Shaking

The Proper Way to Husk a Coconut

LB Sedlacek — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:52:48 +0000

Removal of the gold wedding band
That’s the first step
Securing it in a shirt pocket –
Button closed.
Hold the shell high
Then slam it down on a steel pick
Peeling away the green halves
Cracked along the seam.
Then pick out a blond or brunette
From the gathered crowd
Huddling in pairs or in red windbreakers
Squinting eyes of blue
Hiding behind black sunglasses
Underneath the orange Hawaiian sun
Dispersed by the ever-present island wind.
Give her the coconut and a screwdriver.
Then show her the spot
To make a hole to drain the milk:
It really isn’t milk at all,
It’s water colored white by the coconut meat.
Then give her a rock, find the seam
Along the brown furry shell.
Show her just where to slam it
Breaking the coconut in half, forever.

photo by Aurora Toshiko King http://auroratoshikoking.com/

————–

LB Sedlacek’s poems have appeared in publications such as Pure Francis, Ginosko, Fickle Muses, Tertulia Magazine, Mastodon Dentist, Apparent Magnitude, and Sea Stories.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one

Oliver Lee Bateman — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:47:53 +0000

The hardest part about the past, at least for me, is that you’re in so much of it.

Remember that one Christmas when we were driving through North Dakota, which is mostly empty, and we passed that burned-out husk of an ice cream truck on the shoulder of the road?

You told me to stop the car so that you could take some pictures.

“There isn’t a town in any direction for fifty miles,” you said. “What do you think happened?”

I kept real quiet, because even then I didn’t know how I felt about you.

“Do you think the person inside there died? Do you think it exploded?” you asked.

Even though we still had a long ride ahead of us, we stood around for a while, maybe a half-hour or so.

The landscape was flat and white, with a horizon so far away I couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. Against that backdrop, the truck stood out like a sore thumb. As we drove away and it disappeared behind us, I began to realize that seeing it had really meant something to you.

To me, it was just another piece of junk.

___________

Oliver Lee Bateman is currently an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Starting next August, he will begin serving as Assistant Professor of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He and his good friend Erik Hinton co-curate the Moustache Club of America, an online literary magazine that has published over 220 essays and short stories. He is a columnist for The Good Men Project and The Pitt News, and a regular contributor to Stymie Magazine.

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Remembering Buddy

Vito Grippi — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:48:46 +0000

I was a student enrolled in Carlow University’s Low Residency M.F.A. program the day I met Lewis “Buddy” Nordan. He was scheduled to read at one of our events in Pittsburgh. Many of the other students had been excited about the event most of the day. Past students had come to town for the occasion. Nordan was a legend in the Pittsburgh area. He’d taught in Pitt’s creative writing program for more than 20 years. By the time I met him it was 2006. He was already thin, frail, the effects of his neuropathy had taken hold of his body.

Nordan rose to read and his hands shook. His legs, too skinny, shook as well. He walked with a cane. A slight smile showed itself through his gray beard. He squinted, moving the pages closer to his eyes. Then he spoke, his voice melodic, inflected with that patient, southern drawl that he made all his own. It was a voice smooth and steady and as large as Buddy’s heart. In the end we all rose to applaud him, tears in our eyes from the laughter.

A year later, he joined the fiction staff of the program and I enrolled in his workshop. I prepared, as best I could, for the six-month mentorship with the legendary Buddy Nordan. The Buddy in the workshop was different than the man I’d seen read a year earlier. His authority, his recognition loomed over our little group of aspiring writers. He was an amazing teacher. His critiques of our stories were sharp, witty, and when warranted, supportive. We shared many great stories, and many laughs in that room. I was in my last semester. Afterwards I asked Nordan to be my manuscript advisor. He was familiar with my work, and our relationship had grown immensely during our time.

Buddy was quick to offer support and praise when he felt I deserved it, but he was just as quick to pop me on the side of the head when he thought I was veering off track. At times it felt like training with a hardened ringside manager. He popped me a few times. I can still see the thick, shaky pencil marks on a manuscript he’d returned to me. “Vito, I don’t know what the hell you were doing here?” And I laughed out loud, as if he were sitting beside me. We were already so many miles apart.

Losing Buddy feels like losing a ringside manager.

He guided me through the writing of a novel manuscript required for the completion of the M.F.A. And after many revisions, phone calls, comforting words, and sharp critique, he signed off on the project. “It’s ready,” he said. “Maybe not ready for publication, but enough so you can stop paying these people.” We’d spent hours on the phone, usually ending with my whining and his words of encouragement. “It’s really fucking good,” he said to me one day. I had been ready to throw the thing in the fire. Buddy methodically pointed out all the areas he really liked on the spot. Small gestures, images that to me seemed so trivial, dialogue he could see. For him it was the tiny details, the small inflections of voice that told a story. If you’ve read his work, you know what I mean here. I thanked him for his support and told him I looked forward to seeing him at my defense.

Although I couldn’t have known by talking to him over the phone, Buddy’s health was digressing. The illness had already taken over most of his body. He was working on his own book, typing each draft letter by letter, using just one finger. His body was shutting down, but he carried on. I was later informed by people close to Buddy that things were getting pretty bad. He and his wife, Alicia, were moving to Ohio from Sewickley, to a retirement home that could provide him with the assistance he needed. Somehow my looming manuscript defense felt silly, trivial. I considered the trouble he would have to go through to come. But he assured me by phone. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Buddy arrived 30 minutes late to my manuscript defense. I had been forced to start without him–something I quietly objected to. I had planned remarks and in some ways, my defense felt as much about my relationship with Buddy as it did the manuscript (probably more). He arrived in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife and a man he introduced as his driver, that comforting voice and the slight smirk on his face. I was seated at the head of a conference table in the same room we had held our workshop more than a year earlier. Buddy, from the far end, apologized profusely. “I’m just really happy you’re here, Buddy,” I said.

The defense carried on. Things grew tense when discussion turned to the manuscript itself. Some of the members of the panel found serious issues with parts of the book. Questions of motivation. Buddy shifted in his seat. He spoke out more than once, in my defense. The general consensus, though, was that everyone liked the book, but shared differences of opinion on many details. Buddy deflected most of those differences. His anger rose. He told the panel they were overlooking what was important. One member mentioned the title, a title that I can admit now, may not have been great. Buddy slammed his hands on the table. “The title? Who gives a shit about the goddamn title,” he shouted. Then he turned to me. “Vito,” he said, “I think you’ve written a beautiful book. It’s needs revision, but it’s beautiful and I’m not sure why these people don’t get it.” I wanted to laugh while tears welled up in my eyes. The situation was strange–strange much like one of Buddy’s stories. There are moments of complete awkwardness, discomfort, yet somehow there is always a hint of humor that tells you life really is a complex, strange beast. Really, their criticisms of the book were not that bad. They were fairly minor. But Buddy, there he was, in my corner.

The effort, the struggle he had made to come to the event.

Even as his body continued to crumble, his mind stayed sharp. I thanked him. He apologized he would not be able to make it to a public reading of my manuscript later that day. “It’s fine Buddy, thank you for coming to this,” I said. We left one another with a handshake, it was an emotional day for me for many reasons, but the deepest pain was knowing that I would most likely never see Buddy again. We spoke one or two times after that by phone. He had given me some information about publishing. His agent was no longer taking new writers. The publisher wasn’t really interested. We talked about writers, writing, his stories. During that time, Buddy had been writing new stories, work that many of us in the program had the pleasure of hearing, in part, at readings. But most of that work, much of the world will regrettably never get to see.

