twisted Rain Osanga, and if he had found no beauty in the maidens before, it was because he had none in himself. But the beauty of Chimarobi was more than enough for both of them, and the moment that Rain had laid eyes on her on his riverbank, his heart had opened, and now he was beautiful too. So it was that he knelt boldly before Chimarobi, who is called Little Flower, and asked her if she did not find him pleasing.

And she, with the voice of the little stream that washes white the pebbles, replied that she indeed found him beautiful, as she found all things beautiful and that she was surprised that the stories of malice and spite were about this very Skyman.

Then Rain Osanga stood like a man because her answer had satisfied him, and he was for the moment content. He swore by his father’s name that he would return to that very place at that very time the next day. Then, leaving his rivers running, he bounded back into the Sky, his heart filled with newfound beauty.

That day, Rain began to weave a kente, the marriage cloth of his people.

So it was that Rain returned to Earth every day, at the place that the Benue meets the Niger. And Chimarobi was there always, sitting in the riverbank, and not surprised to see him.

As time went by, as Malik went about his furious business and waged wars in the utmost parts of the Earth, Rain continued to visit Little Flower. And as time went by, Little Flower, who had first found Osanga a little frightening, then strangely pleasing and kind, began to like him a little. For Rain Osanga’s heart had opened and there was no more hate. All the Earthmen and Skymen wondered at his change, for now Rain went about his business with laughter, singing for the children and helping the old women, looking finer day after day.

Even the maidens began to like him, because sometimes when he came upon one as he charted the course of his rivers, he might give her some strange and wonderful flower that he had found along his riverbanks in some faraway part of Earth. Before they had time to be surprised he would be gone, riding on his rushing rivers, laughing at them and at himself as he went to see Little Flower who held his heart in her right hand.

A year passed, and by that time Chimarobi loved Osanga almost as thoroughly as he loved her. The Skymen and Earthmen favored him immensely, because of the love and beauty he had found within himself. Every morning, the old women listened for his laughter as he descended to Chimarobi and to his Rivers.

Now, Malik the Fiery Red, firstborn of King Oduduwa, had during this time been waging ferocious war with foreign tribes and nations in the utmost parts of Earth. After a year, victory was his, and now that his thirst for battle had passed temporarily from him, he turned his thoughts to another thing—his marriage to Little Flower.
He had seen the maiden only twice; once on a journey across the sky, when he had spotted her from a distance and determined to make her his, and the other when he had betrothed her to himself the next day.

Now that the demon of war was passed from him, Malik remembered the beauty of a woman and he resolved to have Chimarobi with him by sunset, or he would answer to any who attempted delay.

So Red Malik turned from his battlefields and went home.

\\\

Osanga, for the first time in a year, was troubled. He had heard of his bother’s exploits in faraway parts of Earth and now he knew that Malik was returning home.

When he descended to the Earth that day, there was no laughter to brighten the birdsong and the old women stayed in bed all day. He did not sing for the children, neither did he greet the maidens that he passed that morning. He went straight to the place where the Benue meets the Niger. Little Flower was there, as always, and laughed with joy to see him.

But Rain Osanga said:

“Do not laugh, my love. Today is not a day for laughter. Today your betrothed will come home.”

“He is no longer my betrothed, Rain,” said Chimarobi to the Skyman. “He cannot be my betrothed when my heart is in the right hand of another.”

“You know that,” said Rain, “and I know that, but will the gods listen? It is against custom to marry the promised wife of another. It is betrayal, punishable by death.”

Then Chimarobi was up in fury. Her eyes flashed, and her beauty was like a lioness.

“Betrayal, you say?” she cried. “Betrayal, when it was you who came from the water to find me, and ask if I was pleased by you? Betrayal, when everyday you have come to me, and we have been together, and you have loved it as much as I? Shame on you, Rain Osanga, and a curse upon your ancestors!” And Chimarobi wept that he and she should speak so.

Osanga went to her, and knelt before her, and slipped his arm around his darling’s waist.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I spoke as a fool, because it is a fool who tries to fashion love after wisdom.

“But now, my darling, think what we shall do. Your mind is as quick as your eyes, quick as a springbok on the savannah, leaving dull me far behind.

“We are liable for death, both of us for my sin, and I would rather roast over an open fire than see you hurt for the love I drew you into.”

Then Little Flower smiled, and she wiped her eyes and told her Skyman:

“You spoke not as a fool before, Rain, but you speak as a fool now, because of your ranting about your sinfulness and me being only a scapegoat. I am as guilty as you, for I love you as much as you love me, and how then can we be guilty in love?

“See now; while you speak of nonsense, this my quick mind has found a way for us to escape the wrath of the gods.” When Rain asked her how, she knelt before him, so that they were face and eye to eye like two children.
“We will flee, my love,” said she. “We will run away together.”

\\\

Rain, hearing her words, was up in a fury of his own.

“The gods forbid that I flee from defending my love and very life. Too long I have hid and plotted and schemed, and walked away from the face of wrath.

“No, my love; no, Chimarobi, I will do anything but flee. I will stand for once, like a man, and see this thing to its end.” Then, kissing Chimarobi tenderly, he left her weeping by his rivers and climbed back into the sky, proud as an eagle and ready to see the end of it.

Now Red Malik, as he returned from battle and journeyed across the sky, had spied Chimarobi and his brother Osanga kneeling together, eye to eye, like two children. Immediately, Red Malik was thunderously vexed. His awful wrath was set all of it to burn and he swore to destroy the both of them in the intensity of his anger.

As he rushed them in his fury, he met Rain Osanga halfway down. Malik was surprised that his twisted brother should be so fine, indeed as fine as he, with the light of the stars in his eyes. When he was still far-off, Red Malik called with a terrible voice, challenging him to come to him like a man and fight, because he knew that his brother was no warrior, and he would strike him to the Earth with one blow.

But Rain Osanga absorbed his brother’s roar quietly, and said: “I am no warrior, and if we fight, you will strike me to the Earth with a single blow. Let us battle in another field; let us debate before the King in court. He will decide who will marry Chimarobi, whether it is you who are betrothed to her, or me whom she loves.”

\\\

They argued for a day and a night. Malik was a talented orator. He called them all to bear witness to the law and against his brother’s betrayal who, while he was gone to war, stole Malik’s betrothed from him. He demanded that both the adulterers, according to custom, be killed.

Then Rain Osanga spoke. He was no gifted speaker, and his words did not flow like his rivers nor did they ignite passion in a man. But he spoke of simple things; of love and beauty, and of his finding life in the eyes of a maiden whose death his brother demanded.

At the end of the night and day, all men voted for Red Malik,and all women for Rain Osanga.

King Oduduwa decided that a contest would be held. This contest would show the strength of both his sons and allow the King to favor one above the other. Malik, as elder, would go first.

So Malik the Fiery Red climbed high into the Sky. He called upon every spark in the Earth, and he gathered them in the center of the Sky into a great ball of fire. He cut down one whole forest to fuel it.

The fire grew hotter and hotter, and while it burned, Malik scoured the Earth for more forests. He piled forest after forest on his bonfire and it grew hotter and hotter. The Earth sweltered and the savannah was set ablaze in the heat.

Little Flower was the only one on Earth, because it was against custom that a woman attend a contest arranged over her hand. When the Earth began to burn, Rain at last understood his brother’s plan. He went to the gods and begged them to ask Malik to stop his fires, or Little Flower would surely be burnt to death. But the horrified gods could do nothing. No god may interfere with the power of another, or that interfering god would be cast from the Sky to live on with men on Earth. So the gods begged Osanga to have patience and wait his turn.

By the time Malik had piled the seventh forest on his fire, Rain could bear it no longer. He descended to the burning Earth carrying his most beautiful cloth: the kente that he had begun weaving the day he first met Chimarobi. He found his love, half-dead from the heat, hiding in the water where the two rivers meet. Rain pulled her out and kissed her and covered her with his kente. It was a very beautiful kente, his finest work by far. It had seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. There, with the fires raging all around them, Rain Osanga married Little Flower and covered her with his kente. Then, he set off on his journey.

He crossed Seven Mountains and Seven Seas before he reached the land he sought. This was the Land of Thunder and its King was Sango, the god of Thunder. Osanga went to the palace of Sango and bowed before him. He reminded Sango that he had watered his lands countless times with his Rivers, and how Wind Utaka, the firstborn of Sango, had heard his laughter and become his bosom friend. He told Sango of his plight, of his love for Chimarobi and Malik’s murderous fury, which would soon kill her. He begged Sango to lend him the Clouds that covered the Land of Thunder. With these, he said, he would shield his darling from his brother’s killing fires.

Sango the god of Thunder agreed to lend Rain his Clouds. But they were extremely heavy. Rain found that he could not carry them home alone. So Wind Utaka, a friend of Osanga’s and immensely strong, helped him roll the heavy black clouds all the way from the Land of Thunder, over the Seven Seas and Seven Mountains, till they reached the burning Earth and rolled the Clouds beneath the Sky.

When Malik saw that the heat of his fires could hurt the Little Flower no longer, he was furious. He called that custom be fulfilled and that Rain Osanga be cast from the Sky to live on Earth among men. The gods asked Rain to defend himself, to argue his case, but he refused. There was nothing Osanga wanted more than to live on the Earth with Little Flower.

There was nothing Oduduwa could do but cast him from the Sky. Rain Osanga fell all the way down to Earth.

He was killed by the fall.

\\\
When the gods saw that Rain Osanga; their laughing, singing Osanga had been killed, they all began to weep. They cried and cried and cried and their tears fell in showers that put out all Malik’s raging fires.

To this day, whenever Maliks’s fires pile high and the forests threaten to burn again, Wind journeys from the Land of Thunder, bringing the heavy Clouds with him. Sango commands them all in his loud voice, and Wind rolls the Clouds once more beneath the Sky, shielding Little Flower from Malik’s fiery hate.

And when the gods see the Clouds again, and hear Wind howling for his friend Rain, they remember their sin and begin to cry again. They mourn the murder of Rain Osanga of Sky-Blue, the son of King Oduduwa, the fairest of all Skymen.

\\\

There is silence in the Navigator when Adamu has finished. Silence at last.

We are almost at the Tinapa Bar. I guide the big car carefully through the traffic, the wipers working frantically to clear the gods’ tears off my windshield.

Why were they crying, anyway? It was nobody’s fault. How were they to know that the idiot, who had plunged singing from the sky so many times, should choose that particular descent to break his neck?

Adamu is shoveling more snuff up his nose. It is on the tip of my tongue to ask what happened to Little Flower afterward. But I am no longer a child in the village square, so I hold my peace.

I drop him off at the Tinapa Bar. The others are already there. I can see Dikeh through the lighted windows, laughing with Aisha as he pours her beer. The Alhaji sits grandly on his chair, certain, I am sure, that we all love him dearly.

Adamu looks at me quizzically as he climbs out and I rev the Navigator’s engine. I say:

“Tell the Alhaji I have an urgent phone call, please. I have to travel to Warri immediately.”

He is surprised for a moment, then grins and winks. I will have to ‘sort’ him some money on Monday. Brigadier or not, Adamu is not above blackmail.

As I begin the long drive out of town, I wonder again what became of Chimarobi, sitting by the riverbank, covered in her rainbow-colored kente. Maybe she moved to Warri and changed her name.

I must be with Chinelo tonight.

For the moment, the rain has stopped.

Daniel Ehiedu currently resides in Jos, Nigeria. He recently graduated from high school, where he was editor for the St. John’s students’ quarterly magazine, Jollity. ‘The Weeping Gods’ is his first published work.

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Written by Uncategorized & Posted on February 20th, 2011

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Given the endless delays that have plagued the Dark Comedy Review, our ever forthcoming print journal, we’ve decided to give a sneak peak at one of our non-fiction selections. This piece comes courtesy of Ciu Choo, a bartender and manager and a good friend of the site. The following excerpt comes from the first chapter of “Glad Girls”, her ongoing memoir of a corner of the Brooklyn bar scene.

Glad Girls

Oh I’m in a shocked shocked state of shockdom, because lemme tell you this will not stand. I am gonna get this guy. I know I might come off as a tad nutty at times but I just can’t abide by this. This damn Mr. Felty has not called me back and it’s been way way past the point of waiting. He’s fucking dead. And try as I might, I can’t seem to stop thinking about that little fucker and its not like I even know him. Lordy knows it ain’t due to any prowess in the bed, and maybe has to do a little with my own vanity, and the fact that I like his taste in color, but I hate it hate it hate it and now I’m forced to plot and plan. And lo, I know that maybe sending a dead bird to his house might not quite cut the mustard on this one, don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind. I will bide my time.

So it looks like I’m back in high school once again. I keep humping these dull drama queen Brooklyn boys who preen and whine and eat my house bare and stink of feet and armpit and then my soap and me, and I wear it out until I just fucking hate them. And I’d like to think that they’re all ok people but the closer I get the more useless I find them, the more closed off I become. And by the end of it I wouldn’t care if they were dead, these obsolete fucking shell boys, all beer stench and morning breath and self pity and skinny jeans. And I know how I must seem, so cold and maybe sociopathic and definitely getting older, but as bad as I feel about how others might find me, I really really can’t say I care. And yet I am constantly on the hunt, constantly searching, without regard to interest, appearance, position, odor. I’d like to say I do this so easily because I’m just lovely and kind and wise, but come on….I dress like a tramp and I manage two bars. More to the point, I have no standards and limitless desire, an unnatural urge to hump everything that crosses my path from Strollerville to Bushwick. It’s fucking killing me. I need a new hobby.

This is what my life looks like, Thanksgiving week till Christmas:

Finishing up with The Kid, the end of a three monthish kinda party–very handsome, very tall, very young, very thin, but so dull and dim that you can hear that little pea brain rattling around in that pretty little head. He asks me if Thanksgiving is on a Monday this year, I tell him it’s always on a Thursday. He gets angry, asks me how am I supposed to know? I decide not to go with him to his family cottage in Connecticut. I can sit through discomfort from my very own bed perch, and I KNOW that at least the food, if not the company, will be better.

I make other plans, have a lovely grownup turkey dinner at Danielle’s dreamy loft in a converted Bushwick warehouse, realize I’m late for a date with the Argentinian dude from the bar, who had spoken of oysters and champagne, but I figured would end up more along the beer and TV kinda lines and therefore took my time in arriving. I make the mad dash a few blocks past the bar I work at, past the Boar’s Head factory, leap over the dead rat that’s been rotting on the sidewalk since Halloween, try to find the broken neon sign on his building—I haven’t been here since the summer, I can’t remember the building. Buzz buzz in, out of breath (YOU try running in a sheath dress with a waist belt), and lo and behold, there they were– oysters on a bed of what was once ice, a candelabra set on a makeshift table in the middle of the loft (guess the roommate was away….). And of course with the Tom Waits (Bette Midler for boys) and dancing and way way too much champagne (fuckin Veuve Cliquot too!) and, as I had guessed, a bald head under that omnipresent hat. Someone must have mentioned to him that longshoreman chic will get you more ladies than looking like Richard Dreyfuss. Yup. ROMANCE!! After drunk humping to no release (I’m pleasantly surprised that he buys Magnums, they almost fit him!), I get bored when the pillowtalk turns to Foucault and make a run for it. Back to the bar (just four blocks away!), back to the booze, then back to Dick Dreyfuss to crash for the night (why do they wait up once I’ve already left? So stupid!). Slap on lipstick the next morning, back on with the stockings (ripped, dammit, from the PASSION), and then……

And I’m off to run the new bar the next day, rush rushing home through the subway tunnels and dodging the double wide strollers up the hill to my tiny brownstone, new mothers waving away my cigarette smoke, to lose the dress and slap on something that would look appropriate with a messy rat’s nest of sex-hair (no time for a shower!). Wave goodbye to my pink little studio (“Margaret Ellen” is the color), run up the block to open the bar, sit on a stool for hours alone, gloating and giggling about getting laid by someone over 35, eating bad Japanese and makin’ burgers on my new favorite silly video game. Couple customers, talking waaaay too much shit, and then my favorite new regulars walk in with cheer and aplomb and a handsome friend. Cindy asks how my Thanksgiving was; I scream “I got laaaaaaaaaaaaaiid!” like an idiot. We chat, her husband Miles and the buddy hit the jukebox, three songs in and all of my favorite music comes on. Granted I did pick all the juke albums, but he managed to play every favorite I have on each record—this is how that goddamn Guided by Voices song is stuck in my head for a month! And he’s funny and he’s cute and he’s not 22, we sit by the popcorn machine and crack wise. And a few more drinks and I’m wishing I had showered and shaved, had never announced the previous nights activities. No matter; on to the next bar, onto that point in the night where the blackout begins, somehow even though I live a hot 2 blocks away I find myself in a cab over the bridge to the East Village to go to this dude’s house. His room is the color I had painted my kitchen in my first roommate-free responsibility-free apartment (“Glass Green”), but it’s neat and it’s beautiful and there are chandeliers with colored bulbs and drawers with fancy pulls. Maybe he’s gay? Oh but I’m falling in love, we’re laughing, and then MORE fucking ill-advised Magnums! Showertime, shame, reluctance to blow this kid, and I end up the big spoon. Boo. We roll around for hours and it’s not really working, what a shame because I’m so drunk I really actually like this one. I wake with a start around 8, manic like a puppy, unsure of what to do as I can’t even vaguely remember dream boy’s name. And I’m gross and unkempt and I’m wearing goddamn knee-high fringed moccasins and an eighties shirt, I just gotta GO. Call Jules, make a run for it, make a brunch of it, tell my best friend all about this boy I’m gonna marry if only I could remember his name or had the forethought to get his number. I get back home to Strollerville, call Miles and Cindy for his info, pound a few ciders and can’t contain it for five fucking minutes. Of COURSE I immediately fuck it all up big time with a singysong “Hiiii Mr. Felty it’s me, the girl you banged this morning. Call me back so we can fuck again!” So chirpy and sooooooslurred. I’m a girl who needs a meeting.

