Home Again

I was riding the train home from Philadelphia. Of course, strictly speaking, I wasn’t really riding it home. My home was a one bedroom apartment in the south side of Philadelphia, on a block of old brownstones. Indeed, my parents’ house ceased to be my home some time ago. I can’t remember when that happened though, what it was that tipped me off to the fact that house was someplace different than the place I had grown up in. Was it the new brand of soap in the bathroom? Was it the day my mother asked me to get the kidney beans from the pantry, only to find that they had been relocated three shelves down?

I don’t think most people notice these things, or at least, I never really did. But then, one Thanksgiving, or one evening when you are passing through to celebrate a relative’s birthday, perhaps even, your mother’s birthday, mysteriously, the house is a place where strangers live. You approach it as you would a friend’s house. Instead of turning the doorknob, you knock or ring the bell. You do this even though you have a key. The house smells different, in a way that you want to recognize but can’t. Then at the end of the night, when you still have no recollection of the scent, you assume that the house has always smelled just as it had that night.

And still, despite these changes, I tell friends and co-workers and girlfriends that I’m heading home for the weekend. That is what I said last night at the bar. “No, no, friends, I am expected at home tomorrow, no, no, I can’t drink anymore with you. No, no, I need to take an early train.” What I said was a lie, because I was not getting up early to take the train, I was getting up early to go to work. But my friends cannot respect working in an office at nine, five days a week. Instead, they are hipsters and graduate students and interesting people and they are doing all the wonderful things in the world that I cannot. And here I am riding the train out of Philadelphia in the middle of rush hour because I could not take a day off from working.

I bought a Wall Street Journal hoping to read it during the ride. I took it out at 30th Street Station, clutching it tightly as people rushed past me, hoping, I think, that the thin paper will shield me from vagrants and degenerates. Did you know that a newspaper would have been enough to protect you from the radioactive fallout generated at Hiroshima? That is of course, if you survived the blast. I placed the paper on the seat next to me, hoping it would keep the seat vacant.

The ploy fails and a girl with blue hair wearing a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt wants to sit in the seat. I place the paper on my lap with some hope still of reading it before the train gets to Trenton. Instead though, my attention is drawn to the scenery as we pull out of the station. The streets and neighborhoods and cityscape north of Philadelphia hardly is scenic with rows of crack houses, or at least what I imagine to be crack houses, and old toilet bowl factories from an era when our country made things, and abandoned parking lots and treeless parks. But I am fascinated by these things, by the old factories, the skeletons of ancient industry, and little strips of abandoned storefronts and piles of bricks, homeless ramblers, unfilled warehouses. The train rides high above all this gray.

Gray is the color of cities, of concrete and asphalt and old, dilapidated neighborhoods. The train does not pass anything green until we are well beyond the limits of Philadelphia, into suburbia, when grass sprouts out between buildings, much like a crocus pops through the snow of late winter. I have made this trip a hundred times before. But it has been a long time and things have changed, and I am watching the suburbs pass by hoping to spot these changes in attempt to make up for not spotting the changes I missed at my parents’ house. Even though we are roaring by these suburban streets, the differences are easy to spot.

Once, I thought I might like to live near here. I thought maybe I would have a home on the short blocks where I would walk to the train station and ride to my office. Once, I wanted a picket fence around a teal blue concrete pool with green plastic lawn furniture. I wanted to buy a pink flamingo and stick it in the center of my front lawn just to piss off the association members. Not now, though.

The train was slowing, arriving at the first of many suburban stations. This could be my stop, I thought, looking out onto the acres of tract homes. There were more now then there had been last year—last month, even. The train’s stop was prolonged for some unannounced reason, as if daring me to sample the bounty of suburban bliss. Not now though, not any longer.

I began to notice that the college girl next to me, red eyed and ill, had a particularly strong odor coming from her. She had not showered this morning and still clinging to her was the stink of the previous night’s tawdry deeds, the little sins, the spilt gin. And I knew what it was like to ride the train in the condition she was in, so I did my best to politely ignore her smell.

There it was, New Years Eve 1999, when the end of our world was predicted. My mother had stowed away supplies for a month, just in case things went really badly for us when the clocks all changed. Stay away from the cities, they said, mother had said. But the city was where the party was, where the girls were, where the girl was, and so where I was. We were drinking cheap tequila and golden rye whiskey some southern boy who I didn’t know had brought. It was an End of the World Party and we all wanted to be drunk when the apocalypse came to wipe us away.

Mary Anne Maxwell, dressed in a tight red dress, standing beside me, kissed some other drunken fool at the stroke of apocalypse. Did Mary Anne not understand who she was supposed to be kissing? And so I kissed a bottle of Jim Beam and slept on Fat, Naked Frank’s bedroom floor. In the morning, broken hearted, I was wondering why the end of the world had not come, and wishing it had. Fat, Naked Frank loaned me a University of Pennsylvania t-shirt. The shirt I had arrived in was now covered in awful looking stuff. And there I was, just as this blue haired girl next to me was, hung over and riding the train and hoping no one would notice the odor wafting around me.

In Trenton, I bought a Coke. I thought now, while I was waiting for the connecting train, how I would like to read the paper. But I realized then that I had left the paper on the train. I had lost track of the little blue haired girl, she having disappeared into Trenton’s dark abyss. The train I arrived on was preparing to return to Philadelphia now. The rush hour crowd was filling the station with folks headed home, to their real homes, to places that were no longer the house of their parents. There was no real rush here, no buzz like 30th Street Station would have at this time. I took a seat on the train next to two state workers chatting about office politics and indictments and the next election. I could not see out the windows, because the good seats had been taken by middle aged bureaucrats and overweight secretaries.

I knew though, that my stop was coming soon, even though I was not watching through the windows, because after all, you always can feel when you are home. And then we were there and I was getting off the train and walking down the platform stairs. How too, this small city had changed since I left. In high school we would walk across the river to here, to flirt with college girls and sneak into bars and pretend we were old. And then after high school, on winter break and spring break and summer break we would join up again on these streets to remember how things were. Now I didn’t care to remember. Those people were all far away, even those few who were married now, and living in their parents’ houses, but without their parents, those people who were now parents themselves. They would have small children playing t-ball on the same fields we did once.

My parent’s house was a few blocks across the river. I could have taken a cab, and in most recent trips, I have, not worrying about the four dollar fare. But tonight I wanted to walk as I had once. Of course, the walk was not the same. I hid my face as best I could from passing cars, hoping to avoid an awkward encounter with people formerly known as friends. They were strangers now anyway, so it probably didn’t matter much if they did see me. The walk was longer than I had remembered, and my leather loafers were not built for suburban wandering. The Corner Confectionary was filled with children spoiling their dinner. I knew as I passed by that I would run into someone I had known. Someone with a child, with a mortgage, someone who was excited about the new health plan they were enrolled in. I was wondering if I should have been calling this place home any longer.

There was part of me concerned with the expectations these people had for me, expectations that I no doubt failed to achieve. Was I who I wanted to be when they knew me? Or worse still, I was afraid I might somehow end up becoming envious of them for living here, for achieving whatever small dreams they may have had. They were living the dream while I was busy trying to figure one out. Maybe I would realize this, if I saw one of them walking their dog or buying milk.

And I was wrong to fear an encounter, but only because I had come to the front door of my parent’s house without actually coming across one of them. The door was different then I remembered it though. It was solid oak with a fancy glass window with a pattern etched in acid. I raised my hand to knock, or to turn the knob. I wasn’t sure which. But then my father was there standing in the hallway of the house, looking much older than I ever thought he could be. Children, I find, have a very poor understanding of age. There was child and there was adult and there was old. Once, back when I was in college, I remember a nephew asking if I was “over the hill.” To them, I was simply an adult. And now, my father was simply old. I had never noticed this before, but somehow he had aged when I wasn’t looking.

Never mind all that now. I was here for a reason, a purpose. I was here to help cleanup my mother’s things, as I had promised him I would do at her funeral. And I realized that it had nothing to do with the color of the hand towel in the bathroom, or what cabinet the frying pan was stored in. You stop referring to your parent’s house as home the day you are cleaning out your dead mother’s things. This was not my home anymore. This was not my father’s home, either. Finally, we had something in common.

Mothers

This story was included in Belting Drunk, a collection I put together as a zine my senior year of college.

Carli moved into the house across the street when we were both three. We played tea party and Barbie together because in return she would watch Voltron and Transformers with me. We watched at her house, since my mother forbid commercial television. Exceptions of course, were made for MacGyver.

For my twelfth birthday, my mother turned our basement into a Pirate's den with pirate booty prizes and I dressed up as Captain Hook. Carli came as a princess with a patch covering her left eye and a beard drawn on with magic markers. They weren't so magic and she had three days of pirate-princess five o'clock shadow.

The day that Carli's mother died, Marianna and I made out in the back of a Volvo 240. Marianna was driving since I was only fifteen. Carli watched from her dark bedroom window as I played soviet spy groping at Marianna's Russian breasts. When we were finished, she kissed me on the cheek and said she was expected home.

I watched the Volvo pull away before laying down on the summer grass to fantasize about the nicest—the first— breasts I had ever seen. The moon and stars above were like symbols in cheap romance novels.

"Did you know my mother died today?" Carli asked, looking down on me.

"No," I responded.

She then rolled herself out on the grass next to me to stare at the emptiness between the stars. And my mother had told me at four that afternoon, about Carli's mother, but I didn't want to skip Marianna's breasts.

Carli had skin as pale as the moon, and eyes with stars in them. She went to the senior prom with a spaceman. He thought he was that night, at least, when he failed to take his Lithium. He showed up at Carli's door with a NASA helmet he found at a garage sale. She never made it to the dance floor.

