Bright, brief flashes of what ifs
What if the dog can understand me,
is both listening and analyzing my music?
What if I am the only living being?
Sparingly sits in the easy chair by the window because he is afraid to use up its juices. Is the holy grail's power finite?
I found the grail
all by myself.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
A tragic flaw is a crack in an otherwise invulnerable shield. In Thompson's case, the wood in his solid Anglo-Saxon self, if a shield, a large perfectly symmetric circle, thick oak bound around with a steel ring, the wood had cracked because he had soaked it with a cleansing agent, til it was dried out and brittle.
The screaming of pigs. The peptobismo light of the sun coming across the sky at dawn. The pens and then the ride through the tunnels.
One bright spot, a connection, in an otherwise dim day. To open the box, to find it not empty, but to find the long-awaited e-mail, a letter, a token, a sign, a branch broken off the tree and carved into something personal. This is to live for. Live wires amidst the tangled vines of dead ones. The reverse of the mesh of Christmas Lights, snarled up in the box, with the one bulb out somewhere.
Let virtual dogs lie.
The screaming of pigs. The peptobismo light of the sun coming across the sky at dawn. The pens and then the ride through the tunnels.
One bright spot, a connection, in an otherwise dim day. To open the box, to find it not empty, but to find the long-awaited e-mail, a letter, a token, a sign, a branch broken off the tree and carved into something personal. This is to live for. Live wires amidst the tangled vines of dead ones. The reverse of the mesh of Christmas Lights, snarled up in the box, with the one bulb out somewhere.
Let virtual dogs lie.
He only stopped to look at the notice lying amidst the leaves on the barely used sidewalk because the day before there was one and now there were two, the second laid neatly atop the first. He reached down and pulled them up. It was on stiff white paper, dirtied, and centered across the page in old fashioned bold letters was:
(and pretend I change the font here)
You Have
Been Referred
to an
Entomologist ( change to ?)
(and pretend I change the font here)
You Have
Been Referred
to an
Entomologist ( change to ?)
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
hipsters
I would say that the trouble began down at the laundry mat. The machines stopped working. All of them, all at once. I was there and the lady says to me "What can you do? What can I do? I can't do anything." I don't know what to do. I stare at her while she sweats. It is hot out. She says "Am I insane?" and I tell her she isn't. Then she sits for a while. There is a bunch of us there in the laundrymat. And we're all gathered around her counter. She says after a while "Do you think its god?" The group looks at me, because evidently I've gathered some kind of credibility because I was the one she was talking to. I say that I doubt it. That its probably a problem with the electricity. A Mexican lady points out that the electricity is still on. The lights are on and the machines are still on, they just stopped turning. I suggest that it might have to do with the water pressure. The owner goes to the sink, still sweating, and moistens a very dirty towelette when she turns on the faucet. She wipes off some of the sweat with this. She looks at me. I said that I don't know, but there's no point in staying around. So I take my clothes out of the dryer, not very dry, and put them in my basket and go out of the store. I hear cheering behind me after I walk out the door. The machines are back on.
I walk back in, put my clothes back in the dryer, and then all the machines turn off. The crowd,
I walk back in, put my clothes back in the dryer, and then all the machines turn off. The crowd,
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Grant Edwards, Or A Truly Precious and Instructive Tale
A Precious Tale of Instructive Qualities, being largely an account placed before the court in the trial of Rebecca A. Walker
Grant departed his 21st year with morbid fascination. He had a distinct problem: he had never known death. Not one of his family members had died. All four grandparents were alive and limber. Not even one of his pets had died, except the salamanders he fried when he left the heat lamp on when he was six, burned crisp into slender, black fries. Old Sparky was still galumphing spryly, eating tampons with gusto. Whiskers the cat had gone further into crotchety-ness (however, she still swiped with vigor, licking the blood from her claws just like an innocent kitten.) Rollums, his large yellow fish, had subsisted fairly well on algae for much of its twelve year life. Not one of his friends had died, not one of his friend's friends...or his parent's friends, or his friend's parents.