I’m so stupid. Few nights later I find myself out in Strollerville with Barry, my new favorite co-worker from the new bar; we split up to hit up on everything in our path. I talk to an endearingly dorky reporter from the Wall Street Journal but find my way home with some teenage sports fan instead, who Barry was kind enough to loudly point out was also a “herb;” no matter. That kid fucked me like a goddamn porn star for hours. I tried to ignore the blown up snapshot of him and his sister as children at Disneyland, looking suspiciously like it was taken while I was in high school. Nevertheless. I woke in a panic at 7:30 and ordered beer for the bars, fucked that kid a few more hours, I mean HOURS–who keeps selling these guys Magnums?!–then fell back to sleep. No complaints. Then I trotted back home through the brownstones and never turned back. Think last name was Larochelle? Never caught that first one though. Nice boy.

I make plans with Richard Dreyfuss; The Kid finally comes home (6am surprise! to MY fucking apartment –NEVER give your keys to teenagers!) and I dump him. After all that he leaves his fucking skateboard at my house. Hmph. Make it back to Bushwick after a good half bottle of whiskey; it’s no wonder that I wind up in a viiiiiiiiiiiiiiolent argument with Dreyfuss over some lovely sweetbreads with a nice saffron mayonnaise. Worst date ever; at the end we realize we can’t stand each other and shake hands over shots. I stay at the bar to finish my deeerinking, safe in that black concrete windowless cave, run ranting into my buddy (let’s call him Barney, he manages this crappy burger joint/bar up the street from my little cave bar), remember little other than a finger wagging at me and “Its bedtime for you choo!” Wake up at his house with a head like lead piping; its 8:30 am and “Ciu ciu wake up! You were a bad choo last night!” Barney’s gotta catch a flight to Seattle but has to hit up work first; I chew ciu some gum, slap on lipstick, get some coffee, we grab a car; Barney regales me with tales of what level of assholery my liver can reach. We joke and laugh in his pubby dive, speculate on the upcoming trip to Vegas for the holidays, make plans for the big night out on the town so we have one night of respite from our families. I trudge back two blocks to my bar, do the money do the drudgery then ride that train back to Strollerville where this current headache began. Nothing learned. At all. I go home and dye my hair redder for like the 79th time this month. Margaret Ellen is pink with joy that I’m actually home for once. We watch a movie.

For shame, for rain, for sure. Date Night sucked. Worked all night Thursday behind the bar in Bushwick and all I got was a whiny fucking Kid screaming round midnight about how “I loved you!” and “Can I get another bud? I’ll pay you tomorrow?” I hit on some other 5th grader, hedge my bets and call The Kid back 2 hours later. He comes back, 5th grader has ridden the whiskey train home by now, but The Kid is lit up like the prom queen and has ceased to make sense. I let him ride his bike home, finish another hour or two of drinking in the cave with Barney and the boys (I am still having fun), call a car home and phone The Kid on the way, listen to his grandiose verbose yet highly ineloquent version of what he thought it would hoped it should felt it could have been before I cut him off and say “I just thought you might come over tonight.” Response? “Oh. I’ll call a car. Do you have bacon?” There’s another 8 minutes of my life gone to the apocalypse. Fix the hair, put on better undies, cook the bacon, DING DONG!! , whine whine naked fumble dick don’t work “I wish I was better tonight so you’d like me again” ugh eek sleep please just sleep and then alarm going off and “it was nice to see you again” and he’s thankfully out the door, off to deliver burgers for Barney (did I mention he was Barney’s delivery boy?). Gambled and lost. I thought I could at least count on a lay from that boy.

And that fucking skateboard….still in my house.

And STILL thinking about stupid Mr. Felty……I will bide my time………..but then the nice reporter from the Wall Street Journal calls and asks me on a date! We go see a movie, the fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox, we drink in my neighb, we are interrupted by the police raiding the Strollerville bar and finding our documentation to be, uh, sub par. I run over two blocks; Mikey (my boss, my bff, my partner, my goddamn WIFE) is thankfully there, he and I chat with the cops –those Uniforms! So cute! I could shoot the shit with these dudes for hours!– but I’m happy when they leave for more than sure. Cindy and Miles show up, shots ensue, Mikey and I try not to have mild heart attacks, WSJ comes back, drinks all around. I stumble home with the nice reporter, suddenly I’m having some very sloppy but fun sex with a guy who looks like Ralphie from A Christmas Story. I remember laughing, I remember thinking I was glad the lights were off. I remember repeatedly slapping (slapping!) him in the face whilst fucking him. I wake up confused and a little terrified; he looks kinda like my brother with his glasses off. We go to breakfast (glasses back on); he’s charming and sweet. It’s raining like drizzle and misery yet the sidewalks are full of trees and responsible adults with coffee cups and museum plans; I remember walking past the mailbox on my block, thinking of that beginner foreign language textbook where there’s a bus driver and a construction worker and a stoplight and a crossing guard, all clearly labeled, English and French subtitles, and some strumpet in red knee boots and a ridiculous fur coat (named Londa!), leopard bra showing through a sweater……oy. I don’t even wanna think what they call my kind in French. And the nice respectable reporter dude goes from brunch back to his business, but nevertheless…. We make plans for Tuesday. I go off with Jules to attempt to Christmas shop for her douchebag princess boyfriend (Massage? “He has a personal massuse.” Clothes? “He won’t wear anything from Banana Republic.” Cashmere? “Who the fuck spends 600 bucks on a sweater?” Oh boy. But how we tried. God I hate her dude. I thank my lucky stars I don’t have a boyfriend this holiday season.

And I try to behave on Tuesday. I go to Ralphie’s, he makes me a sad ickyburger. I gladly eat it in front of the Christmas tree; he plays me Bob Dylan’s unintentionally hilarious Christmas album. There are stockings hung by the…..wait this is Apartmentland, nobody has an actual fireplace…..We watch tv; make it thru half of Gone with the Wind. It is literally a Norman Rockwell picture over here—nobody’s even moving. And just when I start plotting how to get his pants off, he kicks me out at 9:30, because apparently reporters get up at 4am and he has to go to bed. I don’t get laid. Not even a cuddle. What the fuck? I was originally psyched about this dude who woke up when I got home and went to bed just as I started my night (I can eat dinner, get laid, then go out!) but this is BULLSHIT. I’m outta there. No matter, my phone is beeping its little pants off, because the boys wanna play. I go out with Barney and Fred and get stupid. We go Bushwick’s finest strip club, Pumps, to see the ladies with bullet wounds and c-section scars jiggle to bad hip-hop, we go to my cave bar, smoke weed at the garage where they keep their motorcycles, end up back at Barney’s bar. Fred asks if I want pizza and movies, simple code for crashing at his place and fooling around (this happens with Fred every couple of months). I’m pissed that I already agreed to sleep at Barney’s instead for boredom and actual movie watching (this happens every coupla weeks). No matter, Fred’s admitted to being fair game again. Yes! Wake up at Barney’s AGAIN, staring at hair and crust and flakes of skin next to the pillow. Ewwwwwwww. I remain unlaid. Picked the wrong horse on that one.

But baaaah then its Sunday and I’m shopping for Christmas, I get 18 texts from a bored and twitchy Fred, and I find myself back in Bushwick, sitting with the boys, Fred’s awesome friend BamBam had made it all the way out from the city!! I got Barney I got Fred I got BamBam all shrieking about murder! and rape! and waaaah! and its fun. They ask me if I’m a lesbian, and I say I must be because I keep dating all these little girls. BAH DUM BUM!! Laughter ensues; more shots. Stop me if you heard this one? Somehow BamBam gets wasted, needs a car back up to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Fred lives next door anyway, and its “Ginzo! You comin with?” Whooo fuckinhooo I love going to Fred’s house–he is the worst, whiniest, smelliest, angriest, stupidest, loudest deigo wop guinea greasemonkey mess of a mechanic, and I want to make babies with him (well, you know, metaphoric babies. Those kids would be dumb as nails). I met him right after we had both had awful breakups; Barney actually set that one up. We hit it off like firecrackers, instantly. That first night we were talking for all of ten minutes in a burlesque club, I had said something (hilarious, of course), he just stared in response for a second then physically dragged me downstairs to the bathroom, shoved me in, locked the door, and we made out like the world was ending. Anyway. He lives in his mom’s old apartment, she has since moved to Queens, but it’s comfy and decorated with tiny mirrors and baby pictures and then Fred’s motocross jumpsuits and spare bike parts. We make out like teenagers in the shower, I get fingerbanged within an inch of my life, splish splash, of course his dick doesn’t work as usual, he runs around the apartment screaming and shaking his little ween like it might give him an answer. We pass out, he’s got me in a headlock; thank CHRIST someone knows how to be the big spoon! When I try to get up for the toilet he pulls me back down and says Ginzo don’t sneak off you have to stay. He is sweet sometimes, and he knows how I like the disappearing act. We wake up, talk shit, coffee cigarettes computer, I ask if he’s up for a hump and he’s too hungover so I leave. I march past Bloomingdale’s to the subway, full of pride and good cheer. It’s finally starting to feel like Christmas.

And on and on and so forth, old bar Bushwick then new bar/home Strollerville, back out with the boys, there’s a blizzard!!, rinse repeat, PUMPS!!, and by that time I’m due on a plane with Barney, back to Vegas for Christmas, as both of our families live out there in the desert. The stir crazy hits maybe half an hour off the plane, sometime around lunch, and though I’m thrilled to see the family, relieved to get a vacation from my savage liver-rape and hunting, I realize that I just don’t exist as an actual human outside of the bar, that “So what have you been up to?” can’t be answered in polite company anymore. I look at my hand to see if it’s fading like Marty McFly’s at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, see that it’s solid, then try to reconcile my beautiful baby niece and my brother and the sister-in-law and the SUV outside in a strip mall parking lot. I desperately wish it felt like home, wish I felt like less of a stepsister. I miss Jules and Mikey so much it hurts.

Making dinner, making cookies, watching movies, wrapping presents. I feel that little voice inside, screaming for out, OUT!!!! I call Barney, we do the usual–three bars, a few drinks, he’s short. We give up for fear of the DUI, the mythical monster that the carless New Yorker cannot quite fathom. Same end of the night drill as in Brooklyn, go back to his (sister’s) house and watch movies, pass out in our clothes, I wake up feeling like a pufferfish, somehow it’s comforting. Barney drives me home. We make plans for the big post Christmas Saturday night on the town, we’re gonna get WASTED, get a room at a hotel to avoid dread DUI, and I try to figure how I can pick up tail despite little Barney as my wingman (if I don’t bang something soooon……). Ugh. And don’t you just know what happens next……

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! ELMOOOOO! TOYS!!! TELEVISION!!!!!!

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Written by Ciu Choo & Posted on August 15th, 2010
Tags :: drinking, memoir, sex

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The following is an excerpt from Turbulence:

After my shift at the restaurant downtown, I stepped into the empty parking lot and the door slammed behind me louder than all the plates I’d broken that night. I was a bad waitress.

I started walking to my car and felt the cool night air blow across my face. The breeze carried a whiff of garlic and oregano. Pulling the elastic off my ponytail, I let my hair fall and caress my shoulders. Pausing for a moment, I tipped my head back until it was almost parallel with the ground and stared at the shimmering sky, stars bright and mesmerizing.

When I began walking again, I heard footsteps behind me, hitting the pavement simultaneously with mine. My skin turned to gooseflesh. An overwhelming fear mixed with tension spread through my body.

My purse was slung over my shoulder and a blue apron tied around my waist held a lot of money in tips. Okay, a decent amount of money; I was, after all, a bad waitress.

I was afraid to look behind me and so continued moving, becoming more nervous with every breath. Searching my bag for my keys, I felt a small tube of lipstick, a brush, and to my surprise, a few pieces of lettuce. I checked the pocket in the front of my purse. No keys. My feet hit the concrete harder with each step and my hands shook like a plucked guitar string. I checked inside the bag again and finally felt cold metal in my palm.

The other person’s footsteps became louder, closer. After unlocking my car with the remote, I swung the door open and jumped into the driver’s seat. My heart throbbed as I started the engine of my Jetta and peeled out of the parking lot without looking back. Pushing the pedal to the floor, I sped down the street to the highway entrance.

After pulling into the right-hand lane, I began to loosen my grip on the steering wheel. I was driving slower than the speed limit of sixty-five miles per hour when two cars sped up the road behind me. One was driving much too close to my left, not letting the car behind me pass. I started breathing fast. The car behind me collided with my rear bumper, jolting my car forward and into the passenger side of the other vehicle. My car spun like a top and my hands squeezed the wheel.

The pressure from spinning pushed my back against the seat, fully extended my arms and caused my body to tighten. My car rammed into something and I heard another crash, felt another jolt, and then the right side of my car rose off the ground. I screamed.

“Oh, shit, holy shit.”

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. As the right side of my car rose up, the left side hit the ground. I covered my face with my hands as my body was flung to the left and my head bashed into the side window. Then my seat belt tightened and pulled me back.

Glass shattered everywhere. I felt my entire body turn upside down for a split second before being pushed into the window again. Everything was silent, and I had the sensation that I was falling.

I was. So was my car. It had flipped over the guardrail and was plummeting into a ditch between the north and southbound sides of the highway. I closed my eyes and held my breath. Seconds later, the driver’s side of my car smashed onto the ground.

Then, silence and darkness. I’m alive, I thought. I can’t believe it. My body was numb and all I could smell was burning rubber. In the light from my cell phone, I saw that my hands were covered in blood. Was I really injured but just couldn’t feel it yet?

What I could feel was a stinging sensation behind my left ear. I touched it and felt more blood. I realized then that I had to get out of the car.

I turned on the interior light, made sure my cell phone was in my pocket, and unlocked the doors. Because my car was still on its side, I had to grab onto the passenger door to pull myself up, and then stand on the side of the middle console to fling the door open. I couldn’t get it to stay propped, so I climbed farther up onto the side of the seat, and on bent knees pushed the door ajar and hopped out. Trees surrounded me. I saw the gray guardrail in the distance, and ran up the hill to the highway, as fast as my body would allow.

When I reached the top, I saw that the break down lane was clear. I couldn’t believe that the cars that had hit me didn’t have any damage. I was shocked that they had driven away and that no one else had pulled over. I screamed for help, but was alone.

I began to cry, and reached for my phone to call 911. When I looked up, I saw a woman running toward me, flailing her arms in the air.

“Are you all right?” she asked, but didn’t give me a chance to answer. “I saw what happened from a distance. I think the other cars just drove off and left you. I called 911,” she said. “They’re on their way. Was anyone else in your car?”

“No, just me.”

“I’m so glad that you are okay. An ambulance will be here any second,” she said.

I dialed Mom. “I was in an accident,” I said. “A bad one. My car flipped over.”

“Are you okay? Did you call an ambulance?” she asked.

“Someone did. I’m so scared.”

“I’ll be right there. Where are you?”

I told her where I was, and when I hung up the phone, I noticed that the woman I’d been talking to had disappeared. I stood alone by the guardrail, and heard the passing cars crush glass and other debris from the accident.

Finally, an orange and white ambulance stopped a few feet away. Two men jumped out and rushed over to me. I looked up at the stars that night one more time before stepping into the ambulance, still in shock that I was alive.