My mother baked applesauce cookies and pumpkin bread; pumpkin bread with walnuts and without, and with raisins and with apple butter. The Christmas after Carli's mother died, Carli spent the holiday with us. Her father had gone to South Carolina—some woman he found at a bar the week before. He had also neglected to get anything for Carli. Carli's sister was older then, and with her fiancée's family lived in California. She had all but forgotten her little sister. And so that left my house for Carli to sit and wait for Santa Claus.

I dressed in a collared shirt and khakis, and a tie with a print of Santa's sled being pulled by his reindeer. At the head of the pack was Rudolph. When you pressed down on Rudolph, the tie played Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and a red light blinked where his nose should be.

Carli laughed at the gimmick, but mother made me change before the aunts and uncles and grandparents and old folks came stumbling in. They were so blind or drunk that I doubt any of them would have noticed Rudolph.

Carli's sister flew in from Chicago the day after her mother died. My mother and Carli and I drove to Newark to retrieve her. I liked Nicole, especially when she once had babysat for me and allowed me the pleasure of watching commercial television. And now Nicole, who I hadn't seen in five years, had grown up, and I, becoming infatuated with breasts and women and pubic hair could do nothing but think about Nicole and the fun we would have if she would baby sit for me that night. But, she didn't.

In August after graduation, I noticed Carli had finally developed her long sought curves. She was a late bloomer I suppose.

We were watching MTV one afternoon sometime during the seventh grade, fretting over biology reports and Muscle Men trading figurines, and Carli said, "When we grow up, we won't do this anymore, since we'll both have families and jobs and we'll barely see each other."

I ignored her since Radiohead was playing. But maybe she was right, and if she was, she grew up faster than I did.

Marianna was two years older than I was and drove and had beautiful breasts, that much a certainty. But years earlier she had been fat and had braces and so no one really talked to her then, except for me since I was fat and had braces too. She promised she wanted me to accompany her at her senior prom. That was, until of course, David Lee Keller invited her. He captained the football team.

Before that fiasco though, Marianna and I kissed for the first time one summer night at the lake where as five year olds we had built castles and sunk battleships. The association that ran swimming lessons and beach volleyball was holding an Italian spaghetti night. The evening was one dedicated to boxed wine and cheap spaghetti sauce from cans stuffed into the mouths of middle aged Sicilians who had never seen where Dad was born or where Mom first got kissed, or who even knew that Sicily was an island. Carli wanted to play shuffleboard with me. She wanted to let me win. She wanted me to make her feel bad, so I had no choice but to console her with a kiss. But since I was on the tip of the outermost dock and speaking in tongues with Marianna, Carli went home.

Carli received her driver's license in June and her father, wanting the freedom to fly to South Carolina without regard for how Carli would get to softball practice, bought her a station wagon. One night instead of studying for calculus we drove down to the boardwalk at Belmar. It was around midnight and cool for early June, but the salt air and the sand exfoliating our feet churned a mediocre idea into a pleasant distraction.

We tossed a frisbee she kept where a spare tire should be. She said, "I'll race you to the water," and before I answered, she was stripping down and jumping into the icy Atlantic Ocean. My lips turned blue with cold, but how could I refuse?

When Marianna went off to college, and because I had two more years of Shakespeare and water molecules and Germany had only invaded France once, she said good-bye, for good, she promised.

Over her winter break we had coffee at a diner far away from where everyone else was, far from the eager ears of blathering peers. "I've really done it this time," she said.

"What?"

"I'm knocked up," she said. She was calm and smoking a cigarette. "That's what finals will do to you," she said, "you get crazy when you take those anti-sleeping pills." She told me earlier that three cups of coffee and a jelly donut were a fine substitute for eight hours sleep when the time was needed to learn a semester of Wordsworth.

"I refuse to get fat again though, so I'm going to get it taken care of," she said. She waited a moment while I stirred the syrup left on my French Toast platter.

"Would you come with me when I go?" she asked.

Carli wanted to be a yuppie after we were out of college, instead I made her a mother. I condemned her to stretch marks and floppy breasts and a stomach like Swiss Miss vanilla pudding. She made applesauce cookies.

The Little Dog

originally published in The Anthologist, the literary journal of Rutgers College





"I met an old man today," she said to me.

"What was his name?" I asked.

"He didn't have a name. I called him Frank. We talked about sliced bread."

"Why?"

"He never had it before. Frank said when he was younger, either you made your own bread or you didn't have any. He makes his own bread everyday."

"Isn't that a lot of work?"

"That's what I thought, but apparently it isn't. Frank is very old and I don't think he could make bread if it was a lot of work. Maybe that's why he bought sliced bread today, because it's too much work to make it himself any more."

We didn't eat sliced bread for the rest of the week. Half a loaf of Wonder Bread sat on the counter until I threw it out on Friday. The funny thing about Wonder Bread is that even after a week it doesn't get green and brown. I threw it out anyway, on principle alone.

Saturday was cold and since the heater was still not giving heat into our little apartment, Lena went to the grocery store on the corner to warm up. She bought bread from the bakery section. It wasn't pre-sliced and was uneven and hard to cut.

For lunch we ate toast with butter and jam, and afterwards since the apartment was still cold, we sat together on the couch. Luckily we were not married, so the experience was very romantic.

"Since when did we start getting the Times delivered?" I asked.

"We don't," she said.

"Well, I have a copy right here." I opened it up to show it to her.

"Where did you get the Times from?"

"It was outside the door this morning." I said.

"It must be the old man's from next door. The delivery boy must have left it in front of our door this week. You should fold it back up and give it to him."

"Who, the boy?"

"No, the old man."

"Does he have a name?"

"No. Call him Herb, I think his son calls him herb."

"He has a son?"

"I think so."

"You know the man has a son but you don't know his name?"

"I saw a young man down in the lobby with Herb on Tuesday."

"If the young guy was Herb's son, wouldn't he call Herb dad?"

"I don't know. What do you call your father?"

"Dad."

"Oh, then I don't know if Herb has a boy. Maybe not"

"Its cold in here."

"Let's go to the movies."

We went to the movies to avoid the frigid apartment and came home for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Lena loves peanut butter and jelly. Since I hate consistency that bread acquires when jelly is placed on it, I cannot for anything eat peanut butter and jelly. If I didn't love Lena so much, I would tell her she couldn't eat peanut butter and jelly. But I do love her, so I try to think of thick cheeseburgers with bacon when she spreads the jelly. I'm not allowed to eat cheeseburgers with Lena, since she is a vegetarian.

As Lena made a second sandwich, this time substituting fluff for jelly, I escaped into the outside world for a walk. Relatively speaking, outside was warm. A single orange lamp lit the street and this caused the ordinarily green door to the apartment to appear gray. I walked to the corner of the block where a man was selling newspapers.

"Excuse me," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Do you sell the Times?"

"The Times? The New York Times? Sure. Daily is thirty-five, two-fifty on Sundays."

"The delivery boy sent the paper to the wrong door today."

"I don't deliver."

"Do you know who does?"

"No."

I bought a Yoo-Hoo and continued down the street and around the block. I did a lap, a walk long enough to finish the Yoo-Hoo but not so long as to tired me out. I passed some people, some walking dogs or smoking cigarettes or talking on the phone or eating hot dogs, but none of them were exceptionally beautiful or surprisingly engaging. Back in the building lobby, a little fat boy stood playing with a yoyo. I hate little fat boys, since they make me think of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Lena was soaking in the bathtub when I came. I went directly to bed.

Winter passes quickly, and so soon the leaves on the trees began to sprout, and the bulbs Lena had planted in the flower boxes flowered. Maybe it was April when we walked through the park. A clown with white face paint was handing out balloons to little children.

"How trusting those children are." She said.

"They don't know any better," I said.

"Their parents should watch their children better than that. If we ever have children, you better watch them closely."

"I will, but you should too."

"I would be a mother. Mothers always make better parents."

"Why is that?"

One of the children's balloons popped; the little girl wearing a red dress began to cry and I assumed the balloon had been hers.

"I don't know. My mother was a much better parent than my father."

The child's mother ran up to her.

"You're father beat you, obviously you think your mother was a better parent."

The mother held the little girl in her arms.

"So did my mother."

The girl stopped crying.

"But not as much."

The mother put the girl on the ground, took her hand and led her out of the park.

"We should get a dog," she said

"I don't like dogs."

"Not a big dog."

"You know I don't like dogs."

"It would be a small one."

Another week passed. I was sitting on the couch watching Tom Brokaw and eating out of a box of Chinese food, which I don't like. Chinese that is, I think Tom Brokaw is an honest looking Newscaster, a trait so lacking in Newscasters these days it makes me wonder why we trust anything we hear on television. So while having a mediocre dinner, Lena brought the thing in. It was a small hairy, smelly thing. The best way to describe in a way that is neither vulgar nor incorrect is to say it looked like it had been through the washing machine.

"What is that?" I asked.

"A dog." She closed the door and let it loose.

"Why do we have a dog."

"We talked about it."

It came up to me and began licking my feet.

"And I thought we said no dog."

She picked it up and put it on my lap. The mangy thing makes a much better sell licking your fingers.

"I can take it back, if you really don't want it."

Who could say no to that face. The dog's, not hers. But I love her too and at least she wasn't asking for a baby, so I said, "fine, we'll keep it, just as long as I don't have to deal with it."

It was raining the first time I had to take it out. It poked its mangy little nose around for ten minutes before it found a good spot to go. It urinated on some flowers, but it was raining and no one was outside to care. We, the dog and I, went back in the building. The little fat boy was there playing with his yoyo.

"Is that your dog mister?"

I don't like dogs, and I don't like little fat boys.

"Yes."

I pushed the elevator button.

"Can I pet it?"

"Just until the elevator comes."

"Will he bite?."

"He won't bite." I thought he wouldn't. I wanted him to bite the little fat boy.