Despite having seven family members in the New York City Fire Department on September 11, despite his father having the 13th most dangerous job in America, despite his brother's occupation as a race-car driver and two cousins in the Marines, he had never had so much as a passing glance from death. He had no idea what death looked like, not even the silhouette. There were some faint scents remaining, that's all. These he sniffed like a bloodhound:
1. In his high school class, one girl had died, three years after graduation, in mysterious circumstances. She was not pretty and consequently not popular. He attended both wakes, witnessed the funeral from a telescope in the trees, and took her friends out to dinner, one by one. He slept with two of them (the ones that didn't cry, also the least ugly). The prettiest one confessed that she had died of accidental asphyxiation during masturbation. And that was all he learned about Maeve Zimmer, a silent girl who sat in the back of every class.
2. A co-worker of his father had died of a heart-attack at fifty-one. Grant had never met him, but he loved him. He wept over old photographs, tearfully asked his father to repeat the old tales until his father ignored him with weary shakes of the head, and anonymously sent the man's wife flowers and his children happy books about “taking the road into the land of infinity.”
3. He had successfully gone to see a man throw himself off the Outerbridge, but this seemed contrived. Who would jump off the Outerbridge anyway? There was the Bayonne, Verrazano, and (the perennial favorite, not too much farther, and in a more well-known borough) the Brooklyn, all much more obviously appropriate?
This was all the death that his scarlet-tinged and impish nose had ever sniffed. His heart paced nervously back and forth over the paucity of circumstances. He asked himself: “Can this be a good thing?”
He forced himself to read the germane parts of religious texts. He found the karmic cycles too light, heaven and hell too heavy, and the Tibetan book of the dead completely irrelevant. He settled, diplomatically and precariously, but confidently and often primly, like the butterfly that he was, on a grimly slender form of existentialism composed largely of a single axiom: “I may die at any moment.” There was one corollary acquired nearly simultaneous to that one in a grand moment of satori during his senior year of high school in an SAT Review Class: (this, as he described it):
The dull man with thick round features and a scratchy face got up from his desk, raised his hands like a preacher and droned perilously “Carpe Diem” and went to the window. The shade leaped open. In wave form, the back row of the class wearily lifted their heads from the desks and then receded. “Carpe diem,” he flatly intoned, “Seize the day. Seize the day.”1
And from there his behavior took on a troubled pinkish color. Or maybe it was salmon. Mauve? In any case its not difficult to walk along the painted line at the edge of a road, but once you are aware of the cliff-side tumbling below you and the cars speeding by beside you...
It may have been that he was practicing a sort of fatalistic “memento mori” but his already uncertain academic rigor took a plunge towards even greater flaccidity. He affected a studied nihilism. He attempted to act chummy with everyone, all the time. Possibly the only thing that saved him from imminent self-destruction by disease or bridge-diving was a natural conservatism, a distaste for excess, which left him as an imprecise epicurean with an almost aristocratic and really very tiresome interest in death.
This manifested itself like you would think: dark humor, experimentation with drugs, desultory sexual deviation, trips to and photo albums of 19th century cemeteries, the love of a dark Virginian, an encyclopedic knowledge of diseases, a somber mien with manic bouts of taciturnity and fabulousness-and then in other ways-non-attachment to material things, often given away, including money, and a consequent lack thereof, a compassion bordering on the insane, sympathizing with the totally unsympathetic i.e. whores, drunks, guidos, thugs, administrative types and the contentedly middle-aged, and a dislike for vegans, soldiers, art students, greenpeacers and other, as he called them: “moral penny-pinchers,” a physical fear of the elderly, a dislike of sleep, and an a-type personality's (which he certainly wasn't) abhorrence to “wasting time.” Though you never knew someone who wasted so much time.
Like he knew he wasn't going to last long, he lived extravagantly off who knows what? Student loans? He would get his friends matching antique cigarette cases and drank fine scotch in measured sips out of an ivory-covered flask. “It keeps me going” he said. He was always employed but he never worked hard. He valued a job for its ability to allow him to “philosophize like a vizier” as he grandiloquently described it. He worked as a salesman and would just barely make commissions as he spent so much time hearing the airs of disgruntled men on disability, retired seamen, gamblers, con artists, failed artists and generally people who had something to say. He had a job in a pawn shop and would commiserate so gushingly that the clientele loved him and came there specifically when he was working, but the owners thought it was bad for business, the too much talking. For a time, he was marginally good at conning money out of people for greenpeace, but he was, of course, ultimately disillusioned. His favorite situation was his only corporate job, a well-stipended internship; he did next to nothing; he went on e-bay a lot and occasionally he cross-checked some names and some numbers. At the time of these events, he was working as a tutor for under-privileged teenagers, supposedly in the fine points of English, but he saw his function as more of a pep-talker; he tried to get them to think about the importance of doing well, believing they would teach themselves well enough, if they could only have the right amount of moxie. All in all, and despite his best efforts, he lived in a reasonably pleasant bubble which promised to stay that way for a reasonably long period of time.