Working with buddy was life changing. He was a strong voice. He saw something in my writing that I failed to see on my own. This was important, as I had looked to Nordan’s writing for inspiration. His fiction has the ability to create real sentiment for characters who often say and do vile things. It’s a direct relation to the complexity of people, even the most vile at times make you feel real compassion toward them. Buddy loved his characters, even the ones who are difficult to root for, the racists, the murderers, alcoholics, and the ignorant. He loved the people around him that way too. When emotion was too complex for human comprehension, he broke into elements of magic realism, where time and setting no longer played by the rules of society. His stories were set in gritty, at times near grotesque settings, but it was the fine line he drew between the dirty, real, and the serious, with a slight touch of humor and the absurd that made his style so unique, so heartbreaking and bittersweet, so Buddy.

Rats swimming backstrokes in a flooded basement.

In the end, it was my relationship with Buddy that plays out like a scene in one of his stories. Learning of his passing, the selfish feeling of not wanting to lose such a big-hearted, sharp man, while knowing that he suffered in pain for so long. Life doesn’t make sense sometimes. The minor things feel hyperbolic, truth disguises itself in subtle shifts of perception, a hazy sheen at the edges of our peripheral. Sometimes scenes pan out and the crows on the power lines look down on us and have their say, the dead speak out, lighting strikes a person twice. Sometimes we have to exaggerate, expand things, blur lines, to make sense of what is real and what is not. Buddy left us on Friday the 13th, and somehow that seems like the most appropriate way for him to go.

Buddy, thanks for the laughs, the tears, and the unwavering support you had for me and my writing. I will never be able to live up to it. Know that each word I type is in some way influenced by your outlook on this gritty, complex, and so often, darkly humorous world. We are all, in many ways, Sugar among the freaks, and we’ll be biding our time in the swamp until we can sing with you again.

For a beautifully written obituary, read this.

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Returning to Earth

Peycho Kanev — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:00:06 +0000

And she walks slowly across the deep
grass. Back to earth she goes.
The stems part before her legs and then
gather again with a bow after her body.
In furrows the soil curves. Under her feet
stones patter in excitement, realizing their
perfect shape. Organic agitation and a verdant
genesis in the making, that’s what she is –
apotheosis of light. The sunbeams are stretching
ashamed, looking for a new object of worship.

________________

Peycho Kanev is the Editor-In-Chief of Kanev Books. His poems have appeared in more than 500 literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly,Evergreen Review, The Monarch Review, The Coachella Review, Third Wednesday, Black Market Review, The Cleveland Review, Loch Raven Review, In Posse Review, Mascara Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net and lives in Chicago. His poetry collection Bone Silence was released in September 2010 by Desperanto Publishing Group. A new collection of his poetry, titled Requiemfor One Night, will be published by Desperanto Publishing Group in 2012.

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A Long Tale

William Henderson — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:00:03 +0000

One night I ask you what you think will happen if our relationship ends. Am I feeling uneasy about our relationship? About our chances at whatever going the distance means? Maybe. But I ask you what you think will happen if our relationship ends because I’m curious. And because I think you’ve thought about it. I haven’t. Or, I have, but only in terms of minimizing any affect Avery feels. I don’t think about it in terms of what my life without you will be like. No, not true; I have. I don’t want that life. I’ve found you; how could I think that I’m meant to exist without you? How could either of us think that?

I would ban you from the store where I work, you say.

That’s drastic, I say. I do not question whether or not you can even do this. You must be able to, if you are saying you would do it.

Other employees have done it. I would not be able to handle seeing you and Avery and not being part of your lives.

That would suck, I say, not being able to shop there. What I am saying is it would suck not having you in my life.

People do what they have to do at the ends of things, you say.

I think you’ll have an easier time moving on that I will, I say. You’ll have no problem meeting someone else.

Probably not, you say.

I know, I say.

I’m just being honest, you say. I’ve had to learn how to move on.

I cannot keep straight the ways in which you say you’ve been hurt. Each of your relationships seems to have been more intense and volatile than the one before it. So when you talk about your past, I pay less attention to where and when and focus instead on the chaos and anger inherent in your relationships with men and with yourself in places like Austin and Peoria and a city in North Carolina I do not think you ever name.

After breaking up with one man, you took great pleasure in draining the water from his waterbed.

A man you met at a club gave you a bracelet. When he said he didn’t want to see you again, he asked for the bracelet back. Instead of giving it to him, you threw it out of your car window one night while you were driving somewhere.

One man you kissed goodbye even though you knew the relationship was over. You kissed him goodbye out of habit, you tell me.

You’ve even dated a married man before. I’ve never asked you much about him, for obvious reasons. You don’t know that I am married. I don’t know how to tell you that I am married. I don’t know how to tell you that I married her after we graduated from college because I was afraid of what not wanting to marry her meant about me. She and I have already talked about getting divorced. I know I will have to tell you before then that I am married. I think banning me from the store where you work is the least you will do once you know I am married.

After about the fifth boy who broke your heart, you said enough. Fuck them. These men were cheating on you and dumping you. All kinds of evil things, you say. Each of these men, I think, added to the armor you have erected around your heart. I do not want to add to your armor. I am afraid of what will happen when your heart is fully enclosed.

They were all bad?, I ask. I always ask you if they were all bad.

Not all of them, you say. Sean and Todd were good boyfriends, but you weren’t even 17. Ryan was next. He was goth. He was 19. You were 17. You liked him, and you were interested in him, but you avoided anything that you thought was socially unacceptable. You didn’t want extra attention. I was still trying to blend in and not be gay, you say. Maybe this wasn’t you forever. Maybe you could be bi. After him, you had a girlfriend.

Josh cheated on you for money. He didn’t think it was cheating. It’s just sex, he had told you. I need the money. Some of the men bought him clothes, too. That’s how you caught him. You knew he couldn’t afford the clothes he was bringing home. You ended that relationship after you found out. He’s the one you kissed goodbye out of habit, I think. You treated your next boyfriends horribly. Most of them didn’t deserve how you treated them. They were great guys.

How did you treat them horribly?, I ask.

I did not treat them how I think respectful is, you say.

You do not elaborate on what you think respectful is.

Manuel broke up with you because you weren’t there for him when he needed you to be. Something had happened, and you had had to move, and you and your sister moved into a place together. This is not the first time you have told a story about something that had happened without elaborating on what that something is. I want to ask. I’ve wanted to ask. I’m afraid you won’t tell me, and I’m afraid of what you not telling me means.

We didn’t get a house phone for a few days, you say, but once I got a house phone, I called him and said this is where I am living, this is my address, and it had been like five days since I had talked to him, but he had ended up meeting a guy I had hooked up with before. And I said in the five days I was gone, you met someone? And he had. He wanted to be with him. Manuel was an illegal. This man could help him get papers. You couldn’t.

You got even with Manuel, you say. You dated his best friend, Juan, for a really long time. Five months or so.

Five months is a really long time?, I think. Each time you tell me about Juan, I think, five months is a really long time?

Juan wasn’t out. Not many people knew about you. And while you and Juan were dating, you and your sister were beginning to do crystal like fiends. So when Juan told you he wouldn’t do drugs with you, you ended your relationship with him. He wasn’t going to break up with you because of the drugs, but you knew he didn’t approve.

I left him because I wanted to be selfish, you say, and it destroyed him. He came to my work. I would come home, months later, and he would be waiting just to talk to me, and I wouldn’t give him the time of day. Sometimes I would pick up the phone for him, and we would talk. I didn’t think our relationship should have ended the way it did, but I didn’t know what to say to him, and I didn’t know how to apologize.

Did you even want to apologize to him?, I ask.

I wanted to say that I had told him from the beginning that I am a fucked-up person, and I didn’t think it was good for him to be in a relationship with me. And at that point in my life, it was all about me. It wasn’t about him. He was a nice and genuine person, and I was the dick. Because I wasn’t there for him in the way he needed me to be, I wonder if he went on to be a dick. I guess I did to Juan something similar to what Manuel did to me. I ended a relationship for selfish reasons.