"That's too bad. What a dumb dog if he won't bite," the boy said going to playing with a yoyo. I assume the boy didn't realize how boring yoyos really are.

The dog had free range of the apartment and a pair of her shoes was his first victim.

"Bad dog!" she screamed, "Bad Dog! Very Bad dog!"

"I think it needs a name."

"What?"

"If you are going to yell at him, he needs a name."

"Did you see what he did to my shoes?"

"It's your dog, I think its only fair for him to chew your shoes."

"That's not the point. He is very bad dog."

"I don't think he can understand what you are saying," I said.

"That doesn't matter! It makes me feel better!"

"Can we give him a name please?" I said.

"Oh just give the damn thing a name."

"Frank," I chose.

"Frank? What the hell kind of name is that?"

"Its a name like any other."

She rolled her eyes at me. "Frank, you are a very bad dog. Don't eat mommy's shoes. Bad dog!" she said pointing her finger.

I have to wonder why parents and pet owners talk in the same high pitched voice towards their babies and their pets.

"Don't be so harsh," I said.

"You need to be strict or he'll do it again."

"He'll do it again anyway," I said.

"No he won't, not if he learned his lesson."

He did it again two days later. Only this time it was my tennis shoes. Since they were my tennis shoes, or maybe just because she knew I was right, she didn't yell as much. Poor Frank.

I awoke Saturday morning to an empty apartment. I note on the table explained she had taken Frank for a walk. I made myself some eggs. They were good; scrambled up with a little cheese. I forgot my Wonder bread in the toaster oven and it came out black on one side. The two pieces I had burned were the last two, so I ate it burnt. She came in from her walk with Frank.

"Did you know Herb died?"

"Herb?"

"Herb, you know, the old man from next door."

"Oh, how do you know?"

"They were taking away his body when I came home."

"What did he die of?" I asked finishing my eggs.

"I don't know."

"Poor Herb. We're out of bread."

"Put it on the list next to the phone. I'm going to the market on Tuesday. Should we send flowers?"

"Why?"

"For Herb's son, or whatever family he has."

"I suppose."

A week passed and we kept getting Herb's copy of The New York Times. We took Frank to the park on the last Saturday of May. It was very warm, so we sat in the shade and let Frank run around at our feet.

"He looks happy," she said.

"I suppose."

"You think he isn't?"

"I actually haven't thought about it."

"I think he is happy."

"I'm sure he is."

Frank was tugging at the leash and trying to chase down a pigeon cooing in front of us.

"Do you think he would be happier in New Jersey?"

"I wouldn't be happier in New Jersey."

"I don't mean Jersey City, I mean the suburbs."

"Why would Frank care if we lived in the suburbs?"

Frank began to yap at the pigeon.

"He would have more room to run around."

"He has plenty of room to run around."

"Don't you think he would be happy in one of the suburbs?"

"I wouldn't be happy in the suburbs. We aren't moving to the suburbs."

Frank's leash broke and he was suddenly after the pigeon. But since pigeons can fly, Frank didn't have a chance. And since Frank is faster than both of us, he got away. Frank was free in the park.

"See," she said, "He wasn't happy."

"That's not why he ran away. He ran after the pigeon. You saw it."

I could tell she was upset about Frank running away.

"I'm sure he'll turn up," I said, but it wasn't very sincere. I decided to take her out to dinner. We went to Mario's: Fine Italian Dinning.

Mario's was only a few blocks from the apartment. We held hands as we walked which we rarely did even before moving in together and finding that strange comfort level that means you don't have to hold hands anymore. I don't know why we were holding hands on this evening either. I think it was because Frank was gone.

After dinner we strolled a few blocks to gawk at people, but none of them were exceptionally interesting so we went home. It was warmer than we thought because she had a band of sweat around her forehead and my shirt was dank. There was a blast of cool air when we opened the door to the building. And then there he was. The little fat boy was holding the leash, but it was Frank at the end of it.

"I found your dog," the little fat boy beamed, "he even bit me," he said, smiling.

"Thank you," I said.

Lena brightened and suddenly there was a smile. She let go of my hand and dropped to her knees.

"Here Frank, here boy," she called.

The little fat boy let go of the leash and frank waddled over to her.

"Good boy, good boy, frank," she said.

I just smiled.

"Thanks, kid," I said to the little fat boy.

We went to our apartment with Frank. The suburbs? Is that where this was going? I didn't want to think about it, so I went to bed.

Jesus, Panama Love

originally published in The Anthologist, the literary journal of Rutgers College

On Tuesday nights I have bible study class. I heard it was a good place to meet people. One Tuesday night in early October, after eating alone at the Panama Diner, and drinking alone at Murphey's pub, I found myself staring at the face of Jesus. It appeared in the foamy head of my beer, and I continued to drink.

We sit in a circle and read passages. The group, consisting mainly of middle-age housewives or mailmen or law clerks without enough brains to get through law school and be real lawyers, was not exactly the meat market I had been promised. This is the way of the Lord. Amen.

After the reading, we'd talk about each passage, and then we'd talk about our day, and then we'd drink free coffee and sometimes eat stale donuts. We only had donuts when the clerk from Krispy Kreme would come. She was seventeen--Evelyn was my Jesus.

I sat outside the church debating whether or not I should go in. Evelyn's car wasn't there. Already there was the Red Tercel of Maggie, a fat, queen of secretaries who smelled like baby powder and who insisted on being my bible buddy. Balding Bob was there too. I watched him walk in with Sally So-Good. I called her So-Good because after every passage we read, she always ended with a, "Oh my gosh, that was Sooo-Good!"

At quarter after nine Evelyn pulled in. She still had the Kripsy Kreme uniform on. She had a box of stale donuts, but I was there for the uniform.

"Hi Evelyn," I said coming over to her. We were standing in the dark shadow cast by a billboard preaching "Sunday Mass, 10 am, God is Watching."

"Jack, aren't you a little late?" I had told everyone at Bible group my name was Jack. My real name isn't Jack. But the Jesus knows I didn't want this sorry group of circus freaks and suburban pilgrims looking my name up in the phone book and calling me up whenever they had a fucking experience with God.

"So are you."

"I just came from work." She looked to the door. Above it hung an amber lamp--installed likely by an amateur carpenter doing penance for touching all the band saws at Home Depot and not buying any of them, or perhaps it was for having a Super Sized order of fries rather than the more traditional Large. Whatever its reasons, the lamp now hung limp and cast more light on the building than the parking lot it was meant to protect.

"I see the uniform."

"What?" she said. "Oh yeah. I didn't have time to change tonight. I brought some donuts though."

I could see my breath when I exhaled.

"What kind?"

"Chocolate and strawberry. Are you going to come inside?" she asked.

"No," awkward pause, "I mean, I don't know. Maybe."

"Why wouldn't you?"

"Its kind of stuffy in there. And Maggie smells like baby powder,"

She smiled at that. "Christ, I thought I was the only one who thought that."

"We don't have to go in," I said. I stepped toward her and put my hand on her arm. I saw a moment of fear come across her face. Perhaps it was merely surprise, or better yet, intrigue. "I mean we could get coffee instead. You know, without Baby powder and So-Good."

She smiled at So-Good, knowing immediately whom I meant.

"Do you want to smoke a cigarette first?" I asked. It was sort of condescending.

"I don't want them to worry."

"Evelyn? Is that you?" Balding Bob called from the doorway, outlined by the amber light. I could see light reflecting off the top of his head. He smoked five times an hour. I would have enjoyed his company, if he wasn't so ordinarily boring.

"Coming," Evelyn called, "Not now," she said to me, "but I'd love a cigarette later."

I watched her walk inside. When Bob went back in, I went and sat in my car listening to Golden Oldies. I smoked a cigarette. Some surf rock came on and I drummed in the air. Smoke. I was on the most holy of quests, searching for the most holy of virtues, and how I would love her holy tenderness.

I walked to the Quick Mart across the street and bought a cappuccino. Modern Marvels. My hands were getting cold waiting in the car and I really hate Golden Oldies. Then the car door opened and Evelyn was sitting in the passenger seat.

"Hi." She said.

"Hi."

"I told them I wasn't feeling well."

"Okay."

She smiled.

I started the car and handed her my cappuccino and pack of cigarettes.

"Evelyn," I said from the kitchen, "do you prefer Scotch or Rum?"

"Either is fine. And call me Eve. Jesus, my mother calls me Evelyn."

She wandered around my apartment while I dug out a bottle of Scotch I had hidden behind the Drano and Clorox.

"What's this picture of?" she asked.

"The Red Room. It's by Matisse. He studied under Redon and followed the impressionists, until he started painting with Derain in 1905--"she was uninterested--"he painted a lot of crazy shit."

She walked around the living room touching the books on the shelves and occasionally reading the titles.

"Here," I offered.

She swallowed it all at once to prove her maturity. She coughed.

"Water?"

"No, I'm fine."

She flipped through my CD's. She found something safe: The Beatles. I knew she felt adolescent looking through the albums. Who's The Clash, I could hear her asking. I sat down on the couch.

"Are you looking at colleges?" I asked to make conversation.

"Some," she said.

"What for," I asked. "I mean, what do you want to study?"

"Psychology." She looked at me for a reaction. "Actually, I don't know."

I still didn't give her a response.

She flung her arms up and shouted, "I want to work at Krispy Kreme forever!"

I laughed.

She threw her arms against my shoulder and jumped onto to my lap.

"What are you doing?" I asked, somewhat shocked.

"I'm trying to excite you. Is it working?"

I leaned up to kiss her pouty, impish lips and instead she jumped up and pulled me off the couch. She pulled me along into the bedroom and sat on the bed.

"Come on Jack."

Did I say bible study wasn't a good place to meet people?

I touched her cheek with my hand and felt its warmth and she began to unbutton her blouse. Then I heard the front door unlock and open. That will teach you to not change your locks Nathan, I thought to myself. Fuck you Jesus.