Mom arrived with Steven, my stepdad. I saw them through the steamy ambulance window and asked the EMT to open the door.

“Sorry, guys,” he said when he saw them. “There’s only room for one more.”

“I’ll go with her. Can you meet us there?” Mom asked Steven.

She hugged me and her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, Ash, I’m so sorry that this happened. You just can’t catch a break, can you?”

Before we left for the hospital, a police officer walked over.

“Lucky you had your seat belt on; otherwise, you may not have made it,” he said.

“She always wears her seat belt,” Mom said, smiling with only one cheek.

The ambulance ride seemed to take hours. I hated lying on the stretcher and wanted to sit upright. Each turn seemed tighter than normal and each stop abrupt. Every inch of my body ached.

Toward the end of the ride, it finally registered: I was on my way to a hospital. I hadn’t been to one for quite some time and never wanted to go back. I hated the smell, the food, and the memories. I’ll never forget that April in 2002, and all that had led up to it that year. Maybe it wasn’t just that year. It could’ve been my entire life creeping up on me like a bad dream.

Either way, it was a part of my past that I’d always wished I could change.

I left the hospital in one piece, but my entire body was bruised and sore. I had to get stitches behind my left ear. Each time the needle pricked my skin, a stinging pain would rush up my lower back and into my neck.

Almost as painful was when the nurse pulled the glass out of my hands. The shards reflected the hospital light, helping the nurse find them. With small tweezers, she parted my skin and removed the particles.

After all the glass was gone, the nurse stitched up my hands and wrists. I had only a few deep wounds, but the backs of my hands were badly scratched. The hundreds of tiny red cuts looked like streets on the map of a busy city.

I was anxious during the ride home, even though I was sitting in the back seat. I was certain that I’d need a break from driving for a while.

A few nights after my accident, I had a nightmare that prolonged my driving strike. In my dream, the crash happened the same way, except I didn’t survive. As I dreamt, I watched firefighters and police officers rescue me from my car with the Jaws of Life. I saw them carrying me out of the ditch on a stretcher, and watched Mom throw herself onto my lifeless body.

The nightmare skipped on to my funeral and I heard my brother, Joey, reading my eulogy: “My sister was always there for me. I miss her already. She was such a large part of our family’s foundation that without her, I’m afraid we may fall through the cracks.”

The nightmare ended with the vision of the newspaper headline the day after my accident: “Twenty-year-old female killed in hit-and-run crash.”

I knew that my fear would only grow the longer I put off driving, so one brisk morning, I sat behind the wheel and turned the key. Hearing the engine rev made my body quiver. I hesitated after taking my foot off the break, anxious about accelerating.

After taking a deep breath, I pushed the gas pedal. I felt as though I was driving again for the first time. Coasting along my street, I felt the smoothness of the road, saw sunlight peering through tree branches, and suddenly became comfortable again behind the wheel. I wasn’t ready for the highway yet, but knew I could work my way there.

That accident was not the first turbulence that my life had felt, and it wouldn’t be the last. As I reflect on my past, it shows itself in the form of a slide show, one image projected after another. Once one memory pops into place, another slides in and pushes the old one aside.

Ashley Troutman has a bachelor’s degree in Advertising and a master’s in fine arts from
Southern New Hampshire University. Ashley had the honor of acting as a graduate
assistant during her master’s program in 2008, and speaking at her commencement
ceremony in 2009. Currently, Ashley works as an editorial Assistant for Cambridge
Editors, as a reporter The Somerville News, and as a Feature Editor for The New Hampshire
Writer’s Project. Her writing credits include articles for CambridgeNewsWeekly.com,
The Queen City Examiner, Demand Studios, and Loudbus.com.

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Written by Uncategorized & Posted on August 9th, 2010

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Today we bring you a story dealing with some of the difficulties of adolescence from one of our occasional editors.

The Art of Raising Healthy Children

Ethan Treadwell stood in the dark paneled elevator of his family’s apartment building and pressed the number 6. Somewhere in the bowels of the building the mechanism hummed to life. Ethan felt a surge of relief as the elevator lurched and began to rise. Another day and he still hadn’t managed to break the thing. Maybe, he thought hopefully as he examined his blurred reflection in the shiny polished walls, he had actually lost a little weight.

Ethan’s confidence was immediately diminished when the elevator doors opened to the mirrored foyer of his family’s apartment. His reflection here wasn’t distorted and falsely flattering like it appeared in the shiny brushed brass doors of the elevator—surrounded by mirrors, it was crystal clear that he was an unequivocal fatass.

His mother, summoned by the ding of the elevator, appeared in the foyer. Her frowning face was reflected in profile on both sides. Her face was rather stiff from whatever bacteria or placentas or whatever she had injected into it or smeared on to it, making her frown less severe than it was a few years ago, when Ethan first started blimping out. But he could tell she was displeased by the look in her eyes. That hadn’t changed.

“Ethan,” she said sharply. “Why didn’t you take the steps? You’re supposed to as part of your health goals.”

Ethan shrugged and muttered “Sorry, I was tired,” then shuffled off to the kitchen.

“Never too tired to eat,” his mother observed as he opened the refrigerator.

“I had a long day at school mom, I need a snack,” he said, grabbing for a box of crackers.

“No,” she said, yanking it from his hands, “You know the rules. Fruits and veggies only.” She pulled out a baggie of baby carrots and celery and arranged them artfully on a plate. With an air of self-satisfaction, she presented it to her son, who was slumped in defeat on a counter stool. Ethan didn’t know what reason she had to take pride in the food, other than the fact that she had paid for it. His nanny, Luella, who was now at ballet practice with his little sister, Lisle, was the one who actually went to the grocery store and picked the stuff up, and she had cut and bagged all of his snack portions to his mother’s specifications. It was Luella who did most of the hard work around here. Not that selling art wasn’t hard. Ethan’s mother reminded him of what a hard job she had all the time.

In fact, she was yammering on about it as Ethan absently gnawed on a celery stick. “I’ve got some people coming over tonight,” she said. “That’s why I came home from the gallery early. To make sure the girl gets everything clean.” She peered over Ethan’s head into the dining room, where a caramel-skinned young woman joylessly polished the black lacquer table. Ethan’s mother glanced at her watch. “You better hurry,” she clucked at the girl. “You’ve still got to vacuum the living room again before they get here at 7:00.”

Before Ethan knew it his snack was gone. It had been utterly unsatisfying. His stomach growled as he looked intently at his empty plate, as if willing a cupcake to appear there. His mother cleared her throat, breaking his hunger spell. “Do you have a lot of homework?” she asked. He shook his head. “Well maybe we can move the DVD player into your room for the evening,” she suggested.

“What for?” he asked. The den was where he spent most of his evenings in front of the tv. His mom didn’t want him vegging out unsupervised. Besides, he was supposed to log one hour of treadmill time for every hour of tv he watched, and the treadmill was in the den. It was easier to just do both at the same time. But then, it would be nice not to have to if only for a night.

“We can move the treadmill into your room, too,” said his mom, as if reading his deviant thoughts.

“Why do you want me to stay in my room so badly?” Ethan asked, but he knew the answer.

His mother knew he knew it, too. “I have very important people coming over tonight, Ethan,” she said. “And I don’t want to give them the wrong impression.”

“Wrong impression about what? About me?”

“No . . .”

“I don’t know what wrong impression they could get. I’m fat.”

“No!” his mother cried. “Not fat. Temporarily overweight. You will shed those pounds yet, honey.” She cradled his chubby face in her well-manicured hands. “And you will be so handsome. But until then . . .”

Ethan jerked away from her. “Until then what? Stay locked up in my room so I can’t scare the guests?”

“First impressions are very important,” his mother said. “And these people are German. Unforgiving.”

Ethan had no idea what that meant. That Germans were intolerant of obese American teenagers? They couldn’t possibly be anymore intolerant than his own mother. “Whatever,” Ethan said aloud, and went off to his room. He didn’t really want to be at his mother’s little party anyway. It was just the principle of the thing.

“Turn off that vacuum,” he heard his mother calling to the maid. “You have to move the treadmill into Ethan’s room.”

Hours later, Ethan clicked on the tv in his room and instinctively stepped on the treadmill and started trudging slowly along on the machine. He stopped a moment later when he realized how ridiculous it was for him to do it when he was, for once, blissfully unmonitored. Besides, it wasn’t like he had many calories to burn off from today. He had finished a bland dinner of grilled, unsalted chicken with boiled vegetables with Lisle and Luella about an hour ago, and had been holed up in his room ever since. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself thinner so he could emerge from his cocoon a handsome young man. But unlike his mother, who really seemed to believe that would happen someday, Ethan didn’t think he’d ever look the least bit acceptable, no matter how hard he tried.

Something sweet would make him feel better. He had seen the caterer bringing a cake earlier, so he decided to risk emerging from his room to get some. He tried to tiptoe quietly down the hall to the kitchen but the floor still squeaked conspicuously. Luckily, his mother and her guests were too occupied to notice. Ethan heard their loud laughter and tinkling glasses coming from the living room. It sounded as if his mother had made a good first impression after all.

In the kitchen, a young woman with bright red hair stood staring blankly at an abstract painting on the wall above the breakfast nook. Her utilitarian-looking black button up blouse and pants made it clear she must be a server, not a guest. She gave a tiny yelp and threw her hand to her chest when she noticed Ethan lurking in the doorway. Unfortunately, he was quite accustomed to being a terrifying presence.

“Yikes, you scared me,” she laughed. “You must be Ethan, right?”

He nodded. “She told you about me?” he asked, an edge of hope in his voice.

“No,” she said. She nodded toward the fridge. “I’ve been reading your healthy eating plan.”

Ethan blushed deeply. He had forgotten that was hanging on the fridge for everyone to see, including pretty caterers. Why must he be humiliated in front of the help? “Shouldn’t you be serving drinks or something?” he groused as he shuffled to the island.

The redhead shrugged. “They don’t drink much,” she said. “They’re German.”

That explanation still meant nothing to Ethan. He eyed the ¾ of chocolate cake on the counter greedily.

“I didn’t mean to freak out when you came in,” the redhead said. “It’s just that painting . . . pretty grotesque for kitchen décor.” It was true. The painting portrayed a matador slaying a bull. Blood spurted from the animal and dominated the canvas. Provocative, Ethan’s mother would call it. He was used to her decorating their apartment with provocative pieces of art. After eating breakfast under the bloody mess every morning for a few years, he was no longer provoked by it. “How do you eat around that?” the caterer asked, wrinkling her nose.

“I manage,” Ethan said, and she laughed. He blushed again. He couldn’t help but notice that the caterer looked a little bit like an older version of Jenny McGraw, a very cute girl in his class whom he couldn’t help but have a bit of a crush on, even though their interaction was limited to Jenny looking at him distastefully when he passed her in the hall.

“You’re a good sport, you know that?” the caterer said. “I mean . . . it seems like things must be pretty intense around here.” She cocked her head in the direction of the living room, from which a loud, fake-sounding peal of laughter from his mother was emanating.

Ethan saw the sympathy in her big brown eyes. It made him angry. Why must he always be pitied? If he wasn’t being pitied, he was being chastised. He suddenly regretted emerging from his room. He just wanted to be left alone. But he wasn’t leaving the kitchen without a reward. Pity should at least get him that. “Can you cut me a piece of cake?” he asked, keeping his voice low so there was no chance of his mother overhearing.

The redhead’s expression changed to worry. “I don’t know . . .” she said, her eyes drifting toward the eating plan on the fridge. Ethan sighed in resignation, knowing there was probably no way to convince her to give him the cake since she was getting paid by his mother. “How old are you?” the caterer asked sharply.

“Thirteen.”

“Then why are you asking me to cut you a piece of cake? I’m sure you’re capable of cutting it yourself. The knife is right there.”

Ethan gulped, even more ashamed now. Why had he asked? Because he was so used to other people controlling his portions. If the redhead had cut the cake, it would have absolved him of the consequences. But she wasn’t letting him off so easily.

“Your sister is younger than you and she managed to cut her own piece,” she said.

“Lisle had some?”

The redhead nodded, fingering the knife handle mockingly. Ethan couldn’t decide if he hated her or was falling in love with her. All he knew is that the longer he remained in the kitchen, the more chance there was of his mother discovering him there.

“Fine,” Ethan said, and grabbed the knife. The redhead averted her eyes as he cut a conservative slice.

“I didn’t see a thing,” she said, gazing above the breakfast nook again. “I was too distracted by this painting.”

As Ethan retreated toward the hallway with his cake wrapped in napkin, he noticed something strange in the foyer. A colorful sculpture of some sort was sitting on a pedestal where a flower arrangement had been earlier. “What’s that?” he blurted.

“It’s made of candy,” the redhead said. “By the artist your mom is entertaining. If I only knew I could have sold my Halloween candy in a gallery for thousands of dollars, I would have taken trick or treat a little more seriously.”

She chuckled as Ethan hurried down the hallway. Trick or treat had always been a sore subject with him. Coming up with a good, not to mention figure-flattering costume, wasn’t worth it when he didn’t even get to keep the spoils. Plus, most of the people in his building didn’t give out anything much better than trail mix, anyway. Nothing like those multitudes of mini snickers and Mary Janes and starlight mints he had seen multiplied in the foyer mirrors.

Ethan decided to eat his cake in the playroom, where he ate many of his meals with Lisle and Luella. Any errant crumbs wouldn’t be of much concern there, but if he made the least bit of mess in his bedroom, he feared his rogue cake consumption could be discovered. He was pretty sure his mother paid extra for the maids to report on such things.

When he entered the playroom, Lisle was there, her leotard-covered leg propped on an overstuffed vinyl arm chair with a garish geometric print. Blocky, boldly colored figures painted by one of his mother’s artist friends danced across the walls. Of all the rooms in the apartment, the playroom was most neglected. Its décor was several years out of date and a little babyish, having been customized for a much younger Ethan and Lisle. One of the most unique features of the room was the hamster holes: two short tunnels built into the west wall that led to the children’s respective bedrooms. Ethan hadn’t been small enough to comfortably use his hamster hole for quite some time.

“Hey,” Ethan greeted his sister as he plopped down at a checkerboard printed table to enjoy his cake.

“Hey,” she said, looking at his cake disdainfully as she stretched her other leg. “Mom’s gonna love that,” she scoffed as she folded her body into a position that looked truly painful.

“You had a piece, too,” Ethan pointed out, his mouth full.

“Yeah, but my metabolism is much faster than yours. And besides, I’ve danced for like, five hours today. That’s got to be enough to burn off those calories.” Her voice sounded slightly frantic. But Ethan wasn’t worried that Lisle would tell on him. Her perfect physique already put her in good standing with their mother that she felt no need to put down her brother. If anything, she protected him. Despite their common devotion to exercise, Lisle seemed to hate their mother a little bit. Ethan didn’t fully understand it, but then, he had never been a 12 year old girl.

Lisle pranced around the room a bit more while Ethan devoured his cake. She stopped only when a pop song blared forth from her bedroom. “My phone,” she said. “Gotta get that.” She scurried into her hamster hole, her bony spandex-covered butt disappearing as she crawled down the tunnel.

Ethan savored his last bites of chocolate goodness. The risk had been worth it.

Later that night, Ethan was startled awake when he heard a familiar voice.

“Where should I put it?”

It was the redhead.

Her voice was coming from the playroom. He propped himself up and peered through the hamster hole next to his bed to see what was going on.
“Over here,” said his mother. She and the redhead were setting the candy sculpture down on to the checkered table. “Careful,” his mother instructed.
“Don’t worry, I understand these are priceless Good and Plentys,” the redhead joked. “Willy Wonka’s masterpiece.”

When the sculpture was in place, Ethan’s mother rung her hands and looked at it critically. Meanwhile, the redhead studied the walls. Above a hard plastic rocking chair by the window hung a framed portrait of Ethan’s mother cradling him as an infant. The redhead took it in and cocked her head quizzically. “Is that your mother?” she asked.

Ethan’s mother stopped marveling at her new piece and whirled around, a dark look on her face. “That’s me,” she said coldly.

Ethan had to suppress a snicker. He saw the pale caterer go even paler and hoped she had already been paid. If not, she had just talked herself out of a tip.

But he could understand her confusion—his mother did look entirely different a decade or so ago than she did now. Older. The redhead started to say something apologetic but Ethan’s mother cut her off.

“Shhh,” she hissed. She gestured toward the west wall. “My children.”

The redhead’s eyes grew wide when she saw the hamster holes. Ethan sunk back onto his bed before she could spot him staring at her through the tunnel.

