This is public writing. Like radio Clash. Twain is observing over my shoulder, and there is a picture across the way of the the courtroom in the movie version of a book written with Truman Capote loosely the originator of one role. I am becoming notes tonight. Little blips and bleeps – and it is football season. Your friends are mighty I would say to you if you were here. I will become heat and rising and little pieces of cotton candy. You ate them. I am silly still. I want to fill a page. It is way too late, but not early enough. What will happen in the end. Even Thelonious Monk’s wife wished the jam to be over sometimes – that all of the boys would go home. This is...
Anything that was ever worth writing was worth writing at this point in the day. How going on here? You may ask. Where the fuck are you? I should ask. What’s going on. John Turturro! Or something like that. I make you laugh or you say. I say the boy has bad teeth and you laugh until tomorrow with fake prosthetics and unbelievable promises. These people take care of things around here. Itis your love laughing, rich boy. I create a spark that your notes know not how to comprehend. Walk your ass to the head of the class if you can. I’ve been talking Joyce for too long. I’d like to see you suffer and squirm, I like the way it sounds, squirm, like a non-syballance. Like you know. My words come down on your sweet ass. Like your secret service. You make your way. Don’t fear it’s nothing that mama or daddy can’t make up for at this point. I understood a long time ago that you were to be despised. You came too close and I will strike and you will call for mother and wish that the pristine castle was your own forevever. I cast it all out, f here and something stonger. I turn my face to a new day that you will never see. I am angry beyond admission and you know why. I hope your little ass reads this. I hope that the truth of the point reahces you long before the point, as it is, ever does. Do you...
Ms. O’Connor, my heroRichard said, “I guess that door done gone and got the water in. It’s a full half inch in at the bottom. That kinda thing happens round here this time of the year.” Richard drove a truck for the State. Sometimes it carried salt, in the winter especially when it was cold and the frozen precipitation would spill from the sky. Sometimes it was okra that had seemed to take to the landscape only second to kudzu, another Asian foliage. In summers his whole truck, leased by him, and rented by the state via him, would carry truckloads of okra as far as Raleigh and the Polk Youth Detention Center. He reckoned them boys ought to like okra alright. Hell, from what he had heard, everything went as it wanted to in that prison and things resembling okra were a-okay as well. In the mouth or other places, it mattered not. He measured his successes and failures by the fact that he had never had to eat delivered okra in a concrete building 350 miles from home. Cassard Willoughby bought the inn in town around 1953 and had owned for the last ten years or so. The economy of Shelby had not changed that much in the time despite so many of the local college folk had decided to stay around. He did not know what they did to make a living, nor did he care. He heard there was one man who worked for the United Nations as a translator and was not around that much, always flying on big airplanes to this city or...
Hey Darling, I know it’s hard to get the waves to match, to amplify. Or for there to be any moment, or semblance, of simultaneous empathy. Days seem to be measured out in such a way that getting home makes every hour epic – or at least that’s how I want it to be. Occasionally family stuff comes up – a birthday necessitates a call home, and it feels like it cuts into the long story. Used to be hours felt like short stories, microfiction. Now they want to be that too, but I demand a journey. Of course, I don’t always get what I want. I didn’t realize where you were tonight when I put you to bed. It was a different place from me and a conversation with my father about sports and our favorite teams and the fact that no player should earn over $1 million. That, when we buy Nike shoes, we are paying that $90 million Lebron James got in his contract with the company. It’s important chatter in a way. But it’s not the long story on a night like this. I’m sorry about the way it all went down in the end. Now that I think about it, I should’ve finished the movie with you. Love,...
writer and muse“I don’t think he should be talking to you that way,” he said to her, as he departed for the bathroom. “I think he should only say sweet things, with a girl that looks about like you needs to have sweet things said to her. Otherwise, you gonna run and run far away.” To Pen he seemed like the sweetest specimen of man that she had ever come across. In this place of alkali dryness, rain a few weeks of the year. Cacti grew up out of the barren soil and took root in something much deeper. She was once told that a cactus’ root could extend for miles just to find ample water. She believed it. Her mother lived in Santa Fe and her father in Phoenix, and her kids were now scattered across the country because of the multiple divorces. The one departing for college, and then work in NYC, and she hoped he would be the one that could help keep her up in these “waning years”, as she liked to call them. Her nourishment came in the occasional phone call, a week per summer in Destin, the occasional mariage in the family in which they all, miraculously, managed to return, or to be together. It was a strange phenomenon and it left her satisfied, but feeling a prisoner. Truth is Ricky was a shit. Had been since the day he had caused the great chasm between his mother’s left and right pelvic bones. She believed that he must’ve spit fire upon being extracted. His first word must’ve been “motherfucker.” And as a mother...
Fourth, on fourth, and Maris is going for the winning run, I made it to the bottom of the well faster and therefore would never be declared the winner. Making our way out of Potemkin and around to a side of equal-bashing buttermilk stew I made a killing with that stuff out on the streets till all hours of the morning as the drunks came and went they sang “Katie Dear” and “Start Me Up” they gazed at the crazy man with the limp who stood on the corner, even at this hour, selling comic books Vintage hero, super whimsy drawn in all color on the cover but just a newspaper on the inside sells them for a quarter but some are worth a whole lot...
Twenty six thousand four hundred and fourty four rare, used and (some) new parts. A call and within twenty four hours you too can have a new alternator for your late model Lincoln. Why shop anywhere else when all that you need is here. The outside may rust, but the inside is more than enough. Please make offer at front desk. Management on duty must approve all sales. Jimmy worked hard with an adjustable wrench and a crowbar for 6 years out of high school. Hubcaps and waterpumps. A guy from Elizabeth City once broke down on the highway and he took the pickup truck out to meet him after the call. Helped to fit the pump on the Duster right then and there at the side of the road and did not charge labor. “Elizabeth City,” that always seemed a funny name. Wayne lived in back of the yard with 3 kids and a doberman pinscher. Funny name, “pinscher.” He had a job at the factory and worked a Stuart’s on the weekend’s short ordering hash browns and fried eggs for late night drunks that had decided to lap it over till Sunday morning. Sylvia had left him three years earlier to follow a mountain man to the gulf coast of Florida. Horton was the oldest’s name. After his grandfather, all hopes were he would be a famous MLB pitcher. He seemed to have no interest in baseball though. Preferring to read the E volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as of late, as he had already made it through the first four volumes. He could tell anyone...
Judy Garland had 4 toes on one foot and six on the other.I’m sitting in a hotel room in Nashville when a knock comes on the door and a man of less than normal stature in a pillbox hat asks, “did you call?” Not sure of his origin or affiliation, I made as if I was confused by the whole ordeal and by and by he made his way on down the hall, eventually gaining entry to a room marked “218”, not my “281”. Dumbfounded, I set aside all plans for the weekend getaway of musical mayhem to stalk and discover, and a unfold the riddle that layed itself at my feet. I don’t know why it always begins or ends with a midget, but it just does. I walked down to 16th for a beer and to meet up with my songwriter friend who had been doing the Music City struggle for three years and probably was in desperate need of my fat ass buying him a beer. He was an hour late, and by the time he arrived I was 3 whiskeys into the evening. Funny word, “evening”, like it is when it makes everything okay, equal, irons out the inconsistencies of the day. Strange the way in which you can suddenly think differently about a word. It should be no surprise to those of you that have followed me thus far that my time is the “evening”, the other part of the clock is skewed. My friend arrived and two drinks later we departed for dinner at a BBQ joint on the outskirts of town. Forty-four...
Employer, No Guns!“Get fucking real!, ” she said to me as I walked out of the apartment and down the street to the Green Room where Peter and a table were waiting. It wasn’t like I had not done this every Thursday night since I we got married back in the spring of ’96. She used to like Peter, but refused to like him anymore. She didn’t like the way he refused to prune the facial hair… and he drank too much. Drank himself into oblivion three nights a week and just into a stupor the others. She never laughs at his jokes. Peter is a funny guy, especially when he’s tied a few on. I met Amelia in college and we hit it off immediately. She was the kind of girl I had waited for all through HS, but that alas never came on the scene. She was there under the tree at the Hare Krishna free dinner. My mother told me it would all be better in college. Girls would respect brains. Like I was ugly, maybe I was, or am, I don’t know. Peter and I go back to Bethesda and Lowes Grove Elementary. he provided the first beer I ever drank, and it was with him that I shared my first alcoholic buzz. As a prerequisite for joining the little social group the two of us had created, he would ask if the male applicant masturbated. If the answer was yes, we would laugh and say that was sick. If the answer was no, we would say, “why wouldn’t you? Liar!”, and as equally dismiss...
R. CarverThere was that time that I wrote the review of your book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the Times, and I did not know anything I wrote. You were wild and magnificent and more worldly, and more worldly read than me. I thought you dwelled on the bad things, and the bad people feeling the bad things too much. I made it a habit to adopt the new style and I thought you had nothing to do with it. I met you that weekend in Portland, a long weekend, Labor Day, and you seemed the nicest. I could not seem to get the smear of your writing out of my brain. A bad smear I thought at the time. Like you had tainted my thoughts. The way in which love could be. Like you had precluded the possibility of anything possible. I was young, foolish and full of hope. In Portland, over that beer, I found you nothing like what you wrote. Filled with passion and a history of love, I failed to understand the way in which you could write what I felt at the time was so much heartlessness. Nothing is ever as it seems. Mt. Hood stood as a monument outside of the bar, and over the roofline, of the cold, frigid horizon of aging. I made a mistake. See, it was never your intention to be that way. There was a commitment to truth of one sort or another. The way in which a fictioner will write it and a journalist could never get. This is all second-nature to...
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