"Who is that?" Eve asked.

"I have no idea." It could only be one person: Nancy.

"Nathan?" Nancy called. Well, so much for wishful thinking.

"Stay here," I said, whispering into her ear.

I went into the living room where, to no surprise, I saw Nancy standing and looking beautiful--even with metal shit in her face.

"I have company," I said.

"Well, I'm going to be quick. I just came for my things."

"They're in self storage. Over on JFK Blvd. You can get them tomorrow. Call me at work."

"I really don't think that will be possible."

"Well it's damned impossible to get them now because the place closes at 9, and its certainly after 9."

"Shit. And fuck you too Nathan, the least you could do is fucking say something like, ‘It's nice to fucking see you,' ‘I'm so glad you aren't dead'."

"Truth be told Nance, I'd prefer right now if you were dead."

"That's a fucking sweet attitude. Didn't you figure out why I couldn't be with you anymore? For Christ's sake, I bet you still jerk off to scrambled pay for porn channels."

"Why don't you just go back to Sandusky, Ohio or whatever middle of nowhere town you came from. Now, if you don't mind, I have a guest--"

"What's the matter, she have a hole and you're afraid she won't hold air much longer?"

"So I'll see you at 6:30 tomorrow. We can meet at the Panama. It's a couple of blocks from the self-storage. Do you like how I casually ignored your comment?"

"This screws up my whole fucking day. But, yeah sure. And you only ignored it because you didn't have anything better to say."

"Good, now would you please, for the sake of baby Jesus, leave ?"

"Fine. I need to use the bathroom though."

"It's clogged"

"I'll use the one off your bedroom. Like I'd use the dirty little shitter you let your little sluts piss in? I don't need crabs Nathan."

"You can't go in there--" But, no. She did. She pushed her way through into the bedroom. For whatever reason, Eve had decided to turn my bedroom into the Garden of Eden and strip all her clothing and spread herself out on the bed like in cheap porn sets. But from the shot of scotch, and being a full time employee of Krispy Kreme, and a full time high school student, she had fallen asleep.

"Oh shit Nathan, you killed a girl."

"Fuck you Nance, would you use the bathroom and get out."

"You are such a fucking child molester."

I stared at the naked body. I watched her chest heave up and fall down again with each breath. It actually seemed very scientific and not erotic at all. Up and down. Without fail. I thought about running my hand down her smoother undeveloped body. But instead I gently touched her cheek and woke her.

"Oh gosh," she said, "I fell asleep?"

"Yes," I said.

"Who was at the door?" she asked through the eyes of groggy sleep.

"My old girlfriend."

She realized that she was naked and covered herself with the blanket at the foot of my bed.

"You are very attractive," I said, hoping she would let the blanket slip back off beneath her breast.

"Perhaps I should go home," she said.

Unsatiated.

"If you'd like," I said, looking away from her uninterested.

"Why did she call you Nathan?"

"My middle name," I said. Nope. My first name. I lied. I told you a fib. Child.

She laid back against the pillow again. The blanket pulled back a little, exposing her breast.

I reached out and touched it. I massaged it with my hand. She looked away out the window uninterested.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing." she pushed the blanket down exposing the whole of her breasts.

Both hands.

Then she rolled over on her side moving herself out of my reach. She began to tear around the edges of her eyes. I could see this in the mirror, but she didn't realize it. I pulled the blanket over her again. I left her laying on the bed.

I woke her in the morning around 6 am. It was still dark out. "You have to get up. You need to go to school, and I need to go to work."

I gave her some of Nicole's clothing--another of the ex-girlfriends, and Nancy's sweater. It was brown and yellow stripes with blue and green spun in too. I had for breakfast a low fat pop tart.

"What time do you need to be at school?" I asked.

"Seven-fifteen. Just bring me to my car though. I can drive from there."

The drive was quiet as the sun came up over JFK Boulevard spilling between buildings. She took a cigarette from my pack slipped it behind her ear. I thought only boys did that.

Her car was where she left it with a note from the church, "please don't park in our lot overnight." She kissed me on the cheek and left.

Unsatiated. Nancy was waiting at the diner.

"So how's your little twelve year old doing."

"She's seventeen. I met her at bible study."

"Fucking Christ. You? Bible school. I'm not sure what's worse. You taking advantage of someone who is seventeen or the fact that she believes in Jesus."

I lit a cigarette.

"Please don't smoke around me," Nancy said.

"I can pull over and get out of the car and finish the cigarette, or you can spend another five minutes sucking in second hand smoke like you did for the three years," I said.

She sat quietly until we came to the self-storage unit. It was really new and had excellent security.

"What did you do in Ohio?"

"I met some people, we drank a lot. I took a trip to Seattle and smoked weed." She never smoked weed with me.

I opened the door--it slid up into its little holding pen, very ingenious, very modern.

"Weed? Aren't you a little old for experimentation?"

"Aren't you a little old for a seventeen year old girl?"

"Fair enough."

"Where is my box?"

"The two in the corner. Please don't touch the other ones. I'm going to have another smoke."

Two cigarettes later and she came out.

"Who's shit was in those other boxes."

"Nicole's. You didn't touch it did you?"

"What would I do with that fucking thrift store trash anyway."

"Hey, shut it."

"What, she leave you for something exciting in one of those square states like Nebraska? It's nice you're keeping her stuff here for her until she can pick it up. I'm sure she'll appreciate it as much as I did."

"She was fucking hit by a fucking car."

She paused a moment. Took my cigarette and sucked in.

"I locked it," she said.

On the ride back to the diner she said: "I met this girl when I was out there. I loved her, and we were going to move to Colorado."

"So why you here?" I asked.

"She ran back to this boy she fucked through college and is a lawyer now and shit."

"I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry, you're not a lawyer. Who would have thought?"

"Yeah," I said, "what did you come back for anyway?"

"The New Year's picture at Johnny's house. You know, where you and I are sitting on the couch."

"Yeah. I like that one too." We had pancakes at the diner.


One of the few things I missed after a decade and half of not being in college is the ability to stay up late. Ask me to see the sunrise now, and I will scoff.

For no particularly reason one morning in August, I stayed up through the night inspired by alcohol and loneliness. I lit a cigarette and watched the dawn paint the skyline with shades of amber and purple.

I walked a few blocks through the park and sat on a bench. The Krispy Kreme across the street where Eve once peddled donuts had a glowing "Hot Doughnuts Now" sign shining in the window.

I saw Eve three years later walking around in the mall. She was toting around a blonde boy who looked about her age. I hid behind The New Yorker and my fiancee's birthday present. I didn't want to disturb her if she had found herself some love, even if it was only temporarily genuine.

She appeared outside my building the next night. So much for the anonymity of The New Yorker.

"Hey," she said.

"Hi."

"I saw you the other day," she said, "at the mall."

"I know. I saw you too."

Her seducing little eyes pointed up at me.

I told her about the fiancee. She smiled and laughed and said she was happy I wasn't going to go through life molesting little girls.

She told me she hated psychology but had to finish it out because she didn't have enough money to go an extra year.

"What are you going to do after?" I said.

"I don't know," she said, "I haven't decided."

I was in love with her ignorance, and jealous of her dispassion.

Before leaving we kissed for a few minutes in the shadow of my apartment building. It was nothing exceptional, but her lips were warm with interest. Then I got married to a lawyer and bought a house far away from the Panama Diner.

Butterfly Empire

originally published in The Anthologist, the literary journal of Rutgers College under the title "The Women of Jackson Pierce"

Holly Valentine

Holly Valentine gave me a hand job in the back of the school bus when we were in the eighth grade. That was the last time she would talk to me for nine years.

When I was sixteen I said good bye to my teachers and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. I am not really a savant, but I did begin the kindergarten at the tender age of four, and skipped to the tenth grade when I was fourteen. I was informed of this great honor the very same day Holly Valentine decided to give me a hand job.

The tenth grade is tough enough when you are sixteen, to say nothing of being only fourteen. I certainly don't mean academically. After all, the Chinese surely would not have bridged every technological gap if their school children were on the same academic course ours followed. What I mean is that every one was bigger, taller, hairier and generally, more alpha male. Holly Valentine dated a senior because he displayed the signs of an alpha male much earlier then all of her peers, including yours truly.

Devorah

Devorah needed the help of little blue pills to keep the chemicals inside her mind from bubbling over and turning her brain to mush.

"You know what I simply can't stand," she said to me.

I was ignoring her, because she was my sister and siblings do that sort of thing.

"I can't stand the mirrors here." We were at this trendy bar in Hoboken called Reflections, the mirrors made it trendy. "I always feel like somebody is watching us. Like the government or something." This is why she takes little blue pills.

She was correct though. People were watching us. But they were marketers and analysts from the Hoboken Trust Corporation. They built Reflections before trendy bars sprouted in Hoboken, adding that pinch of lust and dab of sin. The Hoboken Trust Corporation owned seven bars with plans for half a dozen more. And so they watched us in the hopes of building a better mousetrap.

Devorah was the product of my father's first marriage. I was a product of his second. If only he had been able to love as well as he programmed computers, I never would have been brought into this world.

"Jackson, is that really you?" Holly Valentine said to me nine years later.

"I don't think I am anyone else," I said, "who are you?"

And she smiled and responded, "Holly Valentine, silly goose."

We were rocking and swaying on the New York City subway. I tried my best to avoid eye contact with the people on the subway, but who couldn't stare at Holly Valentine?

"Its nice to see you again, Holly," I said, "What are you doing here?" It was meant to be condescending. I think she took it as endearing.

Holly Valentine was about to have an interview, to see if she deserved the sixty-five thousand dollars a year Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise was willing to pay a lawyer who still needed to prove herself by passing the bar exam. As coincidence would have it, I had already saved Gilbert and Pierce seven-hundred and fifty thousand dollars manipulating decimal points. And of course before I bankrupted the firm, so I was really at the top of my game. It was a good day. I told Holly Valentine she could count on a job. I of course, said this while recalling her skills on the back of the school bus.