The next morning when Ethan woke up, the redhead’s face was the first thing that popped into his head. Then the candy sculpture. Was that a dream? he wondered. But when he plodded down the hall on his way to breakfast, he cautiously poked his head into the playroom. He gasped when he saw the sculpture there on the checkerboard table. So it had all been real. And now that sculpture was there. Waiting. Tempting him. The thought of a few Mary Janes to cover up the cardboard taste of his daily oat bran was heavenly.

Ethan was about to move toward the sculpture when suddenly fear washed over him. It took him a second to realize it was brought on by the scent of his mother’s perfume. A moment later she brushed up against him on her way to the kitchen. “Time for breakfast honey!” she announced with a little clap. Before pulling himself away from the playroom Ethan noticed that the picture of her holding him was gone.

In the kitchen, Luella greeted him with a kiss on his forehead and a bowl of oat bran doused in watery gray skim milk with sliced strawberries on top. He mumbled his thanks. At least she tried to make it look nice. It wasn’t her fault it tasted like garbage.

Lisle sat in the breakfast nook under the bloody matador painting, looking like she’d gladly take the bull’s place on that spear rather than choke down another bowl of oat bran.

Meanwhile, their mother swanned around the kitchen in a severe looking suit and shiny snakeskin stilettos, sipping coffee and tapping out messages on her blackberry.

“Mom, do I have to eat this?” Lisle whined.

“Yes, honey,” their mother answered without looking up. “The healthy eating plan, remember?”

“That’s for Ethan, not me,” Lisle protested. “Just because he’s fat doesn’t mean I should have to be on a diet, too.”

“It’s not a diet,” their mother insisted, typing furiously. “It’s good for you.”

“If breakfast is so good for you, why don’t you ever eat any?” Lisle asked, flopping against the booth and crossing her arms defiantly.

Their mother finally looked up and shot Luella a pleading, can’t you do something about this look, but the nanny was absorbed in the newspaper.
Ethan’s mother finally uttered an exasperated noise and said “I don’t eat breakfast because I don’t have time for it, Lisle. Just like I don’t have time for this conversation.”

“Well fine then, I don’t have time for it either,” Lisle spat, and stormed back to her bedroom.

Ethan’s mother pursed her lips and glanced after Lisle, then at the clock above the microwave. “Impossible girl,” she muttered, then took another large swig of coffee.

Ethan was grateful he didn’t have those kinds of fights with his mom. Then again, she rarely engaged with him on a terribly human level. Probably, he guessed, because she didn’t see him as a real person. Just a fat kid waiting to turn into one.

“Ethan,” she said as she gathered her things together and put them in a large handbag, “I’m sure you noticed the new addition to the playroom.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Amazing isn’t it? Hans brought it along last night. I wasn’t expecting it. What a fabulous surprise!”

“Are those real candies?” Ethan asked. He still hadn’t had a chance to check it out up close.

“Yes, all real. But don’t get any ideas.” She laughed as she slung her bag over her shoulder. “It won’t be here for long. It will be transported to the gallery for the new show at the end of the week. Until then it needs to stay just as it is. Do you understand?”

Ethan blushed. It was as if she had read his thoughts, picked up on his secret wish to devour every York Peppermint patty and reeses and kit kat on the thing. But of course he’d never actually do it. Ruining a piece of her art would be a huge mistake. Ethan learned that about two years ago, when he tripped over a 3D sculpture she had installed on a portion of the living room floor and wall. He had broken a piece of it off in his fall and his mother was livid. She paid an exorbitant price to have it professionally repaired, only to have it broken again at Thanksgiving when Ethan’s grandmother tripped over it.

Unfortunately Grandma broke her hip, too. His mother had the sculpture removed after that. Ethan was glad. Besides the obvious hazards it posed, it didn’t look very nice. It reminded him of little vertical clusters of turds.

“Ethan, do you understand?” his mother said again. He nodded and swallowed another bland spoonful of cereal. “Good,” she said. “Maybe you’d better stay out of the playroom. Did you hear that, Luella?”

“Yes ma’am,” Luella said.

“Get Lisle to finish that cereal before she leaves for school,” Ethan’s mother said before stepping into the elevator and waving goodbye.

On the way back to his room to get dressed for school, Ethan couldn’t resist another peek at the sculpture. Of all the art his mother brought to their home, he couldn’t deny that this was provocative.

Ethan’s mind was on the candy sculpture all day. During algebra, images of smarties and liquorice snaked through his mind. He wanted to decimate that sculpture and work himself into the most serious sugar high possible. He imagined eating the candy with the redheaded caterer. The thought nearly made him salivate.

Ethan was so lost in his thoughts that he was taken completely aback when Jenny McGraw approached him in the hall. “Ethan!” she said sharply, sounding upset. He stopped and stared at her perfectly freckled face.

“Is your sister okay?” Jenny asked, just as if they spoke to each other all the time.

Ethan’s jaw dropped open. “I don’t . . .”

Jenny did an impatient little stomp. “Lisle! She’s in my dance class. She fainted yesterday. Is she okay?”

“I . . . I didn’t know,” Ethan stammered, recalling Lisle’s energetic dance through the playroom last night. Was Jenny just messing with him? Was this some kind of fat kid joke? Most people didn’t even know that he and Lisle were related since they didn’t go to the same school, but he wouldn’t put it past someone to use his sister against him if they found out.

But Jenny looked genuinely surprised that he didn’t know. “Really?” she asked, cocking her head to the side and scrunching up her freckle-sprinkled nose. “Well it’s like the second time it’s happened.”

Ethan continued staring at Jenny blankly. Finally she said, “Well, just tell her I hope she feels better, alright?” and swished away.

Ethan wondered if his mother knew about this. For the rest of the day, the thought of his sister’s mysterious fainting spell niggled at the corner of his brain, which was already plagued with images of candy wrappers in every color of the rainbow.

When Ethan got back to the apartment that day, nobody was home. He guessed Luella was disregarding his mother’s warning to guard the candy sculpture from him with her life. Either that or she was carting Lisle to or from dance class. Taking a deep breath and feeling secure in the emptiness of the house, Ethan approached the door to the playroom. He knew he shouldn’t be near it, especially alone. His mother was right about him. He was driven crazy by thoughts of that thing. How could she deny him the pleasure of candy—hot pretzels—greasy slices of pizza—ice cream (and no, the Tasty Delite she approved of was not an acceptable substitute)—and expect him to be able to control himself around this thing? That was his problem anyway, right? No self-control? Never mind every freaking day when he restrained himself from screaming at everyone at school, in the streets, at home, at HER: Stop thinking you’re better than me.

Her. She wasn’t here to watch him, so screw her. With great purpose, Ethan reached out, and grabbed the knob of the playroom door, and turned.
The door was locked. With a cry of despair, he collapsed in a heap on the hallway floor, paying no mind when a vase rolled off a nearby table and smashed on to the floor. As Ethan slumped in defeat against the wall, the adrenaline surging through him slowly drained.

Eventually, it got darker, and still nobody came home. Ethan considered pillaging the refrigerator, but the thought of hummus, Pellegrino, yesterday’s cold grilled chicken breasts, or his old friends the organic baby carrots, had little appeal. He picked himself up off the floor and went to his bedroom. Through the hamster hole, he could make out the candy sculpture in the dark playroom, the wrappers glinting as wedges of light from outside shone in through the shuttered windows.

At some point, Ethan drifted off to sleep. He was awakened by insistent clicking of his mother’s high heels in the hallway. The digital clock on his nightshade glowed 10:28. The clicking ceased for a moment, and he heard her curse. She must have found the broken vase. “Lu—“ she started, then stopped when she realized the nanny wasn’t there. Ethan guessed his mother had probably sent Luella out for groceries, as she often did at this hour. He heard his mom click back down the hall and rummage around the kitchen, probably for a broom and dustpan, which would not be easy for her to find. He recalled she had trouble locating it back during the turd sculpture incident last Thanksgiving.

“Paul!” she called, but that call was unanswered too. More muffled curses. Ethan’s father, Paul, was home even less often than his mother. Ethan listened to the tinkling sounds of his mother cleaning up the glass and suddenly he felt wide awake.

He remembered, years ago, before his weight ballooned, his parents would sometimes bring him and Lisle to parties. From the 27th floor terrace of their friends’ apartment on Central Park South, he always noticed an especially ornate narrow building towering over the others on the east side of the park. Between the eaves of the peaked roof was a small, round window. Ethan and Lisle would amuse each other by making up stories about a crippled boy who lived in the tower and looked out of that round window at them on the terrace, wishing he could join them. Ethan felt like that boy now. He felt lonely.
He had a sudden urge to see if Lisle remembered the little crippled boy in the tower, too. He peeked through the hamster hole to the playroom to see if there was any chance she was still up. She could often be found in the playroom late at night, practicing her dance moves. Ethan would hear her thumping and huffing in exertion, sometimes knocking into a piece of furniture as she twirled around in the dark. When it was late, she kept the playroom light off so that it wouldn’t wake him when it shone through his hamster hole.

She wasn’t in there now, but Ethan couldn’t help but notice there was something off with the sculpture. The shadows it cast on the wall were . . . less substantial somehow. Ethan leaned in further, and saw, to his alarm, that there were shiny candy wrappers all over the floor. His head swam. Is She still up? was his first thought. But all was quiet in the hallway. His mother must have finished sweeping up the pieces of the broken vase and was probably now in bed, reading, alone.

Ethan held his breath and remained focused on the candy sculpture, and then, suddenly, to his surprise, he realized that his body was halfway in the playroom. For a second he froze in panic, terrified that his lower half was stuck in the hamster hole, and envisioning a painful and humiliating extraction with his mother looking on with disappointment.

But no, that nightmare was not to be. Because with only a little bit of wiggling, Ethan managed to slide out of the hamster hole on his own. He lowered himself to the floor and exhaled. He felt elated. It had been so long since he had been thin enough to fit through the hamster hole, ages since he had even tried. Maybe he wasn’t as fat as he feared. Maybe he never was. When was the last time he tried to fit though the passage anyway?

Ethan’s glee was muted when he saw the decimated candy sculpture before him. Someone had savagely torn the candies from their wire base and consumed them, leaving wrappers and chocolate crumbles all over the floor. All that was left on the sculpture were some Mike n Ikes, Good and Plentys, and Lifesavers which appeared to be glued together sans wrappers, and therefore probably inedible. Who could have done this? Ethan wondered incredulously. For a brief, terrifying moment he considered the possibility that he might have even done the damage himself and then somehow blocked it from his mind. But no—he was starving, as usual. If he had actually gone into a candy-eating trance, there was no way he would feel this hungry.
But his appetite was quickly waning as he thought of his mother’s reaction to this. Of course he would be the prime suspect. If not him, who? Was it common for thieves to break into upper east side apartments, consume the art, then leave?

As Ethan’s head swam with unlikely possibilities, he heard a noise coming from his sister’s bedroom. It sounded like she was crying hysterically.
“Lisle?” he whispered through the hamster hole, but there was no response. He took a deep breath and launched himself through the tunnel. Again, he made it through, just barely, and squirmed out into Lisle’s dark room. A sliver of light shone through from under her bathroom door. Ethan could hear her gasping and wondered if she was sick. Maybe on the verge of one of her fainting spells that Jenny seemed so worried about. He knocked softly and tentatively on the door, still mindful of not waking his mother.

“Go away, Ethan,” she said, her voice tearful.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. None of your business. Just leave me alone.”

“Lisle, the candy sculpture is gone. Do you know anything about that?”

There was silence on the other side of the door. Then a phlegmy-sounding laugh. Without thinking, Ethan opened the door, which Lisle must not have been expecting him to do. She quickly flushed the toilet, but not before Ethan caught sight of the colorful swirls of partially digested candy disappearing down the drain. And in front of the toilet kneeled his sister, blotchy faced and wearing a vomit-stained leotard.

Lisle looked up at him with resignation in her bloodshot eyes. “I just needed a snack,” she said, and shrugged. And Ethan thought, sadly, it was the first time in a long time he really understood his sister.

Julie Tibbott is a children’s book editor who lives in New York City.

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Written by Julie Tibbot & Posted on June 8th, 2010
Tags :: addiction, adolescence, oppression, teen

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In time for mother’s day, we bring you a story about the long shadows a mom can cast.
 

The Big C

When Karlene started crying in the middle of a massage, she figured it was all over. She’d fought the battle for thirty-two years and never had a victory and so it was time to call it quits. Her tears soaked into the hole-in-the-middle pillow her face was stuck into, so the therapist would never have known she was crying if her shoulders hadn’t begun to shake. He hesitated, one hand fully buried in her crotch, the other stilled in its slow stroke of her buttocks.

She found the therapist in the classifieds, under the Alternative Lifestyles section:

ECSTACY
Experienced WPM, massage therapist, will provide tense
females with pleasurable and very intimate massage. Clean,
safe, and guaranteed to please. Confidentiality respected.

Intimate massage was something she’d never tried and so she called and set up an appointment. But now, lying face down in this dark room, her body naked on a flexible table, this man’s hands relaxing her muscles and his fingers slipping into the most private of places, she knew the Big C was still a mystery. And she knew there was just nothing left to try.

The therapist removed his hands and whispered into her ear. “Karlene? Is anything wrong? Am I hurting you?”

“No,” she said to the floor. “No, I’m fine. I just know it’s not going to happen, that’s all.”

She watched his white sneakers through the hole in the pillow. He shuffled closer to her head. She smelled herself on his fingers as he leaned on the table. “Happen?” he said.

Karlene closed her eyes. “You know. It’s hard for me to…Reach.”

He exhaled and then his hands were on her shoulders, gently rolling the muscles. “It’ll be okay. Just relax. Why don’t you flip over and let me work on your front?”

So she did, settling her arms against her sides where he placed them. When his fingers slid inside again, and then she felt the warm slip of his tongue, she fell and relaxed onto what was an old familiar uphill path.

Her husband, after ten years of marriage, liked to call her Old Faithful. He listened, he said, for her quickly sighed “Oh!” and watched for the little squirt of fluid that indicated her orgasm. Then he felt free to finish himself off before rolling beside her to sleep.

She told Graham ten years ago it wasn’t enough. She told him for five years, and then gave up. She was willing to have her little eruption at least once a week at his request, but he just couldn’t understand how there had to be more to it.

And there had to be. She knew it. The Big C. The Climax. Reaching the Top. Careening into the Abyss. They were all there, all wonderful vivid descriptions in the books her parents kept hidden for years on the floor of their closet. Books that she discovered when she was six years old and that she read whenever her parents were out of the house. The titles and authors changed frequently, though there were a few dog-eared torn-cover favorites. She began to understand the contents when she was around ten years old. And then she started to listen outside her parents’ door late at night.

They echoed the books. “Oh!” her mother trilled. “Oh, Henry, I’m on the edge! I’m on the edge! Oh, push me over, baby! Oh, I’m reach – I’m reach – I’m Reaching!” And then she fell off into a muffled gabbling and the only thing Karlene could figure was that her father covered her mother’s mouth with his hand to keep her cries from waking their daughter. Who was supposed to be peacefully sleeping across the hall, not crouched outside the bedroom door.

Her father called out too, in a guttural voice reminiscent of when he pushed the lawn mower up and down the ditch. “Take it!” he growled. “Take it all the way, baby! Goddamn, milk it…Oh! Yes!” And he was never muffled. He was too busy muffling Karlene’s mom, who was Reaching.

When the moans and groans turned to soft and satisfied snores, Karlene crept back to her room where she touched herself and thought about these things and dreamed of the Big C. Her own ministrations never seemed to compare to those glorious pages, to the blending of her parents’ sex-soaked voices.

“Oh!” she sighed now on the therapist’s table and she pumped her little geyser against the man’s tongue, felt him lap her up.

“There,” he said, straightening, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “See? I told you. You did fine.”

She noticed the damp spot on the zipper line of his jeans. Quickly, she tucked a sheet around her body and then slid into his bathroom to dress. When she left, she overpaid him by fifteen dollars. But she dodged making another appointment. If he’d given her the Big C, she’d have tipped a hundred and made an appointment for the next day.

But there was no Big C to be found, apparently. At least, not for her. Just for other women. For women like her mother. Who were married to men like her father.

****

The books were all she had left of her parents, other than her memories of all those nights spent huddled in the dark hallway. She kept the books hidden in her own closet now, a closet she didn’t even share with her husband. When she got home from the massage therapist’s, she knelt by her open closet door and took inventory of all the phrases that haunted her, that pushed her to become more than Old Faithful.

