Mo doesn’t want me to tell you this, but I once had sex with his wife, before she was his wife, but while I knew he was in love with her, and I don’t know if I can ever live that down. Now I am married, and happily I may add, and I don’t want anyone other than you to know. I am a sonofabitch. Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us. I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He’s an asshole and I just want all of you to know...
It’s hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct). My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called – gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the “academically gifted” as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers...
For days, Richard has been reading the weather reports, watching the weather reports, researching weather phenomenon on the internet: wikipedia, NOAA, weather.com, various weather related blogs. Even before anyone else on the east coast knew anything about Nolan, old Dick was already buying canned goods, bread, bottled water, beer, whiskey, nudey magazines, a diesel powered generator, a prepaid cell phone. The weather radio already works on batteries, as well as AC. Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that’s too easy. It’s these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday. Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he’s hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so. The approaching storm is hesitantly welcome. He misses her kisses. Her orgasms, or feigned ones, or half-hearted attempts at them. The one mutual friend says that Ashley always said that he took care of her, but he’s not so...
Nancy’s in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn’t seen a weather report in days – no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won. It’s the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke – but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that’s not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time. She didn’t know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn’t know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not...
She said she liked patriotic marches, so he bought a sousaphone. They marched around the backyard, sometimes naked, she the drum major, he carrying on the bass line for a melody to be imagined. It could irritate the neighbors. He liked to drink while they played these games. She put up with it as long as the marches could continue. It was then that she decided that bluegrass was the new sensation. He grew a beard, wore overalls, bought a mandolin that would keep the neighbors up all night. Next it was jazz and the laborious move of a grand piano and the purchase of a used baritone saxophone. During this phase they entertained more. The neighbors, once their enemies, became newfound friends. Soon they started going to galleries and museums and she read artist biographies: Van Gogh, Gaudin, Picasso, Raushenberg, Warhol. They filled what was supposed to be the nursery, or so they thought when they bought the place, with canvasses. She took to drinking. Posing nude for him to paint her. Hours-long sessions would end with sex on the drop cloth. They talked of buying land, starting a commune. They didn’t see much of the neighbors during this period. When they did choose the be around others, it was always with the new friends in the city. One day she came home in a new car and a new business suit. She said that she had been thinking. It was time for him to grow up. She had let a place in the city, with a new Wall-Street type that she had met at the opening reception...
My landlord’s got a new girlfriend and I can tell she’s trouble. I saw them walking down the road tonight to get a slice of pizza. She was in these black skin-tight shorts and he was in that same old baseball hat that hugs the skull like balding dudes like me and him like to wear these days. She kept on having to pull the little black shorts out of her crack as they walked ahead of me. I just paid the rent yesterday, so now he acts like he doesn’t know me. My experience with the landlord is that he has a bluebird made of plaster on the back wall of his front porch. He also has a kitchen sink, and easy chair, and a large roll of copper tubing on the same porch. Once a month I go to his house across the street, usually in the cover of darkness, and leave the largest check I write every month in his mailbox, in the process committing a federal crime. His experience with me is that I leave that check and he let’s me live in this house that he got for a steal, and that he occasionally fixes a leaky faucet. Under my landlord lives a British guy named George of whom I know little. He loves Princess Diana and hate Charles and Camilla. He takes my recycling out to the curb, usually three days before the city picks it up. George works for the landlord and, according to the neighborhood homeless guy, handed in his two-week’s notice a few days ago and is moving on to...
A man walks into a bar; this not a joke. He first asks the bartender for a glass of water, at which point, the bartender explains that if you ain’t paying, you ain’t drinking. The man bursts into tears. The bartender asks why the long face. Really, this is not a joke. It seems that the old guy’s wife had run off with another guy, leaving early this very same morning while he was still in bed. If that wasn’t enough, the Camaro-driving sonofabitch ran over his what-would-be-best hunting dog, if only he ever hunted. The dog could climb a tree and throw the raccoon to its death, or say he said. So his old lady is gone, and his favorite dog is dead, and all he can think to order is a glass of water, because she took the money in the Maxwell House can in the kitchen that they had been saving for a trip this summer to Panama City Beach, and she took the bank card from his wallet on the dresser, and the checkbook which was also on the dresser, and the credit card was long overdrawn, and to top it off, it’s Veteran’s Day, a fucking bank holiday, and the old guy fought in the first Gulf War, and through much VA therapy had just learned to manage his PTSD, but he couldn’t get any cash out to buy a drink after his woman ran off with another man, who ran over his favorite dog, as they made their getaway. Lord knows how he’s going to afford the colonoscopy and all, especially after being...
And she keeps hitting me in the fucking kidneys. And I like it. No I don’t. He’s kicking me in the teeth. I am sorry. No teeth. No luck. All sorrow. Good weekend. I just want to read that book that yo wrote back then.
There are soldiers out tonight, even in this city. I have seen them in their clandestine suits. I have wondered about them through dreams. Tomorrow will be another dream day for this fallen one. I am not broken or foresaken. Just fallen at this point. From the top of the hill over there the scout can see everything and with that everything he cannot move. He want to tell his comrades what there is to come, but he just stand still and the whole world passes, at once, through his eye. That is the nature of the scout. He has to understand it all. The soldier should understand very little if anything. There is this and there’s the hospital. There’s a nurse with a tender touch, or there’s another day. When they saw the whites of the eyes the muskets came ablastin’. The scout dreamed, closed his eyes and composed letters to his wife. There was 30 shot initially, and one when they came face to face. Was it brothers? Of course it was. In some place or not with a name or not. No names on placards or plce cards. There would be no wedding or funeral. Just some dirt sifting through fingers. One last look at the moon. My point being that the man who took the bullet and the one who sent the bullet are one and the...
Daddy liked to laugh. He would laugh when mama got in the car and stormed out the top of the hill. He would laugh when he told us the dirty jokes we were too young to hear. He would laugh when he should be crying. I wish that I could be laughing. Laughing all of this off, but it bites me down to the core and I find the humor hard to find. I cannot laugh. No jokes are funny. Not even donkey dick. I don’t like to tell the old standards. How can there be a joke when we can treat each other as horribly as we will treat one another. Of course we can attack another country, of another religion, and kill thousands of innocents when we can treat people we love like absolute dog shit. We are such selfish beings and despite the fact I have argued differently, I do believe we are utterly broken little pricks – boys, girls, women and men. Ha ha ha ha...
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