Devorah was waiting in my office when I arrived that morning. She too worked for Gilbert and Pierce. After all, our father was Michael Pierce.

"What a pleasant surprise," I said to her, "Aren't you suppose to be in London?"

Devorah, when she took her blue pills, was a sales representative for Europe. We had finally decided to break into the lucrative, if erratic British market.

"I'm leaving at three," she said.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Can't I just come by to say hello?"

"No."

"Anyway, what was that friend of yours in London, I think his name was, Drew?"

"Drew Thompson?" I asked. Drew was an Englishman who had attended the University of Pennsylvania while I was there. I showed him how to meet American girls. He showed me how to drink and be sad, as all Englishman do.

"That's his name! Do you think he'd like me?"

She was only seven years older than he was. Drew was accustomed to women half her age. I said, "what would he ever want to do with you?"

"It's the first time I'll be in London, I hope to enjoy myself."

I believe my dear half sister on this occasion had taken an extra little blue pill, leaving her feeling overly ambitious in the ways of love.

Penelope-Anne
Michael Pierce, father and employer, purchased for me a small yacht when I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters degree in economics. I named her Penelope-Anne, after the girl who was kind enough to grant me my first kiss at the age of seventeen.

Often on the weekend I sailed Penelope-Anne up into Long Island Sound. The world's largest great white sharks have been caught here and often I would share this fact with guests I brought on board Penelope-Anne, in part I think, to frighten them.

Penelope-Anne married a Protestant from southern New Jersey and now works for the state commission that oversees the operation of casinos there.

Drew Thompson granted me a visit several months after the rendezvous I arranged for him and Devorah. He was in New York in hopes of selling crackers and tea biscuits. I offered to take him out on Penelope-Anne.

"I think I want to give it all up, and move to Shangri-La," he said

"Drew, you are too young to be having a mid-life crisis. And do you even know where Shangri-La is?"

"I think though it would be more fun to have one now, while I'm still young enough to enjoy it, then to wait until I am so old I couldn't play with Polynesian girls. And no, I don't know where it is, but a travel agent surely would."

I agreed because he was right.

"Holly Valentine," I said, stepping out of the elevator on the day I was to bankrupt Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise, "What a pleasure to see you today."

Holly was looking beautiful and glamorous, something she had not looked on the subway four months earlier, and had not looked since that penultimate day of her life when she was crowned queen of the Long Valley Regional High School Prom.

"My divorce just went through," she said, "I'm a free woman again. This is the greatest day of my life." She had married Dwayne, that alpha male from Long Valley Regional who's father also was an entrepreneur. He owned a used car lot. Unfortunately, Dwayne and his father liked to drink heavily and often. One night his father on the way home from the used car lot, was killed by a passing motorist—ironically he had been walking. In short, Dwayne was a dud. Just as I was about to prove about myself in an hour or so.

Then I went to my office and drank a coffee with cream and two sugars, went through my messages, and then approved the payroll slips for the week of October seven. Somewhere in accounting however, the computers had quietly moved the decimal point on every check. And I approved for withdrawal the entirety of Gilbert and Pierce's cash reserves for distribution between our hard working employees. I suppose this makes me a socialist.

No one would know that I had bankrupted Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise for another six days. I didn't even know, and I was the decimal king. That very week I saved another five thousand dollars shifting decimal points.

Drew had sent me a postcard from a Tokyo sushi bar. He said they gave hand jobs in the back for five dollars. Devorah was now three months pregnant with Drew's child. She was also very batty since she could not take her blue pills, for fear of birth deformities. I visited her on the weekends, but never stayed long. Devorah lived in New Jersey. She feared the city (after all, the F.B.I. was there watching her), and I loathed New Jersey.



Tuesday Morning I entered my office charmed to be drinking a new imported coffee from a café that had opened a block from the building. Holly Valentine was waiting for me. In the four months of her employment with us, she had gained two promotions. She was a bright one.

"Jackson, you should close the door," she said. She said it so sweetly I was afraid for a moment we were about to make love. We were not.

"What's the matter, Ms. Valentine?" For what its worth, I was still a virgin at the age of twenty-four, despite the convertible, apartment, and Penelope-Anne.

"Gilbert and Pierce Consolidated Merchandise is broke."

"How can that be?" I said, "I've saved us three quarters of a million dollars." Isn't that an alpha-male trait?

"Payroll checks automatically deposited our entire cash reserve."

"But how can that be, I thought it was a reserve," I said.

"You're name is on the pay receipt, so I was hoping you could answer that."

I needn't wait for my father to come to my office, or any of my other superiors, or even for Devorah to get over her fear of telephones and call me. I began packing my things just as soon as Holly showed to me that payroll receipt with my name attached to it, knowing my infinitely greater knowledge of decimal points had not prevented this from happening.

I didn't have many personal things on my desk, not even a picture of a sweet young girl who loved me. After all, none did. Everything else belonged to Gilbert and Pierce, and would be auctioned off in November. At least I had Penelope-Anne.

I slept on the boat that night in the little cabin. I didn't want to take the calls of condolence from my former classmates and peers seeking to benefit somehow from my loss. The only people who really called were those looking to take my job, or those who's disappoint existed only because once they could have gained something from knowing me, and they had failed to take advantage of it while they could.

Penelope-Anne glided through the waters of Long Island Sound with only a quiet nudging of waves against her hull. Maybe I wanted Jaws to come swooping up from beneath her and gobble me up.

On Wednesday morning when I was docking Penelope-Anne at Liberty State Park, the stock market was beginning to slip because of the Gilbert and Pierce payroll debacle. CNN even had my picture on television. It was this day too that my father, descendent of a bastard born to the former President of the United States, shot himself. He left behind a daughter with a chemical imbalance, a son not worth his economics degree, three ex-wives, and a lover by the name of Holly Valentine.

When I sold my apartment in New York to the Japanese, I moved in with my pregnant half sister on Prosper Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Japanese were buying everything, since the American dollar had lost its value following my failure with decimals. As it turned out, a lot of other companies had just as many foolish sons signing off on payroll receipts and ordering raw materials and shortchanging accounting books and generally throwing the wrench into the gears of American Industry. Nepotism fell apart that day.

Drew was doing well in Tokyo because he had converted all of his dollars to Yen. So it goes.

When Gilbert and Pierce was auctioned off to the Japanese, I invited Holly Valentine to live with Devorah and I because they replaced her with a computer. Devorah was six months pregnant and very fat, and very crazy. She carried her possessions around in a shopping bag for fear the F.B.I. was waiting to take them. The butterflies, she said, would infiltrate her mind if she didn't wear earplugs to bed. She refused to eat anything green, since after all green was the color of the butterfly home world.

Then Drew came back from Tokyo.

He was very surprised to see Devorah carrying his child. He was even more surprised when she accused him of being a double agent working for the butterfly overlord. Drew was right to take his mid life crisis when he did, since now he was a father.

I taught Holly how to sail Penelope-Anne. Penelope liked Holly very much, and always glided gracefully when Holly was at the helm. And Holly liked Penelope-Anne so much, Holly took my virginity in the depths of the cabin of my little ship. We drifted from one port to another until we found ourselves swimming with movies stars and ex-presidents.

Layla

I woke before Holly had on an August morning while docked at Nantucket. I watched her sleep for a few minutes but grew bored. In her dreams she was smiling. The night before she told me that my sperm met her egg at a karaoke bar in Bridgeport six weeks earlier.

I left the little boat and wandered around the village looking for coffee. The town was in a tizzy as tourists began packing to return to school and accounting and doctoring. I found a table at Buck's Baghdad Bomber Café, and over coffee wondered if Holly's little package would take after me and be a bogus alpha male, or take after Holly and distribute hand jobs on the back of school buses.

I explained this to Layla, the waitress, who at the age of forty-two had not yet experienced motherhood. She had brown curls and skin darkened by sun and salt water. She laughed at my innocence, and also when I told her she was very pretty. It was true.

I met Layla that evening and walked along the dunes and we made babies under the moon.

Holly Valentine was the primary conveyer of my genes. I told her about Layla some weeks after our third little blonde girl came rushing through the birth canal, though before I knew that Layla had created an heir for Penelope-Anne.

Holly tried to cry, and then she tried to yell, but she was more upset she hadn't thought of it first. The three little blonde girls now live in Nebraska with their grandparents.

Holly Valentine practices international law for the United Nations, though is due to be replaced by a Japanese computer.

Devorah gave birth to a very healthy baby boy, who was not in the least bit like his mother. That is to say, he was very sane. He is now a Senator from New Jersey.

Drew died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. An eighteen-wheeler carrying imported English crackers and tea biscuits cut him in half. I always warned him about the dangers of New Jersey.

Layla found me in San Francisco. I had sold Penelope-Anne, and Holly Valentine had stopped returning my calls, and the little blonde girls forgot who I was, and Devorah had run off to Mexico because the butterflies had finally found her out.

The curls still held their color, but Layla's skin had returned to color of normal Anglo flesh.

"I've brought your son," she said. I was confused but accepted the gift.

James demonstrated many skills of the alpha male. As we sat together in LAX waiting for the plane to take him to the University of Pennsylvania, I told him the story of beautiful Holly Valentine. I think it was on that day he forgave me for missing the first eleven years.

Cocktail Revolution

The yuppies arrived on the first warm Saturday in May. Two came at ten, as scouts, walking up and down the block smoking Cuban cigarillos. By eleven, they trickled by, but by noon it was a torrent of Gettas, Cabrios, and restored Volvo 240’s littered with stickers reading “MV” and “LBI”. They knocked down old men carrying bread and figs bought that morning at the market. One grabbed Mamma Rosario by the hair and pulled her down the flight of stairs, and then, without showing mercy, beat her with a natural fiber broom bought at the Pottery Barn.