“Baby, I’m coming like a mack truck!” bellowed one blonde character.

Another drenched her lover’s penis in a gallon of fluid and claimed she vibrated like a train against the tracks of his love.

There were a lot of train references and Karlene often found herself hypnotized when she was stuck at a railroad crossing. What kind of power was in those engines, she wondered, that could make a woman writhe and blaspheme every god known to man?

There were roller coaster references too and hills and dark caves and deep, forever pulsing black holes.

With all this ecstasy in black and white, sandwiched between covers ripe with bare-breasted women and slack-jawed men, her simple geyser left her only sighing and wanting much more. There had to be more. She wanted to be lifted out of her body on a pleasure so intense, the afterglow would last for days. When she lived at home, she couldn’t remember a single morning where her mother didn’t smile, her father didn’t hum. Most mornings now, all Karlene did was drink coffee. Graham, her husband, kissed her cheek and left for work.

The Big Climax. The Big C. Some people, she knew, called it the Big O. Others thought the Big C was cancer. But for her, the Big C was that intangible thing that made her parents, her mother in particular, call out in a voice that was different from any other voice. Her mother never used that voice to call Karlene to dinner. She never used that voice to say goodnight, to tell Karlene she loved her. That voice was reserved for when an internal tidal wave hit and forced her vocal chords to swell to a new dimension.

And Karlene wanted to trill. She wanted to teeter on The Edge. She wanted to Reach.

Stored in the closet behind her parents’ books was an entire F.A.O. Schwartz of sex toys. Karlene visited her local porn shop so often, the clerks knew her by name. She never told them her problem, her desire, but she guessed that they knew from the way they rushed to show her whatever new contraption was flying off the shelves that week. She had vibrators for every orifice in her body, and some that could plug two or more at the same time. Some were large, others small enough to fit in her wallet, some rotated, others came with special attachments and accessories. There were videos, which she employed sometimes with the vibrators. And there was an inflatable man, but he didn’t do anything that her husband couldn’t do. There was even a leather harness that hung from a special hook in the ceiling. It had cushioned loops that fit over her arms and legs, a waistband to support her back, and allowed her to be suspended in any vulnerable position for Graham to plunder. It came with a Pleasure Guarantee. Graham worked an entire Sunday afternoon to install it, even ignoring football games. The hook now held a cascading Boston fern. But Karlene never returned the harness. It did provide pleasure. Just not the one she was looking for. Even suspended from the ceiling, Karlene could only gasp her “Oh!” and spout. It was no different than when she was under the covers, in the dark, in the missionary position.

Karlene thought of her massage, of a strange man’s tongue cat-licking her. But that was nothing unusual, really. She had sex for the first time when she was twelve, as she was driven home from a babysitting job by a father. She had men and women, old and young, married and single and in groups. Her response was the usual. I belong, she thought as she sat at the closet, in Yellowstone. For a moment, she pictured herself naked and straddled over the real Old Faithful. It would be like masturbating with a million hell-hot whirlpool jets. She wondered if she could sneak into the park at night, or obtain special permission from a randy forest ranger. She would let him watch.

Then she let the image go. It was time, she realized, to let the whole damn thing go. For whatever reason, her body was not like her mother’s, able to open itself to a pleasure that made the walls of skin and conscious thought fall away. And there was no lover like her father, able to pull that beast within her out of hiding. If she even had a beast. She probably didn’t. Graham was a good enough lover, really. She wondered if he’d be different if he didn’t use a riding lawn mower. He needed to sweat.

After fetching an empty box from the garage, she began to pack away all of her books and toys and videos. As she folded the lid, she felt the last bit of her sexual self soak up her private moisture. The geyser went dry.

****

The next Saturday, Graham made his usual move. Karlene shoved his hand away. “What?” he said. “Do you have your period?”

“No, I’m just not in the mood.”

He laughed. “Oh, the hard to get game, huh?” His fingers tickled her thighs. “C’mon, baby, open up for Papa.”

“Graham!” She kicked, then rolled herself into a cocoon of sheets and blanket. “I mean it.” She felt the twitch between her legs, but she tried to ignore it.

Graham hovered over her. Though it was dark, she could feel him. He ran his hand lightly over her blanketed body. “Hon?” he said. “Are you feeling okay? You’ve never said no before.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re too young for menopause, right?”

She sighed. “Yes, forty-two is too young for menopause. I just don’t want to, okay? I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s just not worth it.”

Graham’s hand froze over her hip. Then he let out a faint whimper and pushed away. Karlene released some of her covers so he could make a protective cocoon of his own. She felt bad, she knew this was a puncture to his manhood, but there was nothing she could do. She pulled her pillow over her head and tried to sleep.

****

It took Graham about a month to leave her alone. During that time, he found her box of gadgets in the basement. When he confronted her, she said she didn’t need them anymore. He begged her to go to the doctor for a check-up, but she refused. She was healthy, she said, just unable to achieve the Big C.

“Is that what this is about?” he said, setting the carton at his feet. “Karlene, you do have the Big C. You climax each and every time. Sometimes more than once.”

“But not the way –“ she said and stopped. She learned early in their relationship not to mention her observation of her parents’ sex life. She remembered the way his face looked the first time she told him about them, the way his eyes popped like bubblegum and his cheeks turned the red of cherries. “You listened to your parents have sex?” he’d said, his voice high and the s’s sharp and accusing. So now she finished her sentence with,

“Not the way I should.”

“Karlene, doesn’t it feel good?”

“Sure.”

“So?”

“Just not good enough.”

He left the room. He began spending his evenings in front of the television set, watching whatever was on, and mumbling unintelligibly. She thought of offering him the videos, but then figured he already knew where they were.

****

On Monday mornings, Karlene’s alarm went off a couple hours after Graham’s. She normally got up early to work out at the gym, but on Mondays, she gave herself some time off. Her sleep was always heavy, at least while she was allowing herself to have sex, and so she used an old-fashioned clanging alarm clock, a gold Big Ben with a black face, that sounded like a fire alarm and vibrated her whole dresser. Since the sex boycott started, her sleep was fitful and she was often up before the alarm went off. But about six weeks into it, Karlene fell into a deep sleep after Graham left for work. Her dream twisted erotic. The massage therapist was supine on the floor beneath her, vigorously rubbing her shoulders and back as she hung in the leather harness. Graham’s hands clenched her buttocks and his tongue rolled up and down her clitoris, which was suddenly as big and purple as a grape popsicle.

Then her alarm went off. Clanging furiously, the clock vibrated on the dresser with a machine gun staccato and Karlene’s arm shot out to stop it. But her hand grasped its face by mistake and the vibration caused a jolt to run up her arm. She opened her eyes and felt the jolt zap from her shoulder to her midsection and down and she suddenly became very wet. Big Ben demanded attention and without even thinking about it, she swept him off the dresser and pressed him against her crotch.

The clock rang against her entire vulval area and the upraised letters spelling out Big Ben near the golden twelve rubbed against her clitoris which felt as big and purple as in her dream. Karlene’s voice joined in the chime and she felt herself rock and suddenly her geyser became a broken dam, the massive Hoover Dam, and she vibrated with the current of rapids.

Shaken, Karlene’s thumb moved through her matted pubic hair to find the button to switch the clock off. Even when it fell silent, the waves of pleasure slid through her like aftershocks. When she felt herself come back into her body again, she pulled the clock away. She had to dry it on the sheets.

Oh my God, Karlene thought. She held the clock briefly between her breasts and she felt its tick against her skin. When she returned it to its spot on the dresser, she discovered she was starving. She decided to take herself out to breakfast and then shop. She needed to get a few more alarm clocks, just in case Big Ben broke down. Or rusted out.

****

Graham wasn’t so sure about incorporating a clock into their lovemaking, but even he had to admit there was a difference. After the deluge (she allowed Graham to hold the clock when they were together at night), Graham slid into her easily and she was more than happy to experience her familiar geyser as a side benefit. Graham said his own orgasms were more intense after a clock treatment because it left Karlene more swollen and wet and even purple. Sometimes he entered her quickly enough that she was still riding an aftershock, and if he worked it just right, he could bring the dam down again and she was amazed. He wanted to experiment one night to see if it worked now without the clock, but it didn’t. Big Ben became the Other Man in their marriage.

Karlene donated her box of toys and videos and books to the Salvation Army. She looked forward to waking up every morning, often coming to just before the clock went off and she would lay in the bed and watch as the slowly moving hand stroked her in mental foreplay. She trilled at night and smiled in the morning and Graham hummed and they were closer than ever before. All in all, her life took on a grape popsicle glow.

And when she laughed, she sounded just like her mother.

 

KATHIE GIORGIO’S writing credits include stories in Harpur Palate, Fiction International, Dos Passos Review, Ars Medica, Thema, CutThroat, The Pedestal, Bayou, Eclipse, Potomac Review, Arabesques Review, Hurricane Review, Oyez Review, Jabberwock Review, Karamu Review, Reed Magazine, The Binnacle, Licking River Review, Bellowing Ark, Hiss Quarterly, Midway Journal, The Externalist, in the premier issue of SLAB and in the premier issue of Broken Bridge Review and in an online and audio anthology by Susurrus Press titled, “I Am This Meat”. She has been the featured author in Women Writers’ ezine. Her story, “Harvest,” is currently in Main St. Rag’s new anthology, “Dots on a Map,” on small town settings, and in 2010, she will be in another Main St. Rag anthology on Food. Her story, “The Blue Room,” is currently in Edition Bibliotekos’ anthology on Medical Humanities. Two of Kathie’s stories published in 2007 were nominated for the Million Writer Award. In 2008, her short story, “Chain of Events,” was nominated for the Best of the Net anthology. She is the director and founder of AllWriters’ Workplace & Workshop, a creative writing studio, and is the editor/owner/publisher of Quality Fiction magazine (formerly Quality Women’s Fiction). She also teaches for Writers’ Digest and serves on their advisory board.

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Written by Kathie Giorgio & Posted on May 9th, 2010
Tags :: comedy, erotic, women

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In these heady days of financial reform and the manic battle of lobbyists, politicians and populists to steer the course of financial regulation, the question of who exactly is to blame for the ongoing economic crisis has returned to the fore. A Senate panel recently interrogated Chuck Prince, former chairman of Citigroup, who fell to the familiar routine of pleading ignorance: “I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country. I’m sorry for the millions of people, average Americans who have lost their homes. And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us. [...] investors were reaching for yield, and many people, from investors to traders to rating agencies to regulators, believed that a new era of generally lower risk had begun.” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125736564) Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and a former Citigroup director, stuck to the same story. “[...] there isn’t a way, in an institution that has hundreds of thousands of transactions a day, and probably something over a trillion dollars a day running through it, that you’re going to know what’s in those position books. And I didn’t know it when I was running Goldman Sachs and you wouldn’t know it sitting on the board of Citi either. You really are depending on the people who are there to bring you problems when they exist.”

Needless to say, there’s something quite unsatisfying about these explanations, though we’ve been hearing them from the beginning from most top-level people. Can one really believe that top management didn’t have at least a faint idea of what was happening? It was making them bank, after all.

From my time in New York far on the sidelines of the financial debate, it became clear to me that there’s generally two levels of analysis in the world of financial economics: the top level, consisting of policymakers–Fed and Treasury officials–and academics, which is also populated by some of the higher ups in the financial industry food chain; and the bottom level, populated by traders and asset managers. Clearly, if you want to know what’s “really going on,” you’d go to the bottom level. This simply stands to reason: finance is a massive heaving machine, just keeping up with what’s going on is a full time job for thousands, so any one group of policymakers or regulators is going to have to operate at several levels of abstraction from the real picture. Meanwhile, the traders actually drive the evolution of the system by adapting to regulatory structures and determining how deals are executed in their relentless search for return; they also produce the financial “innovations” of which we’ve become all too aware. Journalists have at last started to report on this micro-level aspect of the crisis: e.g. the New York Times has recently reported on the widespread practice at structured finance desks of hiring away ratings agencies employees to structure financial products in such a way as to fetch AAA ratings, hiding their true risk. This American Life, easily the best source of reporting on the crisis, has also recently ran a story that rebuts the conventional wisdom that the crisis was an emergent phenomenon that no one could foresee; they were able to see through the smoke screen by simply looking deeply at the actions of a particular hedge fund (see episode #405, “Inside Job”). The SEC’s recent indictment of Goldman Sachs has also shifted the focus to the actions of packagers, securitizers, quants, and sales-people.

Here at the Dark Comedy Hour, we’re kicking ourselves a bit for sitting on a story we’ve been reserving for the much delayed first issue of the Dark Comedy Review that would have broke some of this news (to a non-finance audience of course, for much of the information about the soft fraud that was going on in mortgage securitizations was probably an open secret on The Street). For our fifth post, therefore, we bring you, ahead of schedule, a piece by our own Wall Street insider, a good friend of the site who has a decade of experience working in “structured finance”, a term which refers to the types of practices that have become widely known as the central locus of the crisis–the packaging of mortgages and other loans to make securities, i.e. “securitization”, the practice that gave rise to the famed “Collateralized Debt Obligation” or CDO.

In some realms of social science, one sometimes refers to consulting the “Delphic Oracle”, i.e. actually talking to people involved in the social processes you’re studying. In the case of the financial crisis, the oracle has either been left un-consulted, or has been keeping his silence. Whatever the case, we now bring you a story of the financial crisis straight from the banker’s mouth.

Our Wall Street Insider will remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

-the Archivist

note: We’ve also posted an earlier version of this piece that goes into a lot more detail about the way these structured finance desks worked. For readers especially interested in the potential fraud (legal or illegal) caused by conflicts of interest between banks and ratings agencies, especially the practice of banks simply hiring rating agency employees, check out this version.

A Brief History of the Financial Crisis

A lot went wrong, and I don’t think many people know how close we came to large-scale destruction of the modern financial system. There was a real risk of catastrophic failure on the scale of the 1930’s or the 1890’s. It is easy to be sanguine today. Although things are bad, we have remained within the bounds of normalcy. There are no massive, cascading failures rendering people broke overnight. Instead, we have achieved what is probably the best we can hope for out of a set of bad alternatives.
The second stage of this crisis is playing out in slow motion, allowing us some time to adapt to the changing realities of the economic situation. There will be continued changed in our economy and lifestyle for years to come, most of them negative, but as long as they happen slowly enough we will be able to adjust and eventually return to some kind of prosperity.

I can’t tell the whole story here. That would take many more pages, and much more information than I have available.

Depending on who you listen to, you may hear that the problem is a result of credit derivatives, securitization, Wall Street bonus payments, quantitative financial engineering, failure of government regulators, government sponsored mortgage agencies, credit rating agencies, consolidation of the financial industry, American consumer demand, unscrupulous lenders, the abandonment of the gold standard, the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy, and more. In reality, all of those things did contribute in some way. You can take any item from that list and use it as a window into understanding the phenomenon, but you will quickly encounter more and more of these items until you realize that a holistic approach is needed. That is to say, you can not understand or address the problem by focusing on a single aspect of it because it is too big and too complex. You need to understand the dynamic relationship between all of these things.

I will try to explain just a small part of this story concerning the banks involved, and in particular their use of credit derivatives. And I feel compelled to mention that this crisis was not engineered by any conspiracy or cabal. Goldman Sachs has most adroitly exploited the situation to their benefit, but as an organization they are certainly not smart or powerful enough to have created this outcome for their own benefit.

In classic banking, there is a division between retail/commercial banks and investment banks (the division exists as a result of the Glass-Steagall act and other depression-era legislation.) Commercial banking is usually simpler. The bank takes deposits from people in the form of checking and savings accounts, and perhaps a few other ways. It lends those deposits in various forms including mortgage loans, lines of credit, etc.

The bank makes money because it borrows the money at the short-term rate paid to depositors ,and lends the money at a longer term rate charged to borrowers. Typically, there is additional charge referred to as a credit spread. This compensates the bank for taking on the risk that not all borrowers will pay back the money they have borrowed. The bank’s expertise is in judging the borrower’s credit worthiness, as well as the value of any collateral.

Investment banks, on the other hand, primarily make money be providing services to corporations and governments. For example, investment banks arrange for the sale of new stock shares, or bonds, or for the acquisition of one company by another. There are a lot of these types of activities, some fairly esoteric, that investment banks perform and for which they earn large fees.

There are two important things to recognize about the role of the investment banks.

First, they do not take risk in the same sense as commercial banks. While an investment bank often does have its own capital at stake in a stock offering or merger, it does not have to. A commercial bank, however ,can only lend money against its own balance sheet.