Is breaking up with Juan because he wouldn’t do drugs with you selfish?, I ask.

I don’t think choosing drugs over a person is ever the right thing to do.

But you did it.

It was a poor choice, you say.

I think it’s you knowing who you are. I don’t think it’s a poor choice.

To not drag someone else along with you?

Yes.

I’m sure in the end I hurt him a lot less than if he had had to watch me go through it.

Yeah, I say. If you did cocaine or heroin, we wouldn’t have lasted beyond the reveal.

No, we would not have.

There’s no way I would have brought that into Avery’s life.

Just like if I was with anyone who did crystal or coke or anything, I would say that I had been down that road and you can continue on your own. I can’t be with you. But with marijuana, I don’t find it very addicting. There’s not an addiction to it. I’m not addicted, rabbit. Weed is nothing like what I’ve done. When I first started doing drugs, it was E, ecstasy. From E, I went to GHB. I thought GHB was kind of cool. You could just put a few drops in liquid. But I didn’t like it. I threw up from it a few times. I got sick on it easily. Weed is not like any of that.

And crystal?, I ask. You and I have not talked much about your crystal meth addiction. I don’t talk about it because I’m not sure I want to know much about it. I don’t know why you don’t talk about it. Maybe you don’t want to talk about it, or maybe you don’t want to be reminded of it.

The first time, I had been seeing a guy, and he did crystal, and I didn’t know what it was, but I did it with him. I only did three-quarter bags of it. It was just for the time I was with him, probably only two weeks.

I think that I wouldn’t even know how to measure a quarter bag, let alone what crystal looks like. You don’t tell me which of your exes is the one who introduced you to crystal. I hate him, and I don’t even know his name.

But it wasn’t until I was living with my sister that I got back into it. Mostly crystal, but when I couldn’t find crystal, I did coke. I’d even do E, if I had to. That’s when it got out of control. When there was no longer any sense of trying to maintain normalcy and to keep it at a suitable level. Both of us were walking around fucked up and doing it together. I mean, even when I was with Reggie, I was always the one in control. I did less, just a little bit, because I had to keep an eye on him.

I think you must have used the name Reggie before, but I cannot remember it. Maybe he is the one who introduced you to crystal. I do not think I can ask, because I think you will ask me why I can’t remember.

Reggie was always way too fucked up. So I had to be the one who could drive us home in case something happened, and he took too much, and there were times when he had seizures because he took too much. I knew that’s who he was going to be and he was going to overdo it. But in the same, that’s how I got to know people, so it was very easy, once I wanted to find drugs, I knew who to go to. Those were the people who came to our house. I knew who the dealers were.

Then I remember Reggie. He had a house wired with video cameras. He always knew who was standing outside his front door. There were cameras inside too. He was a dealer, or maybe he was just a heavy user. I think maybe you lived with him for a while. Or maybe you were just there all the time. I think he was abusive. Maybe he hit you? Or maybe you and he fought a lot? What kind of scale can you use to compare someone like him against someone like me? What kind of equation could you possibly employ?

That was my bad drug phase, you say. That was the one where when I left I would have dreams, and in my dreams I would be high, and when I woke up, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t actually been high. And for about two years after that, I would have times when things would get rough, my mind would go right to, I wish I could do a line. But I never fell back into it, and eventually it’s gone away, but I can still remember so many of my high experiences and many great euphoric-feeling times on it. But pot never makes me feel like that. You know, in a weird way, my mother’s cancer pulled me out of it. I had to be the one to step up and take care of her. I couldn’t take care of her while I was high.

Do you think if you hadn’t been given a reason to stop, you would have stopped on your own? Or do you think you would have just self-destructed?

I was only a few steps from self-destructing. I lived on that ledge for a long time. If anyone I worked with actually had any sense or any experience with drugs, and if they hadn’t thought I was some kind of Puritan, they would have known I was high. And I would have lost everything. It could have ended badly. I could have ended with felony convictions. At so many points in time, I had more than enough on me that I had been pulled over – and there were times I was so close to it. Like there was a time I didn’t see a red light until I was just under it, and I slammed on my brakes, and I was a little bit out, and what pulled behind me was a cop car. And I looked down and I saw what I had in my lap, and I knew what else I had in the car, and if they had searched me, it would have been over. When the light turned green, I went ahead, and they went to the left. But at the time, I was high, and I was thinking, you know, in a high way, that this was meant to be and I didn’t get caught because I wasn’t meant to get caught. I probably should have seen it as a lesson, as a wake-up call, but that’s not how I saw it.

You know I don’t judge you when you tell me these things, right?, I say.

Yeah, you say, they are all parts of me. Distant-past parts, but still parts.

With Robbie – Roberto – you did everything but let him fuck you. You knew he liked you a lot, maybe even loved you. He bought tickets for the two of you to fly to North Carolina to see Ani DiFranco. You and he were living in Austin. You had a good time at the show, and in the hotel later, you let him fuck you. You felt obliged to put out. Just the once, you say, and when you got back to Austin, you didn’t wait long before breaking up with him. The show, though, was amazing, and well worth it. You were 24. You broke up with him shortly after getting back to Austin. You broke his heart.

He is one of the 17 of us you’ve let fuck you. He is a link on a chain that has ended with me, I think.

Do you regret any of the 17?, I ask.

Do I regret any of them?

Well, you say you don’t do that when there isn’t emotion involved, but with 16 of us, it didn’t work.

Yeah. It didn’t work.

So would you go back and undo it if you could? Would you go back and tell yourself that the relationship is shit. Don’t do this with him?

I wouldn’t take any of them back, I guess, you say. Where does that question came from?

I think about things like that all the time. If I could, would I go back to a younger version of myself and tell him that everything turns out OK. Or go to my freshman year in college and do things differently, knowing that any decision I changed may mean Holly and I never meet, which would erase Avery, but I wouldn’t know before making any changes.

I think that if I had a time machine, I would go back to the moment before you first used crystal and stop you. That’s what I would use my time machine for.

You met Manny during a threesome. He was the third brought in to play. I don’t remember who the other man was. You loved Manny. You saw a future with Manny. You expected that when he said forever, he meant forever, so when he told you that your mother’s cancer was too much for him to handle, you were surprised. Once your mother’s health improved, you had planned to come back to Austin and move in with him. By telling you he couldn’t handle everything, you felt that he took everything away from you. Because of him, you have made a living out of leaving.

What kind of sign would you have wanted?, I ask. A big yellow one?

A sign that said he was going to abandon me.

Maybe he thought you were abandoning him, I say. Maybe he did it for you, I say. Go. Take care of your mom. Don’t worry about me.

No, you say. After I had been with my mother for a while, he and I talked on the phone, and then got back together, but never saw each other, so that didn’t work. Being abandoned is a real fear of mine, you say. It’s happened before. I think it could happen at any time.

You have dated three men in Massachusetts before me. One you saw in a Starbucks, then saw online, then asked out on a date. The last guy, Simon, told you some story about wanting you to move into a house his father would buy the two of you. He went away on an internship. You and he dated for about three months, maybe less.

As you excavate the bones of your former relationships, I look for any resemblance to me. A sliver of who I am, of what I’m not telling you, is in each of your stories. Assemble all these slivers and you will see the relationship you do not know you have with me.

Would you do anything differently?, I ask.

No, you say. I made it through life. I made it to where I am. I’m good. I’m OK. The exes who were dicks to me, I don’t wish them any ill will. The guys I was a dick to, I feel badly for that. There are other ways to get out of a situation without treating someone the way someone else treated you. What is it, an eye for an eye leads to a blind world?

I have never heard that before, I say.