She was walking in front of him. She was pushing a pram or leaning on it. And she was surrounded on two sides with two four-foot boys. They went to cross the busy street and he alongside them. In the effortless manner reserved to the elderly, she began a conversation, assuming some familiarity unrecognized by Grant. She introduced her grandsons: “Children, you remember Grant?” And, turning to him: “They're nice as pie, these two-two slices of their father.”
“So what are you here for, occupationally?” she asked, “What do you do as a career?”
He replied that he worked as a tutor at a high school and would like to become a teacher.
“What are you doing here, then?” she began in the inoffensively accusatory manner also reserved to those past a certain peak.
“You'll never get a job here in these cushy suburban schools-unless you're good at maths-excuse me, mathematics-are you good at maths?” Without stopping, as she knew the answer, she said
“You should be looking in the more urban areas. Flatbush or Midwood. Thats where I began. That's where you should be. “-Is that in the Bronx or Brooklyn?” The later. You could get set up there easily, as neat as a pin.
They crossed the street and he followed, she gently leaning on the pram and on me. Poor old lady. She is going to die soon. They entered the worn brick driveway of a house across from the church he used to go to and then he recognized them as the Peterson family.
The woman's daughter, Nancy, about forty five years old, took a doll from the pram. It was of a child dressed in a leopard costume and must have been very old. She took it and waving it around said brusquely to Grant “I don't know why she keeps all these old things. They're no use to anybody. Since you're volunteering, do you think you could move some more of the things here into the truck there.” He looked at the gargantuan pile of rags and knick-knacks strewn around the front door.
“Where is all this going?” he said, fingering the heap.
“They're out-sourcing it” the elder Mrs. Peterson pronounced. He looked at her, confused. “And they're out-sourcing me too,” she added.
“Oh, we are not,” the woman interrupted.
“The junk is going to my sister and law and so is the heap, I mean my mother.” She slapped her hands on her jeans. “I don't know where she gets this 'out-sourced.' She's going to Pennsylvania, which is a fine state, so far as I know.”
“Out-sourced,” the old-woman delightfully insisted.
“Fine, you are out-sourced, mom,” the woman let drop, “Outsourced to Lorraine's.”
“Where does she get these ideas? Outsourced? She's lucky we don't send her all the way to China; she's such a pest. She'd terrorize the place to pieces. ”
“The outrageous ingratitude” the old woman raised her clear voice to Webster-ian levels of power and resonance, with a clearly self-righteous and only slightly ironic sense of dramatic appreciation “I gave you your son, your lover, your...
“-You mean my husband,” she said laughing.
“Speaking of the devil!” a voice boomed out from a now open doorway, that of the familiar balding, bulk of Mr. Peterson, his former Sunday School teacher who had heart-heartbreakingly pleaded with Grant to take over, to “just teach the stories” despite Grant's acidulous skepticism. Grant froze, speechless, while Mr. Peterson walked out onto the stoop laughing, and, clasping his shoulders from above, gave Grant that old protestant guilt sell: “So you're coming to the Halloween party this Saturday?”
Grant, taking the proper tack, or the easy one, first feigned ignorance and then interest, then took the quickest exit. But the dear nihilist suffered intensely from a tenacious conscience on the walk home. A sweet mix of memories of church, coffee-klatsches and a desire to make those dear people, the thick man and the little old woman, happy. But he was not of the type to suffer alone. [add more here]He would drag others into it. He asked not one but two of his girlfriends, folks. He asked lithe Rebecca Walker, ballerina pretty and deeply mired in dirty amours with the schmuck, the confidence man. And he requested the presence of Melissa Pica. Not in love, but just a sly thick-hipped open-legged stuff of a girl, sheer femme de l'exterieur, if I may use that phrase.
A conflict? Certainly. A dumb thing? Undoubtedly. How could such a nice young man do such a thing? The point of contention is: did he intend contention? Probably not intentionally. He may have said that he didn't expect them to both come, that he thought one would not want to come. He was both overly modest and overly unconscionable. He may have intended to persuade or lie to one of the two in order to get the other not to come. Or he may subconsciously have intended to have them both come. Perhaps he was less modest underneath. Considering what we know of the power of the subconscious, the last is almost certainly true.