They ripped down the fish market, hauling the stalls away, and installed poppy filled planters and wrought iron café tables. They turned the shipping office into a gourmet coffee stand and between evictions, they sipped lattes. Two Mexican boys were badly burned by scented votive candles.

The Pawn Shop mutated; the owner, an Arab, painted the door purple, and changed the sign to P.S. Antiques. The yuppies embraced the Arab man because he was exotic. He sold them armoires beaten and scratched as they were handed down to brothers and sisters and cousins, sold to him for half their value and then bought by yuppie couples for twenty times what the Arab paid, twenty times what he was asking the day before.

Javier stood on the corner holding his black and white television set. The yuppies, seeking relics and novelties from their excursion knocked him down and took the set, leaving the bunny ears on the sidewalk. At first they thought they would use it for showing how chic they were, rebelling against the television culture by watching Friends on a grainy black and white. But then they realized they had no reception without the unsightly antennas, so they opened it up, took out the guts, planted daisies and put it on the stoop.

They tore through Lou’s Taste of Mexico, ransacked Picken Chicken, and broke down the place that sold falafel. Within the hour they were all replaced with fusion ethnic, rarefied for the pale palettes of indifference. Tai Parisian fusion, Indo-Paki-Italian fusion, Outback-Southern fusion, everything fused, a homogenous mix with the flavor of carbon monoxide. Two boys who worked out of Picken Chicken tried to fight them but were stripped down by the crowd, covered in grease from the fryer, and feathered with one hundred percent genuine goose down.

Seeing all hope was lost, the families, holding the last of their possessions not yet confiscated, slung bags over their shoulders and turned west into the setting sun. The caravan wandered away from the neighborhood they knew. Children cried. Women wailed. The sight was a modern trail of tears.

The yuppies, enjoying cocktails, waved. What sad, forlorn ethnic people, they thought. They would honor this day to honor them. They would celebrate diversity and the following year, they promised, there would be a festival, held at one of the local fusion restaurants, to memorialize—

They drank Apple Martinis.

Confessional Fantasies From a Billing Office

Yesterday at five a.m. I had that fantasy where I think the time is really ten a.m. and I've just blown off my midmorning meeting. Only in the fantasy, it's worse, because it is also the boss's birthday and I've missed the breakfast of stale donuts and soggy bagels and melancholy singing. Everyone else is already there gathering around the boss lady like she is the damn Madonna lavishing her with praises and empty tips for getting older. Gag gifts ensue.

I never have the dream about showing up at the office in the nude. Sometimes I wish I had—in fact I envy the people who have the naked office dream. Sometimes before I go to bed at night I stand naked in my bedroom hoping to inspire my mind for the night to dream of walking into the office naked. I know I could handle it, if ever it were to come up. What do I care if my co-workers see my frightened, shrinking penis, my unkempt chest hairs matted to one side across my left breast? Instead, I wake up drenched in sweat afraid I'm going to need to go down to some state agency and file for unemployment because the boss lady is angry I missed her birthday. State agencies bug me too, but I don't dream about them.

Most days I slip away in the afternoon to back of our storage closet. There are rows and rows of file cabinets. I fall asleep standing with my head rested against these archives. No one bothers me because I don't think anyone wants the records from 1984. That's my favorite year to sleep against. The best part is that when I sleep standing up against the cabinets I never dream about sleeping through my alarm clock and missing the boss's birthday cake. When I sleep standing up, I only dream of Ronald Reagan.

But yesterday the boss lady was standing over me, as if she was expecting me to sneak away. Maybe she was onto my midday napping. I needed something as a substitute. When I went to the soda machine looking for a Diet Coke, I found the machine was out and all that was left was fruit punch.

Yesterday really was the Boss's birthday. On my fruitless return from the soda vending machine, I saw Sally So Good collecting money from people. I call her Sally So Good because that's just the way she talks. She snatched a five dollar bill from Wally the one armed receptionist. I'm sure the cake was going to be so good. Since I hate my boss and wanted nothing to do with her cake—I still insist office birthday cakes are a form of mind control—I took all the money from my wallet except a single dollar bill, stuffing the rest into my desk drawer to hide it from Sally’s sweaty hands. I know her hands are sweaty because once she and I went out on a date and she insisted that we hold hands, and they were sweaty.

"Marty," Sally So Good said to me as I hid behind a leafy desk plant someone from the office bought for my birthday last year. "We need some money for a B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y cake for you know who."

"What did you say?" I said. I squirted water on my plant with the spray bottle taking extra care with the leaves.

"We bought a cake. It's going to be so good. But it would really be great if we had some money from everyone though. It wouldn't be fair if Marcia and I were the only ones who paid for the cake if everyone was going to eat it," she said, "We're asking everyone for just five dollars."

Reluctantly, I opened my wallet. Oh no, I only had a dollar left!

"Its so good of you to contribute. Don't worry, you can borrow the rest until tomorrow," Sally said.

I passed the next twenty minutes clicking back and forth between two internet news sites hoping one or both would announce the immanent destruction of humanity until finally I heard Sally and Marcia calling my fellow cubicle sitters together in the conference room.

"Come on Marty, we have you know who's birthday cake, it would be so good for you to come and sing with us," Sally said pulling my arm along.

Let me be honest. I had no intention of repaying Sally the remaining four dollars on my birthday cake credit account. I didn't even like the boss lady very much. And so I did the only thing I could think of. In the middle of "Happy Birthday", I burst into the conference room completely, utterly naked.

Roses for Nancy

An earlier draft of this story was included in Belting Drunk, a collection I put together as a zine my senior year of college. I since revised the story and changed the title. The former title was "The Hollywood Hussy". I once wrote a one act play entitled "Roses for Madison", unrelated to this story, but clearly where I took the title from.

HSM magazine paid Nancy Goldstein two thousand dollars a week. Hollywood Spy Monthly relied on her to dish out gossip from her former friends and lovers and from her new friends and lovers. She lamented the days before Jackson had written that god offal screenplay, before the press had leaked the plot wasn't at all fictional, before even her hardiest of fans had seen her sins on the silver screen and denounced her as a two bit Hollywood whore.

Nancy knew that she drank too much, and smoked too much, and recognized that maybe she smoked too much opium, and certainly she knew too many men. But that wasn't a reason for Jackson to put it all down on paper so Howard Lee could win Oscars for best director, best picture and all sorts of other prizes at her expense. Howard Lee was the reason she had agreed to work freelance for HSM. She wanted his story printed. Hollywood Spy Monthly obliged and six weeks later Lee's reputation was about as pristine as Nancy's.

But now she had grown tired of spying. The party invitations stopped coming, and no one returned her phone calls. She often ate alone at the chic downtown Parisian style cafés or worse, she ate alone at home. Her breasts were tired of being showcased to the world too, and in response never seemed to perk up after the first cup of morning coffee. At least not like they used to. Not like when they had made Nancy a star.

She had started on Broadway at fourteen and by sixteen found herself in Los Angeles. She had plenty of movie credits, and it helped that she had still looked sixteen at twenty-two. But then came Jackson, sex, love, sex, drinking, marriage, divorce, that damn trip to Europe, and of course the movie. What still baffled Nancy was how Jackson, a lifetime alcoholic, had sobered up long enough to write the whole thing down on paper. The trick, he had said, was that he didn't sober up.

She had tried to stop its production. Her first attempt was sleeping with Howard, even though he was five foot four. Even though he had a bulbous nose that hit her in the face when he kissed her. And still that son of a bitch made the movie. She had returned from Paris nearly sober, only to find her life ten days into shooting. Then Nancy had begged Jackson one night at three a.m., after seven martinis, to stop the whole thing. She passed out on his lawn before the police arrived. Jackson invited her to the premier.


Nancy strutted around her living room in her underwear in the mornings. She hoped that some passing paparazzi might see her and give her headlines again. It never worked. She hated daytime television but watched anyway, hoping that her agent might call, suggesting even some independent film project. But he had stopped calling a year ago because she never returned his calls. Now he never returned hers.

She smoked cigarettes waiting for party invitations, not just to continue her career as an HSM agent, but to socialize, since no one wanted to come over anymore, not even the gardener (The house was bugged, buzzed Hollywood's inner circle). If wouldn't have mattered if the gardener came, he only spoke Spanish. She tried writing, but she quickly realized she was an actress, not an author. Nancy could take other people's words and even the worst of scripts would sound like poetry coming from her lips. But her own words sounded like the tuning of an orchestra.

Her only friend was Wilson Ford. Wilson Ford was over seventy and smoked cigars in his garden. Wilson financed motion pictures. He first met Nancy when she was seventeen and working on the set of one his movies. He took a liking to her, since she smiled a lot and unlike other girls he met on sets, Nancy wasn't looking to sleep with him. Everyone wanted to sleep with Wilson, not that he was very attractive. He was after all, somewhere in his seventies, and looked much older. But he had more money, and more power, and more everything than anyone else. And he could have made a star of any girl he chose. Wilson Ford was something of the often-talked about yet never acquired father figure for Nancy, who had never known one.

Nancy visited Wilson once a week, usually on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were always logical, since Monday was spent recovering from the weekend. Tuesday was spent recovering from Monday, and Thursday began the weekend. They would play checkers while he smoked cigars and she told him how he shouldn't and he reminded her she did a lot of things she shouldn't. That shut her up.