I don’t think about legitimate times when it wasn’t working. I think about times when it was a crap excuse, or a selfish reason. Just because pain gets passed on, doesn’t mean you have to do it intentionally, you say.

Maybe you just latch on to unavailable men, I say.

Are you OK hearing about my failed relationships?, you ask.

Yeah, I say. I’m glad you share them with me, I say. It’s hard to remember them all and all of their circumstances. You’ve had many failed relationships. I don’t want to be one of them.

Well, I try to get invested. I go into things with the intention of being in a relationship. I think I get hurt more because I invest emotion in relationships that don’t have the possibility of really going where I want them to go.

I don’t say anything. I don’t think you want me to say anything.

What are you thinking about?

Nothing, I say.

No, not nothing. Your little rabbit brain is racing.

It’s your past. I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough go at it.

It got me here, you say.

It got you here, yes, I say.

However long the road, you say, it leads to the right place.

And you have found the boobie prize, I say.

The which prize?

The booby prize.

The booby?

The booby prize. I am the 25-cent prize at the bottom of the box of Cracker Jacks. It’s not really a prize. It’s worth like a quarter. You’ve paid $2 for the box, and the Cracker Jacks are stale, and the prize is something that doesn’t even work or breaks after the first time or something.

I love my prize, you say.

One Saturday night, you ask if I can pick you up at work at midnight. You do not have a car, and when you can’t easily get home, you ask me to get you, regardless of how late it is or how early I have to wake up.

Sure, I say. I get you, bring you home, and you do not wait to take a shower. You take off your clothes, and you take off my clothes, and you push me onto my back. You straddle me and lower yourself onto me. We are having sex, and I am thinking that I will stay the night with you, and I see your phone light up. There is a text. You stop moving, and you reach for your phone. The text is from your best friend.

He wants to come over and get some weed, you say. He’s going to be here in a couple of minutes. It won’t take me very long.

You get off me and get dressed. I do not know what else to say but OK. While you are downstairs with your best friend, I consider getting dressed and going home, but I don’t. You come back, take off your clothes, and get back on top of me. We finish. After, when we are in your shower, you tell me that your best friend was hoping I would go home so the two of you could get high. He’s having some problems, you tell me. Do you mind?

No, I say. I can go home.

OK, you say. I will call him and tell him to come back. You cup my cock in your hand and you kiss me. Don’t be jealous, rabbit, you say; it’s you I love best.

I think you and I are kind of each other’s keys to overcoming our biggest obstacles within ourselves, if that makes any sense, you tell me one night.

I kind of think that we might potentially represent a happiness if we could just get out of our own way. It’s like, OK, Will, I’m going to put someone in your path that fits. But to have it fit, you’re going to have to make some changes. You can’t hide who you are anymore. And I represent someone to you who you can’t control. You can’t be my everything. I’m in something that’s not going to disappear unless I do something about it. Taking a chance on you is a risk. To work as a couple, we have to grow as people.

Well, yes, I am suddenly becoming a parental figure. It’s not something you could have told me years ago or even last New Year, you know. Oh, this is what’s going to happen to you in this coming year. You’re going to meet this man who, you know, kind of has another world on the side, and he’s going to want to bring you into it, and you’re going to say yes.

Why is that again?

Because you love him. You love him and then you’ll meet his child that he’s not going to tell you about from the beginning and you’ll be pleasantly accepting and invite them up and put on a movie. And I’ve learned to accept a lot more things. Before I push something away, I’m trying to make if it is something I should be pushing away or if I am thinking about pushing it away because it could bring a feeling of rejection. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to have any more mental breakdowns.

You can, I say. I think this is one of the most honest conversations we’ve ever had. I did not think loving you any more than I do was possible, but this conversation, this moment is proving me wrong.

But if I’m keeping up with my bucket, then there shouldn’t be an opportunity.

To make telling each other how we feel about things easier, we conceive of having buckets into which we put things that bother or upset us. These buckets, you say, are very small, and must be emptied regularly. We have to ask each other what’s in the other’s bucket, and we must be honest about anything that might be in the bucket. In time, you say, the buckets will always be empty.

It’s Buddhist, this thinking – address what you feel when you feel it; do not wait until you cannot handle your feelings. I only link the buckets to Buddhist thinking later, after you are no longer in my life and I have begun meditating with a Buddhist monk. We meditate together for two hours a couple of days each week. I am learning how to handle my feelings. I do not remember what anger, frustration, desperation, and mania feel like, as if the pathways in my brain where these emotions lived have been erased.

I hope we won’t have to turn around 15 years from now, and someone will ask, how did your relationship work, and we’ll have to say, well, we had these buckets and they’re really small buckets so you can’t put very many things into them, you say. And we would just empty them. And every time we’d see each other we’d say, I love you, what’s in your bucket. But, Will, there’s been nothing in your bucket.

No, I say. Do you feel you’ve done something bucket-worthy?

No. But I don’t think we normally do. I don’t think if I would look at things in my bucket, I would say, well, you knew this would hurt me. I think that’s the issue with why things end up in the bucket. We do something, and we don’t realize how the other one might perceive it. And for the most part, it’s turned out to be misperception, you know.

For a lot of other people, it would have been enough to throw in the towel. They wouldn’t have given the other person a chance to talk or explain.

I’m glad we did, you say.

Me too. It’s nice to hear you say you love me.

Do I not say it often?

You do.

OK. Good. I don’t time it. I mean, I haven’t been keeping track. I know for a while there I felt I was saying I love you a lot, and I thought, maybe I’m saying I love you too much. If there’s such a thing, I don’t want to wear it out.

The incongruity between how we will be – or not be – at the end of our relationship, and your certainty that I am the one to whom your road has led, is not lost on me. I’ve been on a journey, too. I had thought you were my destination. Now I think that you will be part of my path itself. I cannot see where our paths will diverge, but I feel a divergence is coming.

__________________

William Henderson lives in Boston where he takes care of his children, blogs about love (hendersonhouseofcards.com), rarely reads directions, and wonders why life leads you where you’re led. You can find him through his blog or on Twitter, @Avesdad.

shake and share:

Shaking One is out now

Vito Grippi — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:30:33 +0000

The new issue of Shaking is out now. It features work by Curtis Smith, Kristopher Jansma, Travis Kurowski, Emma Briant, Jennifer Taylor, Dana Staves, Anna Mavromati, Cameron Cook, Alexander Freeman, Patty Somlo, Susan Grier, Eric Ramseier, Stephen Hartunian, David Beckman, Jim Johnston, Traci Parks, Patrick Ross, and Bitsy Sanders.

You can currently grab a copy from Amazon or the Createspace store. Ebook versions and other distribution channels are to follow. If you know of a bookstore that would be interested, we’d love to hear about it.

shake and share:

Second Wind

Enrico Raulli — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:00:32 +0000

The starter’s pistol punctured the air above the heads of the runners curled over like fetuses. Instantly they sprouted arms and legs. From his seat in the bleachers, Stan found it hard to tell which boy had made the best start. Nor could he pick out from among the eight brightly colored jerseys the red one he was looking for. What he could take in, though, was the dirt track that circled the football field and the buildings that made up the quad: the four white stuccoed and red roofed cottages on each side of the field, the long classroom building at the far end, and just behind him to his left, the administration building.

As the runners darted around the track, the dozen or so boys bunched in front of each cottage cheered for their entry. With their hands cupped at the mouth they let loose what sounded to Stan like a volley of gun shots reverberating in the quad. Each of them — they were all of high school age– wore khaki pants and a gray T-shirt with black lettering across the chest: Virginia Training School.