Second, investment banks create product for investors. If you want to invest in publicly traded securities, you buy stocks and bonds. The investment banks are the middle-men who create these securities as a way to transfer capital from investors to investments (productuve uses of capital like businesses.)

It is a natural outgrowth of the investment bank to make capital markets. The investment bank matched up the original company that issued bonds (borrowers) with the bond buyers (lenders). The investment bank is therefore naturally well positioned to create a secondary market in bonds that have already been issued.

So, moving away from theory and toward reality, this means that investment banks have big, open floors the size of multiple football fields, and these floors are filled with row upon row of jackass traders working the phones and the screens. These guys are working to match up buyers and sellers of stocks, bonds, and just about anything else that can made into a security and traded. This activity generates a huge amount of profit – far more than the lending activity of commercial banks.

Let’s go back to the early 2000’s. The fed was keeping interest rates low and credit easy in order to counteract the stock market crash (remember dot-coms, enron, worldcom?) and the effects of the Sept. 11 attacks. All around the world, money was getting easier and cheaper to borrow. Because of this situation, the returns from lending were squeezed down close to nothing. By the mid-2000’s, a few years into the easy money cycle, credit spreads had become very tight.

Investors with fixed liabilities to fund, like pension and insurance funds, as well as lenders like commercial banks, need fixed income assets (bonds) with enough yield to meet their liabilities. They are some of the most profitable customers for investment bank capital markets, and these customers needed a new product. They needed more spread.

How do you take an income producing asset and increase its spread, without changing the quality of the underlying promise to pay back the debt? This question has been asked many times, and the answer is always the same: leverage. If you put up part of the money and borrow the rest when buying an asset, you increase the amount of income received per dollar of actual capital. That is financial leverage.

Wall Street investment banks created product to meet this need. Here is a brief and simplified description of the basic innovation they created. It is called a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), and there a million variations on this simple concept.

You take a credit product, like mortgage loans, and bundle them into pools with thousands of other, similar loans. These pools are securitized into mortgage bonds with standard features that can now be traded easily. This process started in the 1970s and can be now be done with just about any type of underlying asset.

Now you can take these bonds and divide them into different “slices”, called tranches. Investors in the junior tranche absorb all the losses from defaults (or generically from any losses) until their investment is wiped out. Only then do investors in the senior tranche start to take losses. This allows you take a pool of assets, potentially real crap assets, and construct senior tranches that are much safer.

It has been my experience that a lot of people, including many of the people actively involved in the production, trading, and marketing of these products, do not understand them very well. Forgive me if a belabor the point, but I feel compelled to go into a bit more detail on how these structures work. I am deliberately keeping the example simplified and devoid of any mathematics or technicalities.

Two people, A and B, both borrow money. Both debts are risky in these sense that there is a chance that A or B may fail to repay the debt.

Bank X, who has either originated these loans or bought them from someone else, packages them together into a security, the AB bond.

Bank X then tranches the AB bond into two parts: junior and senior. Investor C buys the junior tranche, and investor D buys the senior tranche.

Investor C receives a very high coupon, but will lose his investment if either A or B fails to pay. Investor D receives a modest coupon, but will only lose his investment if both A and B fail to pay.

Investor D owns an investment grade investment (determined by a rating agency like Standard & Poor’s, or Moody’s), while investor C owns an unrated (speculative) investment.

Bank X has transferred the risk of lending to A and B completely off its balance sheet by selling to C and D. At the same time, bank X is earning profits, potentially when it originates the loans at A and B, and again when it sells securities to C and D. Bank X can therefore do these transactions all day long, unconstrained by the need to have actual capital to reserve against the loans (it no longer has the loans on its balance sheet!)

Bank X will want to do many, many more transactions like this. Investor D will also want to do more transactions like this one.

To understand D’s motivation, consider that non-tranched bond with the same credit rating will pay only a small fraction of the spread on the tranched product. Tranches contain hidden leverage.

Given this situation, the limiting factors on how many of these deals get done are the number of borrowers like A and B, and the number of high-risk junior tranche investors like C.

Junior tranche investors take almost all the risk, and hold an investment which is unsuitable for most fixed-income investors because it does not have an investment grade credit rating. Most of these investors are hedge funds or similar leveraged investors (this means they take other people’s money, borrow more, and then invest it with little or no regulatory oversight.) Hedge funds exist mainly to take the risk that investment banks do not want, but that arises as a byproduct of the investment banking business. If investment banks could produce senior tranches without producing junior tranches, they would, but since that is impossible they need the hedge funds.

Hedge funds are generally rational investors who evaluate risk using the same criteria as investment banks. Most hedge fund guys used to work at investment banks. They demand a premium for taking unwanted risk off the bank’s balance sheet. Thus, as a matter of logic, the junior tranche owner must get overpaid relative to the amount of risk he takes.

This situation is possible because the senior tranche investor gets underpaid. The profit from underpaying him is split between the bank and the hedge fund. The senior tranche investor, remember, is an insurance company or pension fund or commercial bank, he evaluates risk differently. He cares about the credit rating on the bond relative to the spread he is getting paid. As long as a bond has a AAA rating, he will go for the highest yielding bond regardless of what it is inside it.

An investment bank salesman has clients from both hedge funds and pension funds. He takes both of them out to dinner, although not together. When he is with the hedge fund manager, he makes fun of the pension fund, but not the other way around.

So junior tranche investors are enticed into the market by getting overpaid. What about the actual borrowers? There are a lot of potential borrowers out there (keep in mind the debt could be home mortgages, credit cards, business loans, student loans, aircraft leases, or almost anything else.) However, investment banks are well known for exploiting an opportunity to make money to the maximum possible degree. They always need more.

The majority of the debt used to create CDO type structures was residential mortgage debt. It is worth noting that nearly every major investment bank bought or created a mortgage lending company. These are the very same companies that aggressively pushed loans to expand the market for mortgage borrowing (sub-prime loans featuring low or no downpayments, little documentation, adjustable rates, teaser rates, negative amortization, many other techniques.)

The combination of low interest rates (courtesy of the Fed) and loose lending standards (courtesy of the mortgage lenders) made it very easy to borrow money to buy a house. The mortgage business got so big because it was a critical input to a very profitable trade. Easily available, cheap loans combined with a little propaganda massively increased the amount of borrowing.

For the average person, buying a house became the best use of capital. It offered a highly leveraged investment, which is hard to get as an individual investor. Most houses can be bought with 20% down or less (sometimes much less), whereas buying stocks on margin usually requires 50% of the price in cash. Also, when you buy a financial asset like stocks on margin, you get daily margin calls. That is, if the value of the stock declines tomorrow, you have to put up more cash to keep your leverage ratio at 50%. With home loans, there are no margin calls. As long as you keep making payments, you never have to contribute more capital even if the value of the house drops.

In addition, mortgage debt is tax advantaged. Perhaps even more importantly, home values trended dramatically higher during this period and created a self-reinforcing cycle of easy money, which stimulated demand, which increased prices, which in turn created more demand. This cycle gave rise to the illusion of stability in home prices. As a “real” asset, as opposed to a financial asset, it was believed that home prices would never decline.

In the early part of this cycle, new ways of finding a market for mortgage debt allowed for a more efficient way to get investment capital to credit-worthy borrowers for the purchase of a valuable asset. As time went on, the appetite of the investment banks to do this trade as much as possible created a runaway spiral of self-reinforcing excess.

Here is how the banks ended up screwing even themselves in the process.

Tranching a security is said to create a “capital structure” out of the underlying security. You have the equity, or most junior tranche. You have the senior, AAA rated tranche. In between, you have various mezzanine tranches which may be investment grade or below investment grade. And above the AAA tranche, you have a “super senior” tranche.

The problem faced by the bank is one of distribution. The demand for each tranche is not equal, and it changes over time. The bank may not be able to sell enough super senior tranches to produce all the AAA tranche that it could sell.

The choice is to either sell fewer AAA tranches, or to retain some of the super senior risk on the bank’s balance sheet.

Option one is never seriously considered. Selling AAA tranches is where all the money is. When these decisions are made by traders who are short-term bonus oriented, they are never going to pass up a money making opportunity. So the bank ends up keeping large amounts of super senior in order to produce enough AAA.

Remember, however, that the senior tranche holder is deliberately underpaid for the risk he takes, in order to overpay the equity holder. Also remember that these risk calculations are underestimated because they contain assumptions such as home values never decline.

The bank is now drinking its own Kool Aid.

In economics, there is something called an exogenous shock. Literally, it means simply a shock from outside the system. Something which can not be predicted based on the rational actions of market participants, but which happens randomly. It is a way for economists to say “we don’t know WTF happened.”

No one knows exactly why the bubble burst when it did. Maybe it was related to the price of oil or commodities. Maybe it was a shift in mass psychology. Maybe it was the weather. In very large, complicated systems it is impossible to know, even ex post, why these things happen.

It should be clear, however, that the system was primed for collapse. While the exact mechanism of the collapse can not be known in advance, or even now, a vulnerable system will eventually meet an exogenous shock that will cause it to collapse.

In simple terms, we as a society borrowed a lot and did very little with it. A house does not really help to grow the economy. You can live in it, but it doesn’t produce anything, or invent anything, the way that a business does. We created a sort of artificial wealth by bidding up the prices of our houses. Now that the bubble has burst, we have reverted to something closer to our actual wealth, but it feels like we are poorer by comparison.

There is a certain inevitability to the cycle of boom and bust in dynamic economies. It has been going for centuries, ever since the roots of capitalism and trade, and will probably continue to go on for as long as there is a robust human society.

The bubble in internet and technology stocks of the late 90’s also created false value, but it did give rise to some valuable progress as well. At least some of the investment in those companies created things of real value. I am not sure that the bubble in housing prices has created any value. Using resources to build housing developments we don’t need doesn’t add any value to the overall economy. Hopefully the next bubble will produce something useful.

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Written by Uncategorized & Posted on April 24th, 2010
Tags :: insiders, non-fiction, wall street

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For our fourth post, we bring you two poems by Sue De La Bruere.
 

First Grade

 
Giggles and pigtails and pale stick limbs aflutter

Baby blond hair affixed to sugary cookie face bordering a partial tooth smile

Brazen packs of two and three and four forming miniature alliances

Committees, subcommittees, conferencing and manipulating

No notion for ruthlessness,  primal instinct guides the flock, the weak left with tear stained faces

Never  too young for attitude, posturing, group thought

Six going on sixteen

Scrambling Mommy thoughts of pain filled distant therapy

Rejection awaiting, acceptance elusive, pathway to maturity

 

Sweet Notes

 
Torrent of cumbersome notes floating north in suburbia,

Piercing carpet, prickling baseboards, resting on defenseless ears.

One start, two starts, going now like a toddler driving a big rig,

Gaining sweat filled energy as the harmony rocks forward.

Strains of forced melody a wall of mismatched sound,

Heart thumping drive of a bass marrying sweet twang of guitar.

Backbone rising up – boom boom boom drumming on,

Music in their teenage ears with passion suspending their hearts.
 

Sue De La Bruere is a freelance writer who shares her suburban Chicago home with endlessly supportive husband, Scott, and moderately brilliant kids, Bradley and Paige. Sue received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Northern Illinois University and can be contacted at allwritenow@comcast.net.

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Written by Sue De La Bruere & Posted on April 8th, 2010
Tags :: parenting, poetry

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The writer for our third entry is Pierre Dumont, a 30 year old mental health worker who has 7 years experience working in a variety of mental hospitals, rehab facilities, and prisons. This entry is about one facility he worked in 3 years ago in rural New Jersey. Pierre blogs about his experiences as a mental health worker at http://mentalhospitalemployee.blogspot.com.

So Another Day Begins at My New Job

So another day begins at my new job, Duke is cursing at Tom, Duke always curses at Tom, not a day passes in which Duke fails to curse at Tom. Today is no different; he proceeds to hurl an expletive at Tom. “Fuck you Tom,” or something equally intelligent. Of course it is my job as a childcare worker to remediate this negative behavior. But how? I am a short, overweight, white 22 year old from suburbia thrusted into a guard position at a prison in the middle of the woods populated by a bunch of inner-city teenage convicts. To make matters worse I am hiding in the corner of the cellblock and am failing to convey any sort of authority whatsoever.

“Minus 10 points due to language,” I sheepishly announce.

“Fuck you Mr. Dumont,” comes the predictable response.

“Minus 15 points due to insulting staff,” comes my brave reply, “you lost 25 points in an hour,”
Now see, if the kid loses 25 points in an hour bad things happen to the kid, in essence he loses all privileges until the next meal, can’t go to the computer lab (and thus download porn) or even be alone without a staff watching him. In essence the next 6 or so hours will suck. Duke isn’t really the sharpest tool in the shed but he is aware of his point problem, he doesn’t take it really well and proceeds to pick up a desk and throws it against a wall.

“Minus 20 points, destruction of property,” I pipe in. Duke (now infuriated) proceeds to kick Tom in the mouth.

“Minus 50 points starting a fight,”

After filling out the paperwork needed to document the point losses and calling the nurse to treat Tom, my attention jumps to another part of the longhouse (company-speak for cellblock). One of the kids has put a sheet covering the front of his cell, blocking the view, god knows what the hell he is doing inside. I run over and of course catch him masturbating; I feel bad for him and walk away, allowing him to finish his business. Thus begins another wonderful day at Visionquest, a juvenile “correction,” facility located in the middle of nowhere, New Jersey. My shift began at 7:00 AM and it is now officially 7:15, 7 hours and 45 minutes until I can go home. The kids of Longhouse 3 (the longhouse I am in charge of) have to 7:30 to get dressed and report to the chow hall or I will get the shit chewed out of me by my boss. The kids are aware of this and thus are refusing to put on jackets or complete their pre-breakfast chores (some proceed to go back to sleep). I have been here less than an hour and already want to die.

I should have debated taking this job in the first place. The initial phone call took place on a Sunday afternoon; if a human resources needs to work on Sundays they have a hard time retaining staff, hard time retaining staff equals a crappy job. Further weirdness involved the interview location – in a sweat lodge covered by cow skins. Alarm bells might have rang off when she gave me a cup of coffee (Starbucks no doubt) and a donut during the interview. I might have been disturbed when she inquired if I could show up the following Monday or the fact that I filled out a W-2 before we actually met. It could have also been the fact that she said she was hiring me 5 minutes into the actual interview. Regardless I was too oblivious in delight to inquire further. I drove back to the apartment in delight, glad I finally made something of myself.

Flashing back to reality the kids are failing in their duties to get prepared for breakfast and I am preparing to get the shit chewed out of me by Mitch, a 40-year-old former drill sergeant and my boss. 10 minutes later it is 7:29, the criminals finally caught wind of the gravity of the situation (which would affect them more severely than myself) and proceeded to ignore my idle threats but at the same time quickly get dressed and march outside in single file, marching outside then standing in formation as if reporting for roll-call. They let me sound off like I am supposed too.

“Letter M’s,”

“Letter M’s,” they reply

“Shoes shined,”

“And shirts tucked sir,”

“Ready to roll gentleman?”

“Ready to roll sir,”

“Proceed to roll,”

And with that the kids would proceed to walk to the longhouse singing some Indian spiritual chant that they were forced to sing. Sing they did as their every move to the chow hall was observed by Mitch who was standing on a platform and inspecting us closely, any sneeze, misstep, curse, bite, punch, or buggery would immediately be noticed and responded to in turn, first by a scream at the kid and then a scream at myself in front of the kiddies (in the process destroying any credibility that I had in the first place).

Breakfast is a standard straightforward affair, yet at the same time I hated it. Chow-hall consisted of giant large room with three long tables, each with 10 chairs (one table for each longhouse). The kids would simply march up, grab their food, grab something to drink (in little juice glasses), then sit down and eat. Watching them were the four of us: Pete, a retired marine who ran longhouse 1, Charles, an older gentleman who ran longhouse 2 (previously worked with child molesters for 25 years), Mitch, our fearless leader, and myself. Things started as they always did: the kids would remove hats and jackets then walk up one-by-one and receive the meal that was offered (today it was cheese-eggs ). Generally the food sucked, breakfast consisted of either cheese-eggs or square pancakes, lunch consisted of assorted lunchmeats and rolls; I never worked the evening shift so I have no idea what dinner consisted of. Edible food costs more money, which in turn equals less profit, simple logic to the swine that ran our lovely private ju-vey.