And when the night of the party arrived he warned them both: “I could not help it: Rebecca is coming.” “I could not help it: Melissa is coming.” And this is like Paul Revere to them: “Awake! Awake! Defend yourselves, arm yourselves!” These doughty patriots did not back down. They would defend the fields they plowed, snipe from the bushes.
Grant arrived at the party as the jovial old man. Uncle Sam? Colonel Sanders? The Venerable Bede? Grandpa? Andrew Jackson? Who knows? He had a knobbly cane. A tall top-hat. A dun-colored suit [add more details. Jonathan Edwards?] Unforgettable. Stupid.
There were a number of prizes. There was a dance. He talked with people he had known all his life. Aunts and Uncles, cousins, kids he used to play with from around the block and down the street. He had known them all all his life. It was only recently he had begun to forget, not going to church anymore. But there was an unfortunate number of unknown teenagers. Trying to attract the youth, the future, as they may be.
Add more here
Towards the end of the night he ran into, as he inevitably should, he ran into the devil himself again: Mr. Peterson, standing coyly and alone at the foot of the stairs. He had on a devil costume, but he had mixed in some furry pieces of a bear costume which grotesquely complemented his bear-like natural features. “What do you want-” the devil-bear Mr. Peterson asked, putting his long-clawed hoof mittens back on, “for your soul?”
“-For my soul?” Grant replied, “Mr. Bear-devil, I would like some very delicious and undoubtedly expensive scotch, I would like to meet some genuinely good people, and I would like to know what death is.”
The bear-devil smiled, clapped his hands/paws, said “It is done” and disappeared towards the punch-bowl.
Grant laughed and turned on a dime, rapping his cane down snappily. He peered down the stairs at the crowd for someone to talk to. Rebecca stood alone at the other end of the room carelessly fingering through the church library. It was filled with a few collections of old sermons, a book by Reinhold Niebuhr, but mostly pamphlets with interrogative titles: What About The Other Side? What is God's Plan? If Jesus Were a Salesman... There was also a Family Circus collection which she thought appropriately painful. Grant went first to say good-bye to his mother and father and his little sister, who were leaving. The floor was now irritatingly consumed by debauched or soon to be debauched teenagers, grinding along with a few chaperons of a middling age, and one or two of a more horrified and censorious advanced age, including the elder Mrs. Peterson. Melissa was being chatted up by two youths significantly below her, at least in physical age. Grant's fateful move was to go to Melissa, perhaps gallantly to rescue her, perhaps gallantly take her home. But Rebecca would have none of that. On a cool interception path she quickly crossed the room and met Grant before he could confront Melissa. What scene ensued is difficult to tell after the fact. In any case, there was raised voices, threats, accusations and cross-accusations, and Melissa left crying like a baby. Grant followed but was rebuffed, at least temporarily. He returned to the room and to Rebecca's attentions. She managed to lure him out the door and into the wood behind the church with the promise of a small container of Scotch.
There I pulled out from my leather holster embossed with stars my Smith & Wesson .38. I, whose intention was for him to never know death, placed the muzzle in his belly-button and released the trigger. The cartridge exploded in a loud but strangely shrill hollywood “pop!” He said “But this is the worst way,” and lay down on the ground to writhe. I could not say anything. I could have said, “You love Tolstoy,” but that would have been too, too much. I counted the silence to ten, thinking that was probably long enough and shot him again, this time in the left ventricle.
The funny thing is: I knew him only tangentially! Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har.
***********************************************************************************
It is at this point, I suppose, that I should introduce myself properly. I was his date to the Halloween party. That was me. I went as a cowgirl. I could tell that he thought I was charming. More than charming. Interminably, boringly, relentlessly charming. As delightful as a rolling log. Or became so when compared to that overgrown lolita, that freshly uncanned dog-food Melissa, with her breasts rolling out like cannonballs. No charm. When she wasn't around I could make his collar pop up with electricity, Push his buttons with alacrity, turn on the lights brightly! But only when she was not around. Through the evening I would sidle up to him, cowpoke like and talk about how much my bottom semi-circumference ached from ridin' the trails, how I was so tired from such a viciously unruly herd, how I had been on such a long drive and hadn't even fully fended off all those horrible cattle-rustlers. He knew what I was talking about. He smiled like a clever five year old because I made him feel like the beloved ruler of a small efficiently run country, which I was.