“Training school, not reform school,” the institution’s director, Mr. Stevenson, had quickly corrected Stan when he interviewed for the social worker job three years before. His white suit, Stetson hat, and southern drawl, along with his colonial styled house that looked down on the quad, led Stan to peg him as a descendant of the plantation aristocracy. “Reform school went out with the 60′s.” From the way the director stared at his ponytail, Stan could see that the elderly man wished it too had suffered the same fate.

Seated next to him in the bleachers, Charley, his friend and colleague, whose rotund body took up two spaces, liked to kid Stan about his hair: “If it’s money you’re trying to save, get it cut, and I’ll gladly pay for it.”

Charley and the four other social workers wore theirs short. A few months ago when he turned thirty, his wife, Cora, had suggested he get it cut: “The war’s over. It’s served its purpose.” They’d first met at an anti-war rally in the 70′s. “As far as I can see,” he’d said, as nicely as he could, but feeling that she was betraying what they’d both fought for, “the mentality that got us into it is still around.” She’d pursed her lips and turned away as if to say it wasn’t worth arguing about.

On the evening of his birthday, after Charley and his wife had left the dinner party Cora had arranged, they were seated on the sand-colored sofa together. He’d felt lightheaded from the wine. Cora extended her arm and stroked his hair affectionately. The gesture led him to believe she’d had a change of heart and still liked the ponytail. But then, taking hold of his hand, she’d said, “Don’t you think it’s time we started a family?” What surprised him was not so much her request, which he’d heard before, but how quickly he sobered up.

The year before, after they’d been married for three years, she’d brought up the subject of having a family for the first time. “What’s the rush?” he’d said defensively. His life had been running pretty much along the lines he’d set: an engaging job which paid him better than his previous social work in Massachusetts; a wife who loved him and was willing to leave her teaching job to follow him to Virginia; classes in the evening for his Master’s degree; and biking, jogging and handball on weekends. Fatherhood was something in the distant future. It was for slower men than he, the way long distance running had seemed to him back in high school and college. He’d been a sprinter, strong, fast and young. The fear at his back now was that with fatherhood, he’d become too settled too soon, put on weight, slow down, and watch life go by from the bleachers.

On that evening of his 30th birthday, he’d simply let go of her hand, and, choosing his words carefully, said, “I’m just not ready to run that race.”

With a look of intense disappointment in her greenish blue eyes, she replied, too quickly he thought, “Will you ever be?” Once again he’d felt betrayed.

A shout from behind and above him brought his attention back to the race. On the second and third floor of the long, white stuccoed administration building, secretaries and other staff people were leaning out the windows watching the race. One of the things Stan liked about these outdoor events was that they brought the entire school community together: kids, cottage parents, teachers, social workers, staff and even the maintenance people looked on. At least for a while, everyone came out from behind the walls that enclosed and isolated them.

At the far end of the field, the eight runners’ heads were bobbing up and down between the goal post and the classroom building. When he spotted the runner in the red jersey, he recalled his first meeting with him in his office, a couple of months ago. The boy had sat there, plucking the loose strings on the sleeve of his grey jacket. His thick neck was bent over, and he kept his left fist clenched for the whole interview. All Stan had been able to draw out from him was stuff he’d already known from court documents: Gary Smith, born in 1965, only child of Martha and Thomas Smith. Freshman year: average grades, good behavior; activities: track, football. Sophomore year: failing grades, truancy, fighting with students and teachers. Remanded to Virginia Training School for six months. But the stuff that mattered and which Stan knew needed to be talked about, the father’s abandonment of him and his mother, he’d not been able to draw out. When he’d asked about his father, the boy had closed up like a fist. In an effort to put him at ease, he’d said, “I guess you’re not ready to run that race.” The words, which had sprung up spontaneously, had conjured up the image of Cora’s greenish blue eyes and their plea. At first he’d felt a twinge of remorse as if his own words had convicted him of being just as closed in toward her as the boy was toward him. But then he’d convinced himself that there was no comparison: in his case, he’d catch up to her in time, but with Gary it would take more than time.

Leaning forward in the bleachers, Stan said to Charley, “Aren’t you proud of me for getting Gary to enter the race?”

Charley turned his large neck which was pressed tightly against his white collar, and said, “I didn’t think he’d buy it, but as I said before, it’s not a good idea. Now the kid’ll want you to do a favor for him, like write up a good report.” Stan had some doubts too, but one thing he was sure of: the idea, which had originated with Cora, had gotten him back into her good graces.

He debated whether or not to tell Charley about the distance that had opened up between him and Cora ever since he’d dashed her hope of starting a family, but decided against it. First there’d been the weekend bike tour they’d agreed to take, but which she’d reneged on. “Sorry, my students’ grades are due on Monday,” she’d said, brusquely. Then she kept coming up with excuses not to go jogging with him. “I only slow you down,” she said, again brusquely, although she’d never felt this way before. She was referring, he knew, to the shorter steps he had to take so she could keep pace with him. When it came to their marriage, however, she’d made him feel he was the one dragging his feet, the one unwilling to become a father.

The only time she seemed to warm up to him since his birthday party was when he’d talked about Gary who’d arrived at the training school around that time. One day while they were out biking together, he filled her in on the boy’s background and on his problem getting him to open up.

“Have you talked to his mother?” she said.

“No. She doesn’t have a phone.”

She glanced sideways and over her left shoulder and said, “You could write a letter.”

Without looking at her, he said, “True, I could.”

“You told me he ran track. Why not get him to run for his cottage in the school Olympics?”

He turned his head toward her and said, “Good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” Her smile was more refreshing than the breeze brushing past his face. He felt as if she’d handed him the baton, and now it was his turn to run his leg of the relay.

Stan shifted his body weight on the hard wood of the green bleachers pushing against his buttocks. He turned his attention away from the runners who were now at the far end of the field. He was about to say something to Charley but stopped when he saw that his friend’s moist eyelids were half closed. Shaking his head he recalled the enthusiasm in Cora’s eyes when he’d told her that Gary had accepted his invitation to run for his cottage.

“Nice going,” she’d said. She was sitting on the living room couch with her tanned legs tucked under her white shorts. “How did it happen? I mean what did you say and what did he say?”

“Well, this afternoon I took him for a walk around the quad, you know like I do sometimes.” Stan was perched on the edge of the sofa chair facing her with his arms resting on his knees. “I figured , no point in asking him questions and getting his usual one word answers, so I told him about the time I stumbled in a race and fell behind, but then I doubled my effort and placed second.”

“Then what?” she’d said, quickly unfolding her legs and sliding to the edge of the sofa, as if mirroring him.

“Then he came back with a story of his own,” Stan had said, his voice rising as he spread out his arms in front of him, palms upward. “About the time he was in a relay race, and he bobbled the baton, recovered it and went on to win.” Resting his arms on his legs again, he lowered his voice, fixed his eyes on her and said, “That’s when I invited him to run for his cottage and he accepted.”

“Great! You got through to him. That’s wonderful!” Cora said. She pushed back a strand of her dark blond hair. He loved the way it hung out from her white helmet when they were biking. He knew now, just from that gesture, that he’d made the right move.

As the runners leaned around the turn and headed up the other side of the field, the space between them widened. The one in the lead, Tyrone, had a slender torso that sprung easily off the ground and glided over the track. According to Charley, his caseworker, who cupped his hand over Stan’s ear so as not to be heard by the others seated in the bleachers, Tyrone was not only good at running track but also at “running off his mouth.” The runner behind him ran pigeon toed, and the next one had his head pointing slightly upward. Then came Gary. His arms were tucked in close to his chest and his bowed legs pumped like pistons. Stan didn’t have the heart to tell him that his physique was better suited to playing guard on a football team than to running short distances.

It didn’t bother him that the boy was not a natural runner. If he could hold on to fourth place in a field of eight, that would be fine. As long as he didn’t come in last. That could lead to kids picking on him and to more fighting.