Nothing happened at breakfast not due to the sanctity of the mess hall (it also functioned as a non-religious chapel like place), but solely due to the fact that the drugs that were shoved down the kids’ throats had their maximum potency at this hour (the kids would get them at 6 when they woke up). Before breakfast they would be eager to settle any vendettas they had the previous day but soon the effects of Seroquel would turn them into delightful drooling zombies. This delightful drooling zombie stage would last until around 9:30 ish when they would return to their natural state of being. It was also during breakfast that we received our assignments for the day; normally the kids would go to school and we would go with them but today I had a special assignment, drive Seth (a 6 foot crip, convicted of assault with a deadly weapon) to the local corporate lab place to get his lithium levels checked. Just myself and Seth in the van, alone together for 30 minutes to the lab place, just like a corporate wage slave, garbage in, garbage out.

I never truly understood the logic of having a staff member two days into the job escort a kid to the lab place, but very few things at this organization did truly make sense. Things of course started off poorly, I was warned that he is a shrewd negotiator although I quickly disregarded this notion.

“You are going to let me smoke in the van right?”

“No,” I quickly retorted.

“Come on man let’ me smoke,”

“No,” minus 3 points irritating staff.

I will have mercy on you, friend-reader, from having to listen to the sub-par insults and death threats that came out of this man’s mouth. But of course that was my job in a nutshell, listen to the curses of idiots, idiots that were bigger than me and seemed to have embarked on a career of beating the shit out of people. I finally convinced him to get into the van and off we went to the lab place, first thing I noticed is that he seemed to disregard the no-smoking rule and was lighting up shortly after we pulled out onto the highway.

“Stop smoking,” minus 20 points,

“Fuck you, I can smoke when I want too,”

“Insulting staff minus 10 points,”

“I don’t care, take away all my fuckin points, I don’t fuckin give a fuckin shit,”

This was Seth’s greatest diplomatic move; Bismarck had the ability to orchestrate alliances and wage war, Kissinger to reconcile with ideological enemies, Pitt to orchestrate the grand strategy, and Seth had the coup de grace’ “take away ALL my fuckin points.” Eventually he had enough of this whining and sat in the back, threw the cigarette out the window, and sulked the rest of the way to the lab. We got to the lab, where he pulled off yet another diplomatic triumph, single-handedly refusing to have his blood drawn. I made apologies on his behalf and we drove back to the prison where we both proceeded to be chewed out. It was 11:00 and I obtained my first century in point deductions, a noble success.

Most other days (staff worked 4 weekdays and one weekend), the kids went to the school that was on premises, a series of trailers connected together by a deck. They had all the subjects available to their peers in normal high schools, algebra (1 and 2), pre-calc, English and of course Gym. Each staff member was assigned to a given room at the school, with myself occupying the gym. The gym itself was housed in a makeshift building enclosing a basketball arena suspended from the actual ground by pylons. Basic enjoyable sporting activities such as dodge ball, floor hockey and volleyball could take place inside, along with lacrosse and football in an adjacent field. We would pick up the kids at the school in the beginning of the period, walk to the gym (about 300 yards away), play whatever sport there was, then walk back to the school at the end. 8 periods a day in turn yields 8 gym classes in turn yields about 5 hours of working out a day for myself playing whatever game we did that week.

Sports were life to these kids and arguably the only hope for them to succeed in life. Unions no longer exist in America so the workingman has no opportunity to make a good living, the kids were also poor and hence according to capitalism don’t deserve to go to college. That is of course if they had enough education to go to college in the first place; Paterson and Newark are not exactly famous for their schools and of course in America your access to elementary and secondary education is primarily based on how wealthy your parents are. If you were born to a crack whore you are out of luck, try again next life. It is to no-one’s surprise then that they take sports dreadfully seriously, and if they had anger problems fights would naturally erupt. And fights did indeed erupt.

In order to explain this scenario further I need to introduce a new character, Steve, a stereotypical white gangster, multiply Eminem by a million and you will have Steve. Steve is also a suburban kid from a stable two-parent family, and is fairly affluent at that. He also has a hothead temper and is an avid gas sniffer. He did other things in the past but at our prison the kiddies abuse whatever drugs they can get their hands on. His partner for this act in our play is Tom from earlier in the chapter, roughly 5’8 and stocky compared to Steve who is taller and lankier. Unfortunately we were playing basketball, myself and Tom vs. Steve and Phillip (one of the gym teachers) when Tom gave a hard foul on Steve. A normal person would be upset but eventually forget about the matter; Steve unfortunately was still upset about the matter a week later. You could feel the tension in the air, Tom vs. Steve, it was inevitable not as much due to the foul call but it was inevitable, like World War 1 and the assassination of the Archduke. It just needed a shove in the right direction to be triggered. The foul was a suitable trigger.

After the period was over we were putting away gym equipment (hockey sticks), into a side-closet, then we proceeded to walk outside and walk back to the school, along the way Steve gave Tom a nice haymaker and the struggle was on. During situations like this as an officer and a gentleman I believed it was my duty to break up the action by example, charging into the fray and tackling one of the kids, taking a blow in the process. I tackled Tom and Justin, another gym teacher, tackled Steve. In a normal psych hospital, soon a couple of staff members would arrive to stabilize the situation and the belligerents would be isolated for their own safety under constant guard. Visionquest did not have an extra couple of staff members (more staff members equals less profit), so we had to fix the situation ourselves. We were debating what to do when Mitch in all his glory arrived on the scene, grabbed both kids and dragged them to the center lodge where punishment would be surely meted out. It was at this time that I realized my nose was gushing blood.

After time spent in the prison infirmary due to the blood I settled down after lunch to do the necessary paperwork related to the event. This was no ordinary event; in an ordinary event you have to fill out a mere two page “incident report,” the event described earlier with Seth smoking was a mere incident report. You deduct some amount of points, describe the event, and then justify your point deduction, simple, easy and done. A wise man (or woman) in this case would realize I tackled a kid and the gym teacher did the same, this is obviously now a legal issue and the pages naturally grew longer; this “restraining report,” was a 10 page treatise. After the treatise was completed I needed to be interviewed by the “youth advocate.”

In all prisons (in theory) the inmates have some sort of recourse from arbitrary punishment from their guards, some sort of appeals process, and for juveniles this of course is significantly increased. Hence the arrival of the youth advocate on stage left. Basically it went like this, using Seth’s smoking story as an example. I fill out the incident report and when I have a chance (usually during lunch) I give it to the youth advocate who either accepts the point deduction or suggests a different point deduction, sort of a defense attorney to myself as a prosecutor. Mitch acts as the judge, jury, and executioner. It appears that Steve managed to get into contact with this youth advocate before I did and told him a conflicting story to my report. In addition he claims I did not follow correct protocol when it came to my tackling procedure (he was correct), which caused him a sore shoulder. Steve wanted to press charges on me but would reconsider if I removed my point deduction. I now have a dilemma: stick to my guns, risk being labeled a child abuser and going to jail myself, or accept the plea bargain; I accepted the plea bargain and preserved my hide for another day. The next day I arrived still upset about the incident and got a buzz over the radio, “Mr. Dumont report to the girls camp,” My life would get infinitely worse.

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Written by Pierre Dumont & Posted on April 2nd, 2010
Tags :: non-fiction, prison, slice of life, work

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For our second entry, we bring you a story of dignity in old age. We were a little saddened to discover that the writer wasn’t himself an octogenarian, but the unpretentious and humorous attitude of the main character is inspiring nonetheless.

A Stroke of Genius

“Edwin Squire?”  Dawn’s face is framed by an interior window that adjoins the living room and kitchenette of Unit # 2.  She is not wearing makeup, only a crew cut and stolen scrubs.  She stands with an unbecoming clerical posture on the cold linoleum, barefoot and bowlegged as a lumberjack.  “Edwin Squire?”  She leans through the interior window, scanning the twelve-by-sixty-foot rectangle of moss green carpet and warped wallpaper as if I wasn’t the only donor waiting.

“Hold your horses, Dawn.”  I quit fiddling with the foil antenna atop her television.  “And don’t put on airs.  Call me Ed, like any other afternoon.”  I come into the kitchenette to find a hospital gown draped over a cedar stool before a breakfast table/ironing board which, between meals, folds conveniently into the mock wood wall.

“We’s tryin to conduct ourself professionallike, Edwin.  So you’s comfortable.”  Dawn hands me a pen chained to a clipboard.  A glass of tap water sits on the table, half full, though some would say otherwise, along with a single pill that is reputed to last thirty-six hours.  “Take that Veagra and fill out this here paperwork.  The nurse’ll be with you shortly.”

“Is this necessary?”  I wave the clipboard.

Dawn vanishes into the laundry room.  “Like I said, Edwin,” I barely hear her baritone voice due to the rinse and tumble of the rusty appliances.  “We’s tryin to conduct ourself professionallike.”

____________________________________________________________________

Last Name:                       Squire IV

First Name:                       Edwin

Date of Birth:                    05/16/1925

Social Security:                 Yes

Occupation:                      High-school history teacher (twice retired)

Weight:                             160 lbs.

Height:                            Maximum 5’10”

Currently 5’8”

Permanent Address:           1037 Frontage Road (off I-25)

Unit # 3

Oasis RV & Trailer Park

Albuquerque, NM  87190

Insurance Carrier:             N/A

Allergies:                          Domesticated birds (this may be a mere aversion)

___________________________________________________________________________

A humble young woman with hair like a horse pokes her head from the lavatory door.  That black mane swirls at her hips.  Some of it is straight.  A few strands are braided with amber beads.  When her gods sculpted her from the dunes of the desert, they carved the features into her face carefully, like the highest head of a totem pole.  As opposed to Dawn’s bloated visage, this woman has cheek bones and only one chin.  When Dawn introduced us, years ago, I expected her name to be “Starlight” or “Breath of the Mustang” but it was simply Sue, which I still consider unsatisfactory, since she is not a Sioux but a disowned Hopi whose father works as a pit boss and mother as a cocktail waitress at the Pueblo Casino on a nearby reservation.

By the citric smell emanating from the second-hand furniture, I sense Sue has sterilized the trailer with Lysol.  After turning down the sofa-bed and fluffing the pillows, she bows her head slightly then shuts the door to the trailer.  Sue only speaks when spoken to and sparingly at that, for she was born unto a tribe who believes each living thing has a preordained number of words to utter before he or she turns to clay, wind, or water, whichever element of earth the gods had wielded when first fashioning him or her.  For years I felt the urge to ask Sue why she dressed like a peppermint, but thought it selfish to engage her in small talk.

On the nightstand I find a fan of magazines with nude women contorting themselves into unpalatable pretzels.  The dates on the cover of these issues are not-at-all recent, the centerfolds removed, the most graphic sections dog-eared.  Amid the array of magazines is a collection of lotions and jellies, as well as an empty plastic cup with an airtight lid, dated with permanent pen.

With the hospital gown over my shoulder, I step to the dresser and discover that my hands are trembling, like a suitor preparing to court.  “Do not be ashamed, Edwin.”  I say to the man in the mirror.  “At least you look presentable.  Not like boys nowadays, with their do-rags and denim.”

When I was twenty-two, I took a teaching gig to pay the bills while composing my coming-of-age novel.  I was a bachelor then who divorced himself from the prospect of marriage upon recognizing that a wife would inevitably hinder his writing.  Sixty years later, I find myself twice retired—my manuscript, a work-in-progress.  Hunched over a typewriter, the seasons of my life turned unannounced: adulthood, middle-age, the golden years.  I am a bachelor now as I was then.  I have outlived all my friends and family.  Somewhere along the way, that novel became an autobiography.  I am still working on it; after all, I am still alive.  I have written the final chapter countless times.  I will write it again tomorrow.  Perhaps this one will stick.

I remove my blazer, unbutton my vest, then loosen my tie.  I have seven vests of seven different colors—a full spectrum: Roy G. Biv.  My memory is not what it once was.  If I forget what day it is when I am revising my manuscript, I don’t consult a calendar, I just ask Roy.  My geriatrician calls this a mnemonic device.  Mnemonic.  I can not recall the meaning of that word.

My trousers fall to the floor upon unfastening my belt.  My silk socks are halfway to my knees.  I look like a pubescent boy in my undergarments, all knees and elbows.  I remove my glasses, thick and square, which magnify my eyes so that I appear to be in a state of perpetual surprise.  I am not self-deprecating.  This fact was brought to my attention by Dawn, when she was one of my pupils at Eldorado High, and prone to passing notes.  Eventually I lost patience and made her read the note aloud, despite her prompt penitence.  I had intended to humiliate her, not myself.  Dawn and I let bygones be just that: bygones.  She slashed my bicycle tires when I flunked her for being a dimwit.  Now we are next-door neighbors, here, in the trailer park.

“There is no shame in being naked, Edwin,” I assure myself.  We were all born in our birthday suit.  Adam was born in a garden.  He wasn’t ashamed.  Not at first.  He passed the torch of life to Cain and Abel.  Cain slew Abel, then dropped the torch and shrunk into the shadows.  Seth recovered the torch and passed it to Enos, who, in turn, passed it to Canaan.  By and by, the torch was bestowed upon Noah, who built a boat and kept the flame flickering through a storm that threatened to snuff it, once and for all.  When the skies cleared, the torch was ushered through the old and new testament, from Israel to Egypt to Palestine.  It burned at the right hand of David, the first and foremost Palestinian King, who passed it to the Kings of Ireland, who passed it to the Kings of Argyleshire, who passed it to the Sovereigns of Scotland and Britain, beginning with King James, the man who United the Kingdom.  Under His Honor’s rule, the Bible was transcribed into the King James Version—the version that, four centuries later, graces my vast bookshelf.

In an unexpected turn of events, a disgruntled group of Catholics renounced their religion, lit a separate wick from the greater flame, and shielded it as they sailed westward through a relentless Atlantic squall only to crash on a giant rock.  There, they made a bonfire of the torch, colonizing so they could churn butter and feast with savages, trading fur for polio blankets, though some of the savages survived or Sue wouldn’t be here today dressed like a peppermint.  The torch traveled further west on a tearful trail along which clans settled after stopping to swim in shimmering mirages.  One of those clans was called Squire, a well-read people with a prudent interest in themselves.  The patriarch of the Squire clan was a schoolteacher who lectured in a sweltering barn but died under a spangled sky in the war for independence.  His best student was his grandson, who was studying to be a protestant historian but was impaled by bayonet while charging toward a picket.  His grandson was a genealogist who compiled family documents to no end and was buried in a Belgian trench before making much sense of them.  His grandson was me, Edwin Squire IV, a high-school history teacher who outlived Hitler but never had a grandson, due to the lack of a middleman.  And, by God, if I don’t take matters into my own hands, the flame of life will extinguish on my watch, in a wisp of smoke, rising not from a garden but a trailer park just outside of Albuquerque.

Nothing can spoil an intimate moment quicker than cold feet.  Cold hands, however, are nearly as bad.  I slap them together and rub until the friction leaves them warm.  The older I get, the worse the circulation in my extremities.

“Brrr…”

These magazines have no redeeming value.  What happened to leaving something to the imagination?  If I must conjure an affair with an imaginary woman, she should be meek and wholesome, not scratching at the camera like an alley cat.  I pull the sheets to my chin.

“Dawn!  This is not working.  I need something other than this…this…rubbish!”

“Like what?”  Dawn hollers through the vent on the shaded side of the trailer.  She had been telling Sue how long it took to cook an egg: one month.

“Someone wholesome.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.  Audrey Hepburn.  Raquel Welch.”

“Keep at it in there.  Me and Sue’ll see what we can scrounge up.”

I listen to that foulmouthed parrot across the park in Unit # 9.  Eventually Dawn slides a poster under the door.  With a pillow over my privates, I scamper to retrieve it then dive back in bed.  Any sunlight daring to enter the trailer is absorbed by velvet curtains lashed to the side of the window like pigtails.  I slide my glasses on to decipher the poster’s black and white image.

“Dawn!  Is this the best you can do?  A cartoon!”

“It ain’t just any cartoon!  It’s Betty Boop!”

“I know who it is!  Fine!  Go away!  And stop talking about eggs!  I can’t concentrate!”

I am ashamed to admit it, even to myself, but I do find Betty Boop irresistible in a grass skirt or strapless dress.  Eighty-two years and I have been reduced to this: fantasizing about an animated flapper.  I got myself into this mess by placing a personal ad in the Oasis Gazette, a non-profit newspaper I publish with my monthly pension check.  It is a periodical that circulates within the trailer park, with or without subscription.  Though small in scale, the Oasis Gazette grapples with some of the biggest issues: rent, rabies, arrests, weddings, anniversaries, and, of course, obituaries.  Within the witty editorials and compassionate human interest stories, the reader will recognize a forthright style harkening back to an era when there still existed a modicum of integrity in print journalism.  Rather than sex or propaganda, the intelligent readership of the Oasis Gazette has come to expect and appreciate an unbiased perspective: mine.  As you can see, this newspaper should not be written off as an amateur publication.  In fact, the most meticulous reader would be hard-pressed to find an anachronism or typographical error.  The devoted staff is comprised of me, myself, and I, who serve as chief editor, press writer, and paper boy, respectively.