But slimy Melissa so obscenely ruined it all. Carting her wares in and giving free samples to anyone with reasonably good vision. Don't tell me coming as a French Maid to a church Halloween party is decent. Don't even try.
How could I forgive him for inviting us both? Utterly ungentlemanly. Sharply inhumane.
It is said women don't like good men and I suppose this is true, but ultimately, maybe Grant was a decent guy. I regret shooting him in a calculated fit of jealous rage, but he so much wanted to die.
I am eager to end, anxious to finish, but I'm obliged to keep going.
My “takingness,” my “quality of being pleasing” as he himself described me, certainly helped to attract him. Physically I'm plain jane. Slightly below average, on the thin side. If you're looking for the tag-along tom-boy younger sister type, that describes me to a “t.” But, see, I know I'm a girl, a fact I'm fond of, and I'm smart. So I know what to do. And how to do. And I've got what he called “takingness.” According to the deceased, it was a very attractive quality.
So why would I? How could I? What made me do it? Of course I don't know. And I claim extenuating circumstances: I'm on the pill and I was not yet eighteen at the time of the murder, and my rabbit just died.
There you are. Thats the whole story, “Neat as a pin,” as Mrs. Peterson would have said. The blanks of course did some damage through his belly-button, and could probably have caused a heart-attack, but he is a vigorous bastard, and is no doubt telling this story somewhere today. Mrs. Peterson died of fright, of course.
Compiled for the court with the ungracious help of Melissa Pica and Grant Edwards by
Becca Walker
Grant departed his 21st year with morbid fascination. He had a distinct problem: he had never known death. Not one of his family members had died. All four grandparents were alive and limber. Not even one of his pets had died, except the salamanders he fried when he left the heat lamp on when he was six, burned crisp into slender, black fries. Old Sparky was still galumphing spryly, eating tampons with gusto. Whiskers the cat had gone further into crotchety-ness (however, she still swiped with vigor, licking the blood from her claws just like an innocent kitten.) Rollums, his large yellow fish, had subsisted fairly well on algae for much of its twelve year life. Not one of his friends had died, not one of his friend's friends...or his parent's friends, or his friend's parents.
Despite having seven family members in the New York City Fire Department on September 11, despite his father having the 13th most dangerous job in America, despite his brother's occupation as a race-car driver and two cousins in the Marines, he had never had so much as a passing glance from death. He had no idea what death looked like, not even the silhouette. There were some faint scents remaining, that's all. These he sniffed like a bloodhound:
1. In his high school class, one girl had died, three years after graduation, in mysterious circumstances. She was not pretty and consequently not popular. He attended both wakes, witnessed the funeral from a telescope in the trees, and took her friends out to dinner, one by one. He slept with two of them (the ones that didn't cry, also the least ugly). The prettiest one confessed that she had died of accidental asphyxiation during masturbation. And that was all he learned about Maeve Zimmer, a silent girl who sat in the back of every class.
2. A co-worker of his father had died of a heart-attack at fifty-one. Grant had never met him, but he loved him. He wept over old photographs, tearfully asked his father to repeat the old tales until his father ignored him with weary shakes of the head, and anonymously sent the man's wife flowers and his children happy books about “taking the road into the land of infinity.”
3. He had successfully gone to see a man throw himself off the Outerbridge, but this seemed contrived. Who would jump off the Outerbridge anyway? There was the Bayonne, Verrazano, and (the perennial favorite, not too much farther, and in a more well-known borough) the Brooklyn, all much more obviously appropriate?
This was all the death that his scarlet-tinged and impish nose had ever sniffed. His heart paced nervously back and forth over the paucity of circumstances. He asked himself: “Can this be a good thing?”