Jackson had always assumed Nancy and Wilson had slept together regularly. That was not the case. Once when Wilson was visiting the set of Nancy's fourth film, she had casually mentioned he could take her anytime he wished in her trailer, since she felt he owed him everything. He politely turned her down because he liked at least the sense of the chase, not when women gave themselves up willingly. Nancy did love Wilson, but she was willing to succumb to his masculinity not because of sexual desire, but because she felt sorry for him in the same way a little girl feels sorry for puppies. He rejected her, not because she was unattractive--Nancy was plenty pretty in fact--but because he respected their relationship for what it was. Jackson never seemed to understand that Nancy's love for him was not at all like her love for Wilson. Once she almost got through to him when she said, "I feel about Wilson the same way you feel about liquor." That had almost worked, but almost is not the same as success and some wee ks later their twelve week marriage ended two days short of a winning date set by Arthur P. Thomas of the Entertainment Network. The reporters had pools on every celebrity marriage. Arthur Thomas won three hundred dollars.

On an April Wednesday morning Nancy and Wilson sat inside--it had grown overcast--smoking cigarettes and cigars, respectively. "Wil," she said, "I want to get back into the game," she said.

"Then do it," he said.

"But how?"

"If you are asking for my help, you know I've been out clean for eighteen months. I don't even have a telephone at the house, even if I wanted to call somebody for you."

"I wasn't. I was asking for advice."

"Nancy, if you want my advice, go to Europe again. Stay there, those people are a lot more sane than this entire country, to say nothing of this city."

Nancy didn't want to go back to Europe. She had done that continent, before the movie had come out. She had Parisian men, and Roman men, and Iberian men. The only problem she had with them was that they never showered. She wasn't going back there.

"That isn't advice," she said.

"Fine. Nancy, I'm an old man. I don't know what you should do."

She smoked another cigarette.


Jackson had made his way into Hollywood quietly and unnoticed. He fancied himself an artist rather than a screenwriter. He hung out with those beatnik types who drank martinis and smoked pipes and wore thick plastic glasses even if their eyes didn't require it. He had quite successfully written far too many screenplays for any one person. Nancy didn't know what he had done before writing screenplays, nor did she ever ask. He drank, she drank, everyone was happy.

They had met at a party off of Mulholland Drive, introduced by someone neither of them knew. Jackson had been observing drunkards and smoking a Cuban. Nancy had been observed. They talked about people they hated, and people they loved. Jackson was twenty years older than she, and that made him attractive. Nancy was twice labeled the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, and that made her attractive. They woke up together in Santa Monica.

Jackson at this point had not produced a screenplay in five years. He tried poetry; he performed his spoken word Tuesday nights at Koala Lounge Café, eight to midnight open microphone, two drink minimum. He had started a novel, but had started another four before the first was finished. On weekends he drank. He had not yet realized his poetry would have been dramatically improved had he been inebriated during its creation.

Nancy was wrapped up in his robe, he had stolen it from the New York City Hilton. He tried cooking breakfast for her, resulting in burnt sausages and undercooked eggs. He mixed bloody Marys, which he was very good at.


Wilson, feeling sorry for Nancy, and knowing that soon he would be dead, found Nancy something to do. It was a small theatre company down in the valley. A hundred and fifty seats at most. The play was new but did not take terrible risks, and the writer had achieved moderate successes previously. The lead actress had left five weeks before opening night to get married in Las Vegas. Nancy had been sober for a week when she walked through the doors.

The morning was actually a bit chilly, or perhaps it was only refreshing, but Nancy could feel small bumps forming on her arms. Tom Parsons greeted her and smiled and gripped her hand firmly. Nancy tried to smile but her breasts had been particularly not perky this morning and she was still very conscious of this.

"Have you read the script through?" Tom asked leading her into the theatre. Three Hispanic men were installing new armrests on the chairs.

"Yes," she said, "I've read it enough to have most if memorized," she said. It was a skill she had.

"Well Julius has finalized another copy," he said, "the son of a bitch is never satisfied. He'll probably be making changes on opening night."

Tom showed her around the stage, the dressing rooms, and the coffee room. He left her there drinking a bitter cup of coffee, waiting for the cast to arrive. She considered adding something sweet to the drink, but there was no sugar, just a bottle of sambuca.

She walked out to the stage and looked around. She hadn't been on a stage in nine years. Who had time for theatres when she was making movies, or making love, or drinking? If she had believed in God, this is where she would have worshiped.


Julius Rivers practiced Catholicism. He had for several years considered entering seminary school. Instead he began writing. He wrote a short play that had achieved minor successes in a regional theatre. With prayer and sobriety, he wrote beautiful words. He moved to California with his fiancée, but she left him for a movie star. Drinking, smoking, hedonism, atheism--and suddenly he had produced the greatest play of the twenty-first century. Keep in mind of course, the twenty-first century was still rather young, and more importantly, the rest of civilization was still unaware of the greatness of this play.

He sat in the projection room overlooking the stage the first day his new Lillian had arrived. Lillian was the pivotal character. She had the lines that will be quoted for the next five hundred years by high school children. He watched her on the stage staring up at the lights and looking lost. This was his Lillian?

Julius had grown up without a television. He despised movies. He had no idea who Nancy Goldstein was. All he could see was that she had a pretty face and wonderful breasts. He watched her for forty minutes.

None of the cast had ever met Julius. He watched their auditions from the projection booth. Sometimes he would hide there while re-working lines. There was a storage room that through a small crack in the wall he could watch the dressing rooms, and sometimes he would be there watching Nancy. With two weeks left in rehearsals, he gave Tom Parsons a copy of the script he promised would be the last. After all, now he was preoccupied watching for Nancy's breasts.

The final dress rehearsal ran until two a.m. The actors wandered out of the theatre, exhausted, but prepared. Nancy was the last one out, smoking a cigarette and humming to herself. Julius appeared from behind the dumpster.

"Who's there?" Nancy said, though not very frightened.

"Hello," Julius said.

"Who in hell are you?"

"I'm the writer," he said.

Nancy smiled at the thought, but then considered it an impossibility.

"I hate writers," she said, walking towards her car.

Julius paused a moment before following her. "Why is that?"

"I don't need a reason, do I?"

"Yes."

"Well then, mostly because they are too caught up with themselves to realize what they are writing doesn't mean a damn thing except to the people they are writing about."

Julius thought of this for a moment, but before he could respond, Nancy had started her car.

"Wait," he called.

She rolled down the window, "If you really are the writer, then you will be here tomorrow. And then you can tell me whatever nonsense about writers you are about to tell me now." She rolled the window up. The tough part was, while she hated writers, they were so damn attractive.

Lights, curtain, scene one, intermission, lights, curtain, curtain call, finis. The audience stood when Nancy took her bow. She hugged her four cast mates, and the curtain guy, and the prop girl, and Tom Parsons got a kiss on the cheek. Julius stood in the back of the stage in the dark.

Sal had invited the cast to his apartment for drinks afterward. Nancy wondered where the writer had gone. They drank and smoked and ordered burgers and fries. When the doorbell rang they thought the burger boy had arrived. In fact, it was the writer.

When daylight appeared on the Horizon, the cast left Sal's apartment. But Julius and Nancy were already sitting at a table at Julius's favorite grease and coffee joint. He had ordered eggs with sausages and toast, and Nancy an orange juice.

"I come here to write," he said, "eating is just a bonus. But look around, you'll see why. These people inspire me."

One man sat in the back corner reading a newspaper. He had a bulbous nose like Howard, and a face like a bad caricature. The waitress, "Valerie" as her blue nametag proclaimed, was maybe seventeen and too beautiful to be wearing the pink waitress uniform. She served coffee. A woman in her forties smoked cigarettes at the counter. Every fifteen minutes or so, she would freshen her Cadillac red lipstick.

Nancy looked at Julius. "You are one strange son of a bitch," she said.

Julius smiled in an awkward manner. "Thanks."

Wilson died during the Sunday matinee performance. During intermission, the woman sitting next to him realized he wasn't breathing and told the house manager. The house manager in turn called the paramedics. The paramedics carted Wilson away. The show did not go on.

Nancy, who was in the dressing room as the paramedics wheeled Wilson out of the theatre, was aware only that a member of the audience had died. She didn't even know Wilson was in attendance that afternoon. As the actors waited, Sal did card tricks in the dressing room. He had spent three years of his youth as a bum in Rome. His card tricks paid for his meals, and eventually for a ticket back to New York.

Nancy, still unaware of Wilson's death, slept with Julius that night. Hollywood Spy Monthly snapped photos of her and Julius through his bedroom window. Her breasts were unusually perky.

Nancy read of Wilson's death in the newspaper. She had not been home to check her messages in three days, since she had been sleeping with Julius. She cried for a few minutes before retiring to the bathroom to smoke a cigarette. Julius did not approve of smoking cigarettes in his apartment. The same paper that ran Wilson's obituary ran a review of the play, proclaiming it to be the greatest play of the twenty-first century. A premature assessment, but accurate none the less.

Julius read the review while Nancy smoked her cigarette. He was thrilled. He was beyond thrilled. He was ‘drink champagne at nine a.m. thrilled'. He did. He called to Nancy, who decided to smoke a second cigarette while held up in the bathroom with red eyes and wet cheeks. She ignored him.

That night, before the curtain went up, Tom Parsons congratulated the cast. He praised them all. Nancy though was only slightly aware, since she had taken codeine following the cigarettes in the bathroom. Julius had yelled at her for smoking in his bathroom. She drank three chocolate lattes that failed to bring her to the place she wanted to be. She tried a martini, and then the codeine. The codeine worked.

Nancy only missed one line. It wasn't even a crucial line. It hadn't been the codeine. She had looked out into the audience, a moment of weakness that ordinarily would not have phased her. Except Jackson was there.

He brought roses. Not the cheap kind anyone can get at traffic lights or the Go Shop a block from the theater, but real genuine flower boutique roses. They were peace roses--peach colored with pink trim--a sign? She had been waiting for the moment now since that damn movie came out, since she had splayed herself on Jackson's lawn after too many drinks, since she had thrown a martini, olive and all, into his face at Valentine's. (She also had been waiting for the day she would be invited back to Valentine's after the scene she caused, but that was a different matter).