When he saw Gary’s red jersey inching closer to the blue one just ahead of him, he wanted to shout encouragement to him, but there were other caseworkers and administrators around him who were big on “keeping professional distance.”

“Look at him run,” he said to Charley. “Not bad for someone who started practicing only a few weeks ago.” Poking Charley with his elbow, he added, “Must be my coaching.”

Charley smirked. “Another one of your brilliant ideas, Coach.”

Charley had taken to interjecting the word “coach” sarcastically with Stan, although the idea to coach Gary had actually originated with Cora.

She’d made the suggestion a few weeks earlier while they were sitting up in bed and she was talking about some of her eighth grade problem students. “Often enough they come to my classroom as much for the attention they don’t get at home,” she’d said, pursing her lips in frustration, “as for help in their studies.” He was glad that the intimacy between them, which had faltered, was now running more smoothly. She adjusted the pillow at her back. “Sometimes when they open up, I feel more like their counselor than their teacher.” Suddenly she turned toward him so as to catch his eye. “Why don’t you offer to coach Gary? Didn’t you tell me how you used to look up to your high school coach?” After a moment, she added, “Sounded to me like he was a second father to you.”

Stan had felt something tighten up inside him. Coaching the boy would mean staying on an extra hour and taking time away from his studies. Besides that, Charley and his other colleagues and maybe even old man Stevenson might say he’d gone too far. He’d been happy to keep Cora abreast of all his contacts with the boy, and though he liked the way her interest kept pace with his, it had now, he feared, moved ahead of his. “I’ll think about it,” he said, cooly.

Her cold stare ended the conversation. He felt as if he were in one of those races where the runners around him were boxing him in, and he couldn’t run his kind of race.

To his left Stan now heard the shouts rising up from the boys gathered in groups at the track’s edge, looking like grey patches against the green lawn. He said to Charley, “Gary’s doing better than I thought.” He was both surprised and pleased to find himself so wrapped up in the contest.

“Must be your coaching,” Charley said, sarcastically.”

Stan was glad he’d changed his mind and agreed to coach Gary. As he’d told Cora, “If Gary’s willing to stretch himself and run for his cottage, I guess I should do a little stretching too.” He’d felt good that she could now see he was ready, at least, to run this race with her if not any others.

“His voice rose as he turned toward Charley and said, “Look, he’s catching up to Tyrone, the front runner.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Charley. “Tyrone’s been running from people all his life.”

Despite Charley’s admonition, Stan, as he watched the runners dashing toward the finish line, did have his hopes up. If Gary made a good showing today, then there was a better chance his trust in Stan would grow, and he’d be more willing to make the next crucial move: to open up and talk about his father.

When the red jersey began closing in on Tyrone, the shouting in the quad rose to a crescendo. Stan sprung from his seat. He was being swept up by something stronger than his fear of what Charley or the others around him might say. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Go, Gary, go!” he shouted.

He hoped the boy had remembered his advice: “When you feel your fatigue building up and your breath getting shorter and you want to slow down, don’t give into it. Keep pushing and you’ll suddenly feel a burst of energy that will help you pick up the pace– that’s your second wind kicking in.”

Thirty yards from the finish line the two runners were side by side. The din echoed off the cottage walls. Stan’s saliva dried up as it did when he used to dash for the tape.

Gary’s sweat-soaked jersey inched forward into the lead. Tyrone then twisted his head, and when he saw Gary pulling ahead, shouted something at him. Gary’s arms stopped pumping, his fists clenched and flew out toward Tyrone. Their tangled bodies rolled off the dirt track and onto the grass field. The other runners shot past them.

In all of his experience as a runner, Stan had never seen anything like this before. His first instinct was to stay where he was, to keep his distance, but the same impulse that earlier had lifted him to his feet drove him to rush out onto the field.

After helping to separate the two boys, he accompanied them to the infirmary. The antiseptic smell of the place made him feel empty inside as if something building up had collapsed. In the infirmary the boys could get their bruises attended to. As for his own, there was no balm for them. They would come clamoring to him for attention as they usually did: while he was lying awake in bed. His wife’s remark, “Will you ever be?” was what had kept him awake the last time he couldn’t sleep. This time her glare would say: “Now you know a little better how I felt when you let me down.” But this time, as he tossed and turned, the pain would be shared by both of them, because the hope she’d conceived and with his consent was bringing to term had miscarried. Maybe he should’ve listened to Charley: “Don’t get your hopes up.” How could he ever succeed as a real father if he couldn’t even make it as a surrogate?

A half hour later when Stan walked into his office on the second floor of the administration building, he wasn’t surprised to find Charley comfortably planted in the cushioned chair behind his desk. “So what happened out there?” Charley asked. He had a squint on his face as if to say, “My guy’s a rotten egg, I know, but then why did your guy throw the first punch?”

Stan walked over to the window and looked down on the quad. A short time ago the open space was alive with people shouting and runners whirling around. Now the windows of the cottages stared back and forth at each other across the vacant field as if mourning some loss. Without facing Charley he said, “Tyrone called Gary’s mother a whore.”

“That’s it for Tyrone. I’m putting him on probation.”

Stan turned around. He saw that Charley expected him to say he’d do the same to Gary.

“I don’t think probation will do any good for Gary.”

Charley’s thick fingers were resting on his stomach, and he was rocking his chair back and forth. “Listen, Uncle Stan, if you think being chummy with him will make him change, think again.” Charley had coined the name to make fun of Stan’s novel way of interviewing kids by taking them for a walk around the quad: “Strolls with Uncle Stan,” he called them. “The outdoor space helps them to open up more,” Stan had responded in his defense.

“Probation is okay for Tyrone,” said Stan. They both knew that the fear of having two months added to his sentence if he broke probation would keep Tyrone in line. “Gary’s different. One day he had a father, and the next day he didn’t. He’s been sucker punched and is still reeling from the blow. Fear isn’t going to work.”

“How’s it going to look to the other kids if Tyrone gets probation and Gary doesn’t?”

“I don’t care how it looks,” Stan said more forcefully than Charley was used to hearing. “Tyrone will survive.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. When he spoke again his voice started softly, “As for Gary…” and then died out.

Charley rocked back and forth a few times as if waiting for Stan to come around to his way of handling the case, and then said, “If no probation, then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“I say you should at least give him hell.”

Stan turned and walked over to the window. He gazed across the quad to the infirmary on the second floor of the school building where he’d just come from, and where he’d faced Gary, intending, in fact, to “give him hell.” But when he’d seen the black-and-dark-red bruises around his eye, he changed his mind: “You were doing great,” he said, trying to sound gentle. “Why did you blow it?”

“He bad mouthed my mother!” he said with a mixture of anger and pride in his voice. He sat with his shoulders hunched over on the hard, wooden chair against the wall.

“He just said that to slow you down. Now you have to go to lock up.”

The boy’s teeth had flashed, and his eyes glared as he spit out: “He called her a whore!” The word, Stan realized, as he stood there with his arms clutched against his chest, must have stirred up all the anger festering in him: at his father’s betrayal of him and his mother, and perhaps at his own foolish belief that he could change, or at Stan for making him believe he could. Why else would he now roll his hand up into a fist and smash it into the white plaster board wall? Stan rushed forward to stop the blow, but he was too late. His arms started to reach out to take hold and comfort the boy, but he held them back. He was not sure if he or the boy was ready for that move. What he was sure of, though, was that he’d learned more about him from this one moment than anything he’d learned from all his files or interviews.

There was no need to “give him hell.” He was already there.

“Well Coach,” Charley said raising his voice slightly, in an obvious effort to bring Stan back to the problem at hand, “You’re not going to solve anything staring out the window.”

Before Stan could respond, the phone on his desk rang. He picked it up. It was Cora.

“So how did Gary do?” He knew she would call, but not this soon. He was glad she had. After what he’d been through, he needed a lift, and he wasn’t going to get it from Charley.

As soon as he heard her melodious voice, he felt his body relax. He made himself comfortable by sitting on the edge of his desk with his back to Charley. “He was doing great, but then…” He told her about the fight, but left out the incident in the infirmary.

“Will his mother have to be told?” Stan could detect the disappointment in her voice.

“She will if I add a couple of months probation to his sentence. Charley thinks I should.” He could feel Charley at his back like some pursuer trying to overtake him. “Remember when you introduced me to him?”she said, her voice almost breaking. He’d taken her to a practice session one afternoon. “It was so obvious to me then that he had to get back to his mother as soon as possible. I could see it all in his face. I felt like I was looking at one of those photos of refugees. You know, the ones where they’re staring out at you with that lost look in their eyes.”

He twisted his head around toward Charley and said, “Charley thinks I should give him hell or maybe just give up on him.” He could hear the dejection in his own voice, and he remembered Charley’s disappointed tone and expression. It was telling him that Charley no longer found him tough or professional enough.

“Please, Stan. Think of what that would do. He needs you now more than ever. If

you back off now, it will look to him like another father abandoning him. Ask Charley what he’d do if, God forbid, his son were separated for a long period from his mother? Wouldn’t he look to his own mother or sister or aunt for help?”

The passion in her voice made him realize she understood a lot better than Charley his bond with the boy. And why shouldn’t she? She’d been there at its conception and had fostered and nurtured it every step of the way. She was now pleading for him not to abort the bond. It was the plea of a mother to a father on behalf of their son.

Stan, after telling her he’d be home early, hung up the phone, stood up and faced Charley.

“Well,” Charley said, “what’s it going to be? Just lock up for a few days or probation also?”

“Neither one is what he needs. I need to talk to him.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to see him in lockup?”

Stan nodded slowly.

“Let him stew,” said Charley. His thick hands were resting on his stomach.

“He’s holding tight to a lot of grief and anger. I’ve got to help him find a way to let it out without swinging at someone’s jaw.”

“Just watch out he doesn’t let it out on your jaw.”

Stan tucked his shirt into his pants and said, “Look, when I told Gary he had to go to lockup, do you know what he did? He punched the plaster board wall of the infirmary, not me. He could’ve hit me then. So why didn’t he?”

Charley stopped rocking back and forth in his chair. “I don’t know. Maybe his aim was bad.” He pushed down on the armrests and lifted himself up, his large body resisting every inch of the way. Slowly he made his way to the door, turned, and added, “Keep your distance, though. It may improve.”

Stan didn’t like going to lockup. It looked too much like a prison. One bulb, high up and uncovered, cast a pale light on the corridor lined with four gray doors on each side. The place reeked with the odor of urine. At the small windows on the metal doors, faces peered through the wire meshing. “Hey, Stan the man, when am I gettin’ outa here?” Stan ignored the remarks from the kids in the cells behind him and peeked into Gary’s. He was seated directly opposite him with his back against the wall. His knees, which were bent up to his chest, supported his left arm that served as a pillow for his head. On his right hand, which rested on the bare mattress that covered half the floor, was a wrapping of white tape. It was the only bright spot in the cell which was dimly lit by one narrow window.

Stan tapped his knuckles on the door. The boy looked up and then put his head back down.

“Come on over here, Gary. I want to talk a little.” Even though he had a master key, no one but the guard was allowed in the cell. Insurance wouldn’t cover the staff for any violence incurred in lockup.

The body bent over against the wall didn’t move or speak.

Standing at the gray metal door, Stan felt like he sometimes did in a race when he could see the finish line, but was running out of breath. In a foot race he could always rely on a second wind to kick in and carry him to victory. But in this race that Cora had invited him to enter, there was no second wind.

Or was there?

Then what was her idea to ask Gary to run and him to coach? And what was the passion in her plea on the phone not to abandon him if not the boost that had brought him to this place?

Cora was his second wind.

He felt his chest expand and his breath come easier. He was now ready, risky as it might turn out to be, to make his move.

He reached into his pocket, inserted his master key into the door and pushed it open. The jolt surprised the boy. He too knew the rules.

Stan sat down next to him on the mattress. “Do you need anything?” Stan kept his voice soft. In the corridor outside, he could heard the chattering going back and forth between the cell doors.

Putting his head back down on his arm, Gary said, “I’m not running any more races, if that’s what you come here for.”

“O. k., if that’s what you want.” Stan knew from experience that starting a race was not easy. There was always resistance.

Gary’s head shot up. “What I want is to get out of this hell hole. Am I gonna get an extended?”

“Tyrone is. Isn’t it fair you should too?”

“He started it,” said Gary turning away from Stan.

“Doesn’t matter. You know the rules,” said Stan, encouraged that they were off and running.

“I can’t help it. That’s the way I am.”

Stan saw a chance to take the lead and challenge Gary to move out of his self pity. “That’s not what your mother told me when she answered my letter.” Stan was now glad he’d taken Cora’s advice. “She told me you never got into a fight until your fa–” Stan stopped. “Not too fast,” he said to himself.

“What am I suppose to do when someone badmouths my mother? Shake his hand?” His jaw jutted out toward Stan as he spit out the words.

“No. Just use your head.” Stan felt his breath expanding and propelling his words out. “Tyrone doesn’t know your mother any more than you know his. Don’t you think it’s tough for her? She’s not taking it out on anyone. Are you going to be the son she wants you to be or the one the Tyrones out there want you to be? Maybe you want an extended since you know that’s what you get for fighting.” Stan had all he could do to reign himself in. He waited, hoping the boy would match his spurt.

“I don’t want no extended.” Gary bent his head down as if the burden of his mistake was weighing on him. His left hand was rolled into a fist.

“O.K. Then promise me this.” Twisting around so that Gary could see his face, Stan said, “Look at me. This is important. The Tyrones out there don’t give a damn about you. Your mother does and I do and so should you.” Stan had never before used that tone with any of his kids. It sounded to him more like an anxious father taking his wayward son to task, maybe a lot like his own reserved but loving father back when he’d been, like all boys, a little mischievous . “Now here’s what I want from you. When someone mouths off to you, promise me you’ll do everything you can to handle yourself better. I can teach you how to do that like I taught you how to run better. We’ll talk more later and find another way to deal with it. Will you promise me that?”

“If I do,” Gary said, “will you promise not to tell mom about the fight and not to give me an extended?” The anger in his voice had subsided, and, Stan was pleased to see, his clenched fist resting on the mattress had opened up.

“That’s the deal.” Stan reached over with his right hand to grasp Gary’s left and said, “Shake on it.” The boy’s underarm odor–he’d not been allowed to shower–didn’t repel Stan. Runners sweat. It was one of the things they had in common. “And the next time I come, I’ll help you write a letter to your mother, unless,” and here Stan smiled, “you can write with your left hand.” Cora would be pleased that he was going to help Gary stay in contact with his mother.

Stan sat back and rested his head against the hard stone wall. The race wasn’t over yet; there was still one more lap to go.

He rubbed his fingers across his lips and said softly, “At some time-it doesn’t have to be now– I’d like to talk to you about your father, o. k.?” Stan paused. He could feel his breath rising and falling easily. “Heard from him at all?”

Gary shook his head slowly. “Not yet.” He still seemed resistant to talking about his father, but a little less so, Stan sensed. Both he and Gary, he noted, were suddenly speaking in hushed tones, as if they’d entered a holy place. “Did he say anything to you before he left?”

Lowering his head, Gary returned to his fetal position and began to sob. Out in the empty corridor the chattering between the cells diminished to a whisper and then to silence. Perhaps, thought Stan, the tears were expressing something for them, too. Even if later they would use it against the boy, now at least, they were all one.

Stan drew out his handkerchief and offered it to him. Without holding back this time, he reached around Gary’s shoulder and held him. It was a move, he felt, he was now ready for.

He stood up to leave, and as he did he caught a glimpse of the quad below. The sun reflected brightly off the windows of the cottages. In the race Gary had run today, the crowd circling the track had seen that he’d fallen short of the mark. What they had not seen was the other race, the one in which not only Gary, but Stan and Cora were participants. And in that race, though no crowds cheered it on, all the runners were further ahead than they’d ever been.

———-

Enrico teaches Creative Writing at St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City, N.J. His fiction has appeared in the following magazines The International Journal of Sports Literature, The Advocate, Lines in the Sand, Words of Wisdom, Poetry Forum, and Innisfree.

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Parlor Game – A Review of Creative License

Fred Shaw — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:30:47 +0000

A few years ago, after writing pieces on Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, it was suggested by one of my editors that the inimitable Gil-Scott Heron might be worthy of a thousand words. The problem was that I knew little about his work. After seeking some source material and doing a few Google searches, I came to understand a bit about this talented, socially-conscious songwriter and his troubled life. Using a bit-torrent program, I downloaded his discography and got to work trying to come up with an angle to approach this project. As I familiarized myself with Gil-Scott Heron’s music, I came to realize I had actually been introduced to his more well-known songs, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “H2O Gate Blues” nearly twenty-five years ago when they were sampled, respectively, in albums by the seminal hip-hop groups Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions. For different reasons, the Gil-Scott Heron article never came to fruition, but the moment of clarity that occurs after figuring out the source of another classic sample is righteous in its own way.

As a young, skateboarding teen growing up in the ‘80’s, I embraced the rebellion that goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of a self seeking both identity and independence. The culturally emerging sounds of hip-hop would soon become the soundtrack to embody most of those years. Between MTV’s daily hip-hop video showcase, Yo!MTV Raps, (BET’s Rap City had its moments as well), and the much-anticipated exchange among friends of dubbed cassette copies by the likes of Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and Biz Markie, among others, I was soon hooked on an emerging genre that many record companies at the time took to be a passing fad.

Besides the coolness of being an early and devoted listener during what others have called “hip-hop’s golden age,” of the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s, the music of that time had a certain immediacy that made it both cutting-edge and unforgettable. While some were drawn to the showmanship and spectacle hip-hop sometimes embraced, others were mesmerized (to the point of memorization) by the lyrical skills of MC’s like Chuck D, KRS-ONE and Rakim, among others. For me, it was the producers and DJs use of sample-driven music that sucked this listener in for life, and to this day, it still makes me happy to recognize a hip-hop sample’s original song. The first few times I heard Public Enemy’s classic, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, I thought a spaceship had flown into my head as it was so complex, densely layered and unlike anything I’d heard before. Sometimes, I feel like that sense of musical discovery is a lurking compulsion that I’m still after since those fateful times.

Perhaps, as the early listeners of the “golden age of hip-hop” get older, and the once revolutionary sounds of hip-hop grow mainstream, it is the academic’s role to make some sense of the music’s influence in the second decade of the 21^st century. In the past twenty-five years, hip-hop culture has been the focus of both social scientists and wary lawmakers in the U.S. Congress, as well as writers, with poets like Terrance Hayes, John Murillo and Patrick Rosal being just a few who embrace its style and themes in their work. While there have been various intellectual angles taken on the impact of this relatively new music on the country, as well as the world, it is the sampling aspect of music in general, hip-hop in particular, that gets dissected and thoroughly argued in a new book, Creative License, released by Duke University Press in 2011 and written by University of Iowa communications professor, Kembrew McLeod, and Northwestern Law School professor, Peter Dicola.

I was aware of the various sampling lawsuits that had befallen some of my favorite groups, most specifically, De La Soul’s legal wrangling with the ‘60’s rock group, The Turtles, after one of their tracks made it into an interlude on De La’s delightful debut, 3 Feet High and Rising. Aside from that, I have been mostly a hip-hop consumer, digging on mix tapes by the gigabyte from obscure turntablists who tended to mash-up old-school breakbeats with more commercial pop songs or classic rock. The idea that legal issues had changed how hip-hop is now being made was brought to my attention a few years ago when the documentary, Copyright Criminals, was shown on PBS’ Independent Lens program.

Copyright Criminals, produced by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, is a companion piece and primer to the more in-depth writing found in Creative License. Aside from a balanced discussion of this as a legal issue, both the documentary and book make the case that many classic hip-hop albums released from 1987 to 1993 could not be made in the current, lawsuit-filled sampling climate. And while the documentary is eminently watchable, it is McLeod and DiCola’s use of interviews and speculation, along with a detailed history of sampling and collage art that makes Creative License a work that tries to clarify the progression of this new musical form into understandable terms.

McLeod, an old-school listener himself, and DiCola interviewed many who have been involved with the creative and legal aspects of sampling, from producers and DJs, to musicians whose work has been sampled extensively, as well as lawyers trying to make some sense of the muddy judicial waters of copyright law. Some of the most interesting interviews are with Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team that put together the group’s most notable work on albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. It is fascinating to hear Chuck D, Hank Shocklee and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler discuss the low-tech ways they distilled hundreds of hours of disparate sounds to create the engaging palette of notes and voices to be found on both of those albums. This holds true as well for the Beastie Boys and their production team of The Dust Brothers as they help the reader make sense of how they were able to brilliantly piece together bits of 125 songs in a time before digital samplers to make their masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique.

The speculation that the authors raise about the incompatibility of making music layered with samples in today’s more litigious age makes for interesting reading as well. With hip-hop now a proven commodity commercially, the sampling of other musicians no longer flies under the radar as easily as it once did when many thought it was little more than a flash in the pan. It also makes sense to long-time listeners of hip-hop why the music seemed to lose some its edgy sound in the early ‘90’s– it would be unprofitable for a record company to pay for hundreds of layered, seconds long samples that made up the music then. In fact, using charts and estimates of today’s sample prices, the authors claim that Fear of a Black Planet would have lost $7 million and Paul’s Boutique nearly $20 million if they were made in 2011’s legal climate. Musically, my world would have certainly been a bit less rich without them.

Creative License really takes off early on when the authors delve into a well-researched history of sampling and collage-based art. McLeod and DiCola point out that collage is a hundred year old technique that was used by artists and writers like Duchamp, Picasso, Joyce and T.S Eliot. In a nod to one of Pittsburgh’s own sons, a thoughtful Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) explains that, “sampling usually is viewed as a musical thing, … but if you look at the art world, for example, you have Andy Warhol taking photographs and painting them. You have different photographers taking certain scenes and reconstructing them, digitally. It all implies a layer of collage and pulling together bits and pieces.” In fact, one of my favorite works by Warhol is a collage of Jackie O. images that uses press photos from November 22, 1963, both before, and after the assassination of her husband, JFK, to construct a hauntingly beautiful pastiche of a woman dealing with a spectrum of emotion. The book discusses another nod to that fateful day in U.S. history when Steinski, the legendary DJ, applied a similar technique of musical sampling to make the musical collage, “The Motorcade Sped On” in 1983.

It’s interesting to think that with copyright law, as suggested in Creative License, being less than conducive to artists who use collage technique today, that Andy Warhol would have had as much success now.

In the same historical vein, McLeod and DiCola explore a timeline of sound collage, beginning with composers Stefan Wolpe and Darius Milhaud’s experiments with multiple phonographs playing at different speeds in the 1920’s to John Cage’s manipulation of sounds in a piece called “Imaginary Landscape No. 5” in 1952. It was Pierre Schaeffer’s development of musique conćrete in post