He forced himself to read the germane parts of religious texts. He found the karmic cycles too light, heaven and hell too heavy, and the Tibetan book of the dead completely irrelevant. He settled, diplomatically and precariously, but confidently and often primly, like the butterfly that he was, on a grimly slender form of existentialism composed largely of a single axiom: “I may die at any moment.” There was one corollary acquired nearly simultaneous to that one in a grand moment of satori during his senior year of high school in an SAT Review Class: (this, as he described it):
The dull man with thick round features and a scratchy face got up from his desk, raised his hands like a preacher and droned perilously “Carpe Diem” and went to the window. The shade leaped open. In wave form, the back row of the class wearily lifted their heads from the desks and then receded. “Carpe diem,” he flatly intoned, “Seize the day. Seize the day.”1
And from there his behavior took on a troubled pinkish color. Or maybe it was salmon. Mauve? In any case its not difficult to walk along the painted line at the edge of a road, but once you are aware of the cliff-side tumbling below you and the cars speeding by beside you...
It may have been that he was practicing a sort of fatalistic “memento mori” but his already uncertain academic rigor took a plunge towards even greater flaccidity. He affected a studied nihilism. He attempted to act chummy with everyone, all the time. Possibly the only thing that saved him from imminent self-destruction by disease or bridge-diving was a natural conservatism, a distaste for excess, which left him as an imprecise epicurean with an almost aristocratic and really very tiresome interest in death.
This manifested itself like you would think: dark humor, experimentation with drugs, desultory sexual deviation, trips to and photo albums of 19th century cemeteries, the love of a dark Virginian, an encyclopedic knowledge of diseases, a somber mien with manic bouts of taciturnity and fabulousness-and then in other ways-non-attachment to material things, often given away, including money, and a consequent lack thereof, a compassion bordering on the insane, sympathizing with the totally unsympathetic i.e. whores, drunks, guidos, thugs, administrative types and the contentedly middle-aged, and a dislike for vegans, soldiers, art students, greenpeacers and other, as he called them: “moral penny-pinchers,” a physical fear of the elderly, a dislike of sleep, and an a-type personality's (which he certainly wasn't) abhorrence to “wasting time.” Though you never knew someone who wasted so much time.
Like he knew he wasn't going to last long, he lived extravagantly off who knows what? Student loans? He would get his friends matching antique cigarette cases and drank fine scotch in measured sips out of an ivory-covered flask. “It keeps me going” he said. He was always employed but he never worked hard. He valued a job for its ability to allow him to “philosophize like a vizier” as he grandiloquently described it. He worked as a salesman and would just barely make commissions as he spent so much time hearing the airs of disgruntled men on disability, retired seamen, gamblers, con artists, failed artists and generally people who had something to say. He had a job in a pawn shop and would commiserate so gushingly that the clientele loved him and came there specifically when he was working, but the owners thought it was bad for business, the too much talking. For a time, he was marginally good at conning money out of people for greenpeace, but he was, of course, ultimately disillusioned. His favorite situation was his only corporate job, a well-stipended internship; he did next to nothing; he went on e-bay a lot and occasionally he cross-checked some names and some numbers. At the time of these events, he was working as a tutor for under-privileged teenagers, supposedly in the fine points of English, but he saw his function as more of a pep-talker; he tried to get them to think about the importance of doing well, believing they would teach themselves well enough, if they could only have the right amount of moxie. All in all, and despite his best efforts, he lived in a reasonably pleasant bubble which promised to stay that way for a reasonably long period of time.
She was walking in front of him. She was pushing a pram or leaning on it. And she was surrounded on two sides with two four-foot boys. They went to cross the busy street and he alongside them. In the effortless manner reserved to the elderly, she began a conversation, assuming some familiarity unrecognized by Grant. She introduced her grandsons: “Children, you remember Grant?” And, turning to him: “They're nice as pie, these two-two slices of their father.”
“So what are you here for, occupationally?” she asked, “What do you do as a career?”
He replied that he worked as a tutor at a high school and would like to become a teacher.
“What are you doing here, then?” she began in the inoffensively accusatory manner also reserved to those past a certain peak.
“You'll never get a job here in these cushy suburban schools-unless you're good at maths-excuse me, mathematics-are you good at maths?” Without stopping, as she knew the answer, she said
“You should be looking in the more urban areas. Flatbush or Midwood. Thats where I began. That's where you should be. “-Is that in the Bronx or Brooklyn?” The later. You could get set up there easily, as neat as a pin.
They crossed the street and he followed, she gently leaning on the pram and on me. Poor old lady. She is going to die soon. They entered the worn brick driveway of a house across from the church he used to go to and then he recognized them as the Peterson family.