I delivered the January issue on a Sunday.  I can say for certain it was Sunday since I was wearing a violet vest.  With a bushel of papers in my basket, I pedaled my way up the dirt trail but didn’t sweat under my blazer thanks to the shade granted by the Joshua trees.  I nudged my kickstand and went door to door, the way I always do, to keep up with my neighbors and perhaps scoop a story for the February issue.  It was a good day for a walk in the park.  The Pit-bulls and Rottweilers were foaming at the mouth, as usual, and thrashing on their chains, especially when the mongrels limped by scratching fleas with their hind legs.  I could tell which neighbors were here for the long haul and which were passing through.  The ramblers refused to remove their wheels whereas the homes of the homebodies sat on cinder blocks.

“Morning fellows!” I greeted the Irish brothers, a tag team of hot-headed mechanics.  Theirs was a junkyard divided into heaps of spare parts: fenders, tires, bulbs, and scrap metal.  They spent most of their days flat on their backs, though, at the moment, they sat upright in plastic lawn-chairs.  When I slung the paper onto their porch, one of them threw it back.  They both laughed heartily then swallowed the dregs of their coffee, which I can only assume was equally Irish.

On the far side of the property, fortified by saguaros that looked like pin-cushions, stood a slatternly doublewide where a trio of triplets lived with their biker boyfriends.  The pretty one was blonde.  The ugly one, brunette.  The redhead bruised easy as an apple.  She was liable to slam the screen door at any hour, screaming as she staggered out of the trailer and into a fashion show of pink flamingos.  By the time she reached the entrance to the park her eye would be plumb swollen.  Invariably, she was chased down the frontage road by a goateed man wearing nothing but boxers and an undershirt, all the way to the onramp of I-25.  If he caught her, he would slap her around a bit.  If she was able to hitch a ride, he would return to the trailer and drink until she came back, which she always did, to a sorority of sisters and revving engines followed by a honeymoon period that made it all worthwhile.

The path leading to Unit # 9 was lined with sage and scorpions.  I did not knock, for it was obvious no one was home.  No one but the redhead’s boyfriend whose motorcycle was wrecked in the yard.  He was asleep on the living room floor amid the shards of a shattered vase.

I was laying the newspaper on the doorstep when I overheard that foulmouthed parrot swearing under its breath.  I peeked through the window and was shocked to see the two-tone Christmas issue of the Oasis Gazette on the bottom of the birdcage, covered in white droppings.  Balancing on its beam, the parrot turned to face me, one foot after the other.

“Bastard!  Bastard!  Bastard!  Squawk!”

I fled the porch before the boyfriend awoke with a start, momentarily oblivious to his whereabouts.  On the ride home, it occurred to me that my modest publication was not being archived or even recycled, but besmirched by domesticated birds lacking the wherewithal to think before they speak.  I put on a record and a kettle of tea then straightened the crooked Monet that enlivened the otherwise sedentary ambiance of Unit # 3.  I found consolation in the company of likeminded biographers: Keats, Keller, Thoreau.  I tried to work awhile on my own autobiography, but could not focus once struck by a troublesome notion: on the off chance my book does not get published, I will have left behind no legacy.  As such, there would be no evidence whatsoever that I, Edwin Squire IV, ever existed.  The Squire lineage, my sole and supreme responsibility, shunned heretofore, would wither with the wintertime of my life.  It was winter now, though the local weather wasn’t any indication.  Instead of rewriting the final chapter of my book, I composed a pithy personal ad to include in the forthcoming February issue of the Oasis Gazette:

___________________________________________________________________________

SINGLE WHITE MALE seeks SINGLE WHITE FEMALE

I am a well-dressed history buff.  Cultured.  Classy.  28.  Should enjoy long walks in the trailer park, classical music, history, and tea.  Must desire to start family immediately!  Pet birds are my pet peeve.  If you own one, don’t bother.

___________________________________________________________________________

“Twenty-eight, Ed?”  Dawn had circled the ad.  She was wearing earrings for the first time in her life.  “Fudged a few years, did ya?”  She and Sue were thirty-something.

“Must have been a typo,” I blushed, though it most certainly was not.  I had hoped to beguile a younger, more fertile generation than my own, and, upon making their acquaintance, charm them ineffably until age was a distinction rather than a disadvantage.  In a way, I was pleased that Dawn had detected the error, for it was proof of just how rarely I err.  Besides, if anyone were going to call attention to it, I should hope she was once a pupil of mine.

The only reply to my ad came from Unit # 2.  They invited me to tea one afternoon in mid-February.  I sat in the threadbare La-Z-Boy.  Dawn sat across from me on the sofa-bed, currently a sofa, with her legs crossed like mine.  Sue served the tea silently, bowing her head slightly as she tipped the piping kettle.  Having topped us off, she took her seat beside Dawn, harvested her hair over one shoulder, then folded her thin hands in her lap.  As usual, Sue was dressed like a peppermint.

“You finished that book of yers?” asked Dawn.  Her thick hands clutched to her knees, pale boulders exposed beneath khaki shorts.

“My autobiography is a work-in-progress.”

“When you fixin to finish?”

“It will seek its own level,” I explained, hoping to change the topic.  “When will you two move out of this dump?”

“We don’t aim to move.”

“Tell me again.  How long have you been roommates?”

“Since high-school.”  Dawn glanced at Sue, who kept her sight focused on the floor.  “But we’s morn roommates, Ed, me and Sue.”

“I am well aware of that.”  I blew the surface of the tea.  “You are the best of friends.”

“We’s morn friends, Ed.  Me and Sue, we’s partners.”  Dawn took Sue’s thin hands and held them.

“Business partners or partners in crime?”

“Neether.  But more like the latter if you make me choose.  Speakin of business, Ed.

We’s got a proposition for ya, me and Sue.”

I placed my teacup on the coffee table.

“We’s been talkin some, and, well,” Dawn cleared her throat, “we may be able to accommodate ya.  Regardin the ad.”

“Which of you?”  I hoped it would be Sue.  I bet her breath smelled like peppermint.

“Both of us.”

“At the same time?”

“That ain’t what we had in mind, Ed.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?”

“Me and Sue, we was hopin you might be willin to do it alone.  Then give us, you know, the leftovers.”

“I am afraid I don’t follow.”

“Nowadays, Ed, a man and woman don’t have to meet halfway to make a baby.”

“So I’ve heard.”  I leaned back in the Lazyboy.  “They have depositories for that sort of procedure.”

“Sure they do, Ed.  But me and Sue, we’d rather do it ourself.  We’s do-it-yerself kinda gals.”  Dawn rolled up her sleeve to show me a tattoo.  She told me she had stitched it into her bicep with indigo ink and a straight pin.

“Is that some sort of acronym?” I asked.

“It’s her initials.”  Dawn pointed at Sue.

I had seen my share of tattoos in the halls of Eldorado High.  Dawn’s needlework was respectable.  “This procedure would be trickier than a tattoo.”

“It’s simple enough—a cup on yer end and a turkey baster on ours.  Sue’s a candy striper at the hospital.  She’ll get everythang we need and be yer nurse for the day.  We aim to conduct ourself professionallike, Ed.  No funny business or nothin.”

I sat deep in that Lazyboy and contemplated: so that’s why Sue dresses like a peppermint.

“Besides,” Dawn added.  The truth came out, “we ain’t got money enough to buy none.”

“Why me?  I can name dozens of viral men in this very neighborhood who would be happy to lend you a hand.”

“They’s pigs, Ed, every last one.  They think like pigs.  They live in a sty.  Stead of cars, they drive hogs.  And they dumb as a quarry of rocks.  But you’s a sweetheart, Ed.  You got class and culture and you’s a history buff.  We don’t know no geniuses.  You’s the only genius in the en-tire Oasis.  Our clock’s a-ticking, Ed.  Tick, tock.  Tick, tock.  Just you listen…”

Indeed, I could perceive the passage of time.  But it was not Dawn or Sue ticking, it was a birdhouse above the mantle.  I wanted to leave before that cuckoo sprung out on a coil.

Dawn was squeezing the color out of Sue’s thin hands.

Sue was clinching her toes in the moss green carpet.

The three of us sat still, listening to the figurative ticking of their biological clocks.

“Please.”

It was the smallest voice I ever heard.  When I looked up, Sue was staring at me, and Dawn was staring at Sue.

So here I am, back in Unit # 2, my blood boiling like water in a teakettle.  Betty Boop is doing a hula dance in a lei and grass skirt.  My body is arched and rigid.  My toes curl.  Like a teakettle, my head is whistling, louder the longer I wait.  Betty Boop.  Betty Boop.  Betty Boop.  Betty Booooooooooooooooop.

I fumble the plastic cup, lying supine on the sofa-bed while experiencing an indescribable sensation of freefall.  A charge of corporeal electricity shoots up the length of my spine.  My body begins to thaw but that whistling in my head fails to cease.

“Everythang all right in there?” Dawn knocks on the door.

I try to reply but find myself speechless.

“Everythang all right in there, Edwin?”

I attempt to stand but can not move a muscle.

“Ready or not,” Dawn says with a note of urgency in her voice, “here we come.”

By the time they barge in, my being has detached from my body and drifted to the corner of the trailer where it hovers undetected like a surveillance camera.  To them, I must look like an adolescent, all knees and elbows.  Beside me is an overturned plastic cup.

Dawn rushes to the bedside.  “Save the leftovers, Sue!  In the freezer!  Hurry!  Fore they all swim off!”

Sue salvages the specimen with a teaspoon, scoop by scoop.

“He’s turnin cold.”  Dawn puts her hand on my chest.  But the pain is not in my chest.  It is in my brain.  “And blue as a berry.”  She retracts her hand, stingily.  “Ed got caught with his pants down.  Look at that thing.  We’ll have to wait thirty-six hours fore callin the po-lice.”

Sue stores the specimen in the freezer then returns to comfort Dawn.  They embrace in the center of the moss green carpet, Sue’s hair swirling around them like a shroud.  Sue releases Dawn and pulls the sheet over my face.  They quit crying long enough to laugh, spotting the three peaks of my cadaver: nose and toes and, well, you get the picture.

After biding their time for a day and a half Dawn spins 911 into an outdated rotary phone.

“Now Sue, when the po-lice arrive, me and you’s gotta conduct ourself proffessionallike.”

From the vicinity of Albuquerque, an ambulance speeds its way down I-25.  Those men will take me away, away from my home, away from my unfinished autobiography.  Come to think of it, my life never did flash before my eyes, only an obituary that, in my absence, will never appear in the March issue of the Oasis Gazette.

Yance Wyatt earned a master’s degree in fiction from the University of Southern California, where he now teaches and serves as director of the Writing Center.  His screenplay won the Silver Brad Award in the 2009 Movie Script Contest and his poetry is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA: the journal of west coast writers and artists.  He lives with his wife in Los Angeles and can be contacted at: william.wyatt@usc.edu

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Written by Yance Wyatt & Posted on March 28th, 2010
Tags :: Fiction, humor, old age, short story

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Dear Reader,

Hello and welcome to The Basement Archive, you’ve reached the space under the stairs of the Dark Comedy Hour. We intend to use this place as an ongoing web journal featuring some of the fine poetry and short stories we’ve been receiving from across the internet.
When we first started putting this site together a little while ago, we dreamed of creating a little internet world comprised of poems and stories reflecting varied aspects of life, but all with a sense of directness and honesty of representation. We were especially interested in stories that came from out-of-the-way corners of the world, preferably darker ones, and ones that portrayed unique points-of-view. Above all, we sought stories and poems with real energy.
I’m happy to say that now, thanks to the overwhelming response we’ve gotten from writers to our forthcoming print journal, we can at last start building our archive. For the first entry, we’ve selected a poem that deals with themes of writers and writing, entitled “Medicine Man: I Don’t Want to Be” by Audrey McLain.
Your Archivist will be posting new stories and poems to this page periodically. Submissions to the Basement Archive can be directed to journal@darkcomedyhour.com . Please allow us a considerable interval to respond to your submissions.

sincerely yours,
-The Archivist

Medicine Man: I Don’t Want to Be

I

Sitting on a plane, I wonder if I
Look as wrecked as I feel; If the people
Boarding can tell. If they notice my hands
Shaking as I write this poem, that my
Body is breaking down, my sanity
Is long gone; That I am a heart-broken
Girl- barren, but from a different kind
Of breaking- and that the only things
In my life not falling apart are my
addictions.

There is strange terrain passing below me,
But what strikes me most is that I am here,
On a plane to rehab, and the only thing
I can think about is him?

And it’s all so trite, so overdue;
The setting is always the same as the rise.
It is a surrender, an archaic
Crumbling, a pathetic loss of footing.
I never wanted to write about him
Or the small patches of sunlight that fell
Through his window early in the mornings.

So maybe this is too much. But he and I,
We are writers, and the intensity
Of our human experience must singe,
Brand, scar, cut, spear, hurt enough to imprint
A permanent mark on the world with words.

But, somehow my work always digresses.
Surely the dark will hide me
And the light become night around me.

Dear God,
Look on me and answer: What are the roots
That clutch? I always said, Do not censor:
Let it be twisted, demonic, spiraling
Out of itself and onto the world.
My writing. My life. Myself.

And now I am dying,
In every sense of the word.

I am about to land
In phoenix.

II

Wasted,
Wreckage scraps
Piling into the dump,
We lay dismal,
Helpless
(Empty and desolate
Is the sea),

Wounded and tainted and
Out of my fucking mind-
Distract, distract, distract,
Think Hemingway think
Paris think early evenings
Think Him think
Stumbling up the stairs
Pressed against the walls
In the doorway on the floors
Think little white lies
That slipped out in whispers
And a bit of self-indulgence, yes,
But-
Genuine, right?
Fucking honesty, right?
Well, at least
It was worth
Writing about.

Art, I think,
Used to be easier,
Toxic and breathing,
Living inside of the storm
That knows there is nothing poetic
In maintaining sanity.

But
Sometimes,
We must be a story
Shattered by our own
Isolated existence.
I sit in the stillness and stare,
My eyes wide with desperation,
But the only way out is through

And the end result
Is
Go.

III

Sometimes I fear
That my pen will never move
Beyond the boundaries
Of drugs and painful sex,
Of blackouts in bars
That lead to accidental blowjobs.

Sometimes I fear
That I don’t really know anything
About poetry,
Because, honestly,
How many times
Has this been written before?

Sometimes I fear
That my fearlessness
Will facilitate my failure.

IV

Just a warning:
Forgive them, Lord,
They know not what they do.

I heard he was spending the entire summer
In Reno,
Just for the strippers.

Into myself?
Of course I am.

This is a show,
A circus of sorts.
I bandage up my wounds
In front of you,
Tightly wrapping the gauze
Until the circulation is
Cut,
And you react.
I sleep with him,
And you react.
I go to rehab,
And you react.

So of course I am your target.
Of course I am.

Don’t you get it?
This is the most confessional shit
I’ve ever written.
And I know what backlash I’ll get for it

But I have won.

Because you are
Still reading,
Because
You
Watch
Me.

Just a warning:
What you reap
Is what you sow.

V

Struggling against the rain
Pounding against the packed earth:
This is breathing.

Find me,
Stumbling against the muted calling
Of my own name.

Lead me,
Lay me down
Under the white flowers
Sprinkled in the trees.

Holy, holy-
It’s hanging in the air;
My hair is wild
And I am free.

VI

Sitting on a plane, I wonder if I
Look the way that I feel; If the people
Boarding can tell. If they notice the way
I walk, I speak, I stare at them because
I know much better now.

You discover a lot about yourself
As a writer when you’re an alcoholic.
Mainly that you are out of your
Fucking mind,
But also
That you are whatever
You want to be,
That most people are slaves
Of the product,
Not process,
That poems do not always
Have to resolve,
And that you save yourself,
Or you remain unsaved.

Nothing, O Lord,
The formless is all that
Can be-
The inaction, the lack of doing,
Of not being something,
But rather
Just being.

Audrey McLain is a junior at Northwestern University where she studies journalism. She has never actually published anything, but maintains an optimistic outlook. She loves Indian food, public libraries, and Amy Winehouse.

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Written by Audrey McLain,The Archivist & Posted on March 19th, 2010
Tags :: about, poetry

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