"You did well," Jackson would say handing her the roses. She would have to smile and thank him. Maybe she would make a quip about him having been drunk enough to have enjoyed it. He would apologize, for being a drunk, and for the movie. And she would say, "that was then," and "let's get a drink." And they would wind up in bed together. Mostly because she wanted to. But also because she was so damned beautiful he couldn't say no, and too because Julius had yelled at her for smoking a cigarette in his bathroom.

After the curtain call, Nancy took her time in the dressing room. Sal was smoking a cigar and trying to joke with her about missing a line. The codeine had worn off. Julius had not been seen since eleven that morning when Nancy stormed out of his apartment. It would be better that way, she believed, since he was nothing but trouble. Even if he was charming, he was still a writer.

Nancy peered out of the dressing room into the hallway, painted a soothing shade of taupe. There were doors to the stage, and fire exits, and sprinklers overhead and Jackson standing at one end, holding peace roses. He looked older, but in the way that made him more attractive.

"Good show," Jeanine said to her as she came out of the dressing room.

"You too," Nancy said. Nancy was fantasizing about the moment. Trying to improve it, to take control of it, trying to belittle Jackson, but just enough that he would sleep with her one last time. Instead, Jackson handed Jeanine the roses, leaned over, and kissed her.

Nancy sat in her car smoking a cigarette. She watched as the remainder of the cast left, and then the technicians. Her codeine bottle was empty now. It wasn't really hers. She had lifted it from Wilson's medicine cabinet some months ago. Tom Parsons came up to the window and knocked with knuckles.

"Nancy," he said, "you ok?"

She nodded, but rolled down the window. "You aren't mad I botched the line tonight?" she asked.

"What line? I didn't notice." He had, but he didn't care. Only the writer cared.

"You want to grab a drink?" she asked.

Tom looked at her and rubbed his face as if he actually had to think about it. "Sure, but just one."

While she was fucking him that night, bombed out on codeine and a light beer, she thought about Wilson, disappointed she never had the opportunity to sleep with him.

The Pen Is Mightier

David flipped through the teenie bopper magazine on the rack next to the cash register, eliciting stares from the teenage girl working at the counter. What would he possibly want with her magazines, she thought, that pervert. And then her attention was diverted to her bubble gum. She blew a beautiful pink sphere out from between her puckered lips.

David flipped through the sex quizzes unaware of the temporary gaze the cashier had given him. Anyway, he would be unconcerned with what a teenage girl thought about his interest in looking through a teenage girls’ magazine even if he had been aware of her investigative stare. He liked the glossy pages. He looked up from the magazine long enough to scan the aisles for his companion. There was no sign of him. Charles had mentioned something about non-fiction, or something like that. David couldn’t remember. Why didn’t he listen to his friends when they said things, he wondered: that’s right, he hated them.

“Excuse me,” David said to the teenage girl who now was filing her nails. Since blowing a bubble, she had lost interest and discovered not less than seven new activities. Filing her nails had been the latest five second craze.

She looked up from her nails long enough to think, now what does this pervert want?

“Wha?” she asked.

Teenage girls are easily identified by their inability to complete simple words like “What.” The “T” is too much for their little brains.

“Could you tell me where the non-fiction section is?” David asked.

The pervert probably wanted some sex books, the cashier thought to herself. “Um, well the fiction section is all the way at the back. So everything else is non-fiction, I think,” she said.

Before the sentence was finished, the girl began thinking about dinner. Her mother was going to be suspicious if she skipped the meal again. But then, if she ate it, she would never fit into the prom dress this stupid job was supposed to pay for. Would she lose her virginity at the prom? She wondered if she would still be with her boyfriend then. She thought maybe he was sleeping with the head cheerleader. What color was she going to paint her fingernails?

David understood now that the staff knew more about Azerbaijan than a bookstore. He needed to fend for himself. Bookstores upset him. There was a time when he felt a bookstore was a special place, where the world lain waiting for him to discover. Yet, somehow, in the last few months, bookstores brought him no comfort. Instead, they had become a place of failed promises, a place of possibilities never to be realized. He felt anxious being in the bookstore now.

Charles, left to wander the store for almost fifteen minutes, had enough time to pick a half dozen books off the shelves. He still had not arrived at the non-fiction section, which indeed was where he indeed had said he would be going to. He had every intention of finding a book of essays vaguely regarding some social upheaval, or perhaps a book of philosophy, or maybe a biography. He felt he needed some “whole grain reading.” The truth in the matter of course was that he rarely read anything other than comic books, and even those lately had gone untouched. He had a vast collection of classic English literature, a library of poetry, and dozens of essay collections. But rarely had he read any book beyond the first chapter. On some occasions he ventured as far as the second. Sometimes, he read the first sentence of every chapter in the book. He never retained any information. The books wound up on the shelves in his living room or stacked knee high on the floor next to his bed.

“You finished yet,” David asked.

“No man, I still got to get a book on the, um—”

“Yeah,” David said, running his finger over the spines of several books. He had been wandering up and down the aisles caressing the books as he went. He had of course been ignoring their titles. Finally though, his fingers grasped one of the books and pulled it from the safety of the shelf. He looked at the book, a collection of shorts stories by Martin Amis. He flipped through the pages of the book. They were not glossy like the teenie bopper magazines. He carried the book with him as he followed Charles. Charles was wandering in and out of aisles, finally stopping in a section of the store that didn’t even sell books.

“Have you seen their selection of pens?” Charles asked David.

“No,” he said.

Charles pointed to a twelve dollar model. “I really have a thing for good pens,” he said.

“Why do you need a twelve dollar pen?” David asked.

“For writing things,” Charles said.

“You don’t write,” David said, wanting very much to be done with the store. He was beginning to feel inadequate.

“I write things,” Charles defended himself.

“You don’t write letters. You don’t write stories, or poems, or novels. You even pay your bills over the internet. So Charles, what is it exactly that you write?”

“If I had a pen like that, I would write things,” Charles said lifting a forty dollar pen from the shelf.

“So why don’t you buy it and write me a fucking sonnet.”

“I’m not paying forty dollars for a pen,” Charles said.

David looked at him wondering why Charles was so fascinated by the pen. “Fine,” he said after a long pause in their conversation. Charles had started moving on towards what David hoped was the non-fiction section so that they could finally leave the store. David looked around for prying eyes. Then he slit the pen’s box with his key and popped the pen out of the package. Once free of the packing, he slipped the pen into his pocket. For a moment he thought the cashier was staring at him, but then realized that the girl instead was staring out the window at a passing convertible. Then she was flipping through a magazine. Then she started doodling on the page of her magazine.

Charles had disappeared again. David headed for what he thought was the non-fiction section. He was very aware of the pen held close to his leg by his jeans. He looked down at his pants to see if the pen’s outline could be seen. No, you couldn’t see it. Now he really wanted to leave the store, and not just because of the ever present sense of failure brought on by bookstores.

He found Charles flipping through several books on photography. David knew immediately what Charles was doing. He was looking for nude pictures. It was something they had done when they were sixteen, before the internet had come along and revealed to them the wonders of the female body.

“What are you, twelve,” David asked. There was a tone of mocking as much as annoyance.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to be a photographer? You know, invite women back to your apartment and get them naked and then take pictures of them?” Charles said this through a sinister chuckle.

“You don’t have to be a photographer to do that.” David said. They were never leaving, were they, David thought. “Why don’t you just buy a playboy or something?”

Charles ignored him and continued flipping through the glossy black and white photos. David was wondering if the security cameras had seen him stuff the pen down his pocket.

“Are you going to buy all those?” David asked, looking at the stack of books Charles had placed at his feet so as to have two hands free to flip the pages of the oversized photography book.

Charles continued to ignore him.

“Hey, did you notice the girl at the register was checking you out?” David asked.

“Seriously?” Charles asked.

“You bet. Hey, so let’s go pay and get the fuck out of here,” David said.

Charles looked at him with a skeptical glare. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him. But then, Charles needed every opportunity presented to him, given his history with women. Or lack of history. Finally, he relented, recognizing that the pile of books he had was more than enough to keep him busy, despite the fact that he was only going to read the first chapter of each.

At the register, Charles either ignored or enjoyed the fact that said cashier was only fifteen. David couldn’t tell, but knew Charles was doing his best to flirt with her as she rung up his books.

Outside, he said, “she totally wanted me.”

David ignored him. He knew that the only reason Charles believed that was because he had been told to believe it. David supposed that was a good enough reason as any. Of course, David had only told Charles the girl had been looking at him so Charles would get his fat ass out of the store. David wanted to head over to Lily’s new apartment, where they had agreed to go after the trip to the bookstore. There were worse reasons to be friends with a guy, then because you wanted to get in his sister’s pants. David just couldn’t think of any right now.

Sitting in Charles’s car, David reached into his pocket and produced the pen. “Here,” he said, handing it to Charles.

Charles looked confused by the present.

“You got this for me?”

“Yeah, I got it for you,” David said, stressing the ‘got,’ or rather, stressing the lack of ‘bought’ in his sentence. Charles didn’t seem to notice.

“Where to?” Charles asked, as if they had not spent the ninety minutes before arriving at the bookstore discussing Lily’s new apartment or David’s infatuation with her.

“Fine,” Charles said, finishing the conversation they had been engaged in before the trip to the bookstore. “You can do what you want with my sister.” The unspoken part of the sentence was, “because the pen is payment for her.”

“Let’s go then,” David said. He was certain now, that he hated Charles, least of all because Charles had sold his sister for a stolen forty dollar pen. But thinking of Charles upset him. Especially upsetting was thinking of Charles as he hummed along to the Beach Boys’s “California Girls.” Instead, he thought of Lily.