The woman's daughter, Nancy, about forty five years old, took a doll from the pram. It was of a child dressed in a leopard costume and must have been very old. She took it and waving it around said brusquely to Grant “I don't know why she keeps all these old things. They're no use to anybody. Since you're volunteering, do you think you could move some more of the things here into the truck there.” He looked at the gargantuan pile of rags and knick-knacks strewn around the front door.
“Where is all this going?” he said, fingering the heap.
“They're out-sourcing it” the elder Mrs. Peterson pronounced. He looked at her, confused. “And they're out-sourcing me too,” she added.
“Oh, we are not,” the woman interrupted.
“The junk is going to my sister and law and so is the heap, I mean my mother.” She slapped her hands on her jeans. “I don't know where she gets this 'out-sourced.' She's going to Pennsylvania, which is a fine state, so far as I know.”
“Out-sourced,” the old-woman delightfully insisted.
“Fine, you are out-sourced, mom,” the woman let drop, “Outsourced to Lorraine's.”
“Where does she get these ideas? Outsourced? She's lucky we don't send her all the way to China; she's such a pest. She'd terrorize the place to pieces. ”
“The outrageous ingratitude” the old woman raised her clear voice to Webster-ian levels of power and resonance, with a clearly self-righteous and only slightly ironic sense of dramatic appreciation “I gave you your son, your lover, your...
“-You mean my husband,” she said laughing.
“Speaking of the devil!” a voice boomed out from a now open doorway, that of the familiar balding, bulk of Mr. Peterson, his former Sunday School teacher who had heart-heartbreakingly pleaded with Grant to take over, to “just teach the stories” despite Grant's acidulous skepticism. Grant froze, speechless, while Mr. Peterson walked out onto the stoop laughing, and, clasping his shoulders from above, gave Grant that old protestant guilt sell: “So you're coming to the Halloween party this Saturday?”
Grant, taking the proper tack, or the easy one, first feigned ignorance and then interest, then took the quickest exit. But the dear nihilist suffered intensely from a tenacious conscience on the walk home. A sweet mix of memories of church, coffee-klatsches and a desire to make those dear people, the thick man and the little old woman, happy. But he was not of the type to suffer alone. [add more here]He would drag others into it. He asked not one but two of his girlfriends, folks. He asked lithe Rebecca Walker, ballerina pretty and deeply mired in dirty amours with the schmuck, the confidence man. And he requested the presence of Melissa Pica. Not in love, but just a sly thick-hipped open-legged stuff of a girl, sheer femme de l'exterieur, if I may use that phrase.
A conflict? Certainly. A dumb thing? Undoubtedly. How could such a nice young man do such a thing? The point of contention is: did he intend contention? Probably not intentionally. He may have said that he didn't expect them to both come, that he thought one would not want to come. He was both overly modest and overly unconscionable. He may have intended to persuade or lie to one of the two in order to get the other not to come. Or he may subconsciously have intended to have them both come. Perhaps he was less modest underneath. Considering what we know of the power of the subconscious, the last is almost certainly true.
And when the night of the party arrived he warned them both: “I could not help it: Rebecca is coming.” “I could not help it: Melissa is coming.” And this is like Paul Revere to them: “Awake! Awake! Defend yourselves, arm yourselves!” These doughty patriots did not back down. They would defend the fields they plowed, snipe from the bushes.
Grant arrived at the party as the jovial old man. Uncle Sam? Colonel Sanders? The Venerable Bede? Grandpa? Andrew Jackson? Who knows? He had a knobbly cane. A tall top-hat. A dun-colored suit [add more details. Jonathan Edwards?] Unforgettable. Stupid.
There were a number of prizes. There was a dance. He talked with people he had known all his life. Aunts and Uncles, cousins, kids he used to play with from around the block and down the street. He had known them all all his life. It was only recently he had begun to forget, not going to church anymore. But there was an unfortunate number of unknown teenagers. Trying to attract the youth, the future, as they may be.
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Towards the end of the night he ran into, as he inevitably should, he ran into the devil himself again: Mr. Peterson, standing coyly and alone at the foot of the stairs. He had on a devil costume, but he had mixed in some furry pieces of a bear costume which grotesquely complemented his bear-like natural features. “What do you want-” the devil-bear Mr. Peterson asked, putting his long-clawed hoof mittens back on, “for your soul?”
“-For my soul?” Grant replied, “Mr. Bear-devil, I would like some very delicious and undoubtedly expensive scotch, I would like to meet some genuinely good people, and I would like to know what death is.”
The bear-devil smiled, clapped his hands/paws, said “It is done” and disappeared towards the punch-bowl.
Grant laughed and turned on a dime, rapping his cane down snappily. He peered down the stairs at the crowd for someone to talk to. Rebecca stood alone at the other end of the room carelessly fingering through the church library. It was filled with a few collections of old sermons, a book by Reinhold Niebuhr, but mostly pamphlets with interrogative titles: What About The Other Side? What is God's Plan? If Jesus Were a Salesman... There was also a Family Circus collection which she thought appropriately painful. Grant went first to say good-bye to his mother and father and his little sister, who were leaving. The floor was now irritatingly consumed by debauched or soon to be debauched teenagers, grinding along with a few chaperons of a middling age, and one or two of a more horrified and censorious advanced age, including the elder Mrs. Peterson. Melissa was being chatted up by two youths significantly below her, at least in physical age. Grant's fateful move was to go to Melissa, perhaps gallantly to rescue her, perhaps gallantly take her home. But Rebecca would have none of that. On a cool interception path she quickly crossed the room and met Grant before he could confront Melissa. What scene ensued is difficult to tell after the fact. In any case, there was raised voices, threats, accusations and cross-accusations, and Melissa left crying like a baby. Grant followed but was rebuffed, at least temporarily. He returned to the room and to Rebecca's attentions. She managed to lure him out the door and into the wood behind the church with the promise of a small container of Scotch.
There I pulled out from my leather holster embossed with stars my Smith & Wesson .38. I, whose intention was for him to never know death, placed the muzzle in his belly-button and released the trigger. The cartridge exploded in a loud but strangely shrill hollywood “pop!” He said “But this is the worst way,” and lay down on the ground to writhe. I could not say anything. I could have said, “You love Tolstoy,” but that would have been too, too much. I counted the silence to ten, thinking that was probably long enough and shot him again, this time in the left ventricle.
The funny thing is: I knew him only tangentially! Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har-har-har. Har.
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It is at this point, I suppose, that I should introduce myself properly. I was his date to the Halloween party. That was me. I went as a cowgirl. I could tell that he thought I was charming. More than charming. Interminably, boringly, relentlessly charming. As delightful as a rolling log. Or became so when compared to that overgrown lolita, that freshly uncanned dog-food Melissa, with her breasts rolling out like cannonballs. No charm. When she wasn't around I could make his collar pop up with electricity, Push his buttons with alacrity, turn on the lights brightly! But only when she was not around. Through the evening I would sidle up to him, cowpoke like and talk about how much my bottom semi-circumference ached from ridin' the trails, how I was so tired from such a viciously unruly herd, how I had been on such a long drive and hadn't even fully fended off all those horrible cattle-rustlers. He knew what I was talking about. He smiled like a clever five year old because I made him feel like the beloved ruler of a small efficiently run country, which I was.
But slimy Melissa so obscenely ruined it all. Carting her wares in and giving free samples to anyone with reasonably good vision. Don't tell me coming as a French Maid to a church Halloween party is decent. Don't even try.
How could I forgive him for inviting us both? Utterly ungentlemanly. Sharply inhumane.
It is said women don't like good men and I suppose this is true, but ultimately, maybe Grant was a decent guy. I regret shooting him in a calculated fit of jealous rage, but he so much wanted to die.
I am eager to end, anxious to finish, but I'm obliged to keep going.
My “takingness,” my “quality of being pleasing” as he himself described me, certainly helped to attract him. Physically I'm plain jane. Slightly below average, on the thin side. If you're looking for the tag-along tom-boy younger sister type, that describes me to a “t.” But, see, I know I'm a girl, a fact I'm fond of, and I'm smart. So I know what to do. And how to do. And I've got what he called “takingness.” According to the deceased, it was a very attractive quality.
So why would I? How could I? What made me do it? Of course I don't know. And I claim extenuating circumstances: I'm on the pill and I was not yet eighteen at the time of the murder, and my rabbit just died.
There you are. Thats the whole story, “Neat as a pin,” as Mrs. Peterson would have said. The blanks of course did some damage through his belly-button, and could probably have caused a heart-attack, but he is a vigorous bastard, and is no doubt telling this story somewhere today. Mrs. Peterson died of fright, of course.
Compiled for the court with the ungracious help of Melissa Pica and Grant Edwards by
Becca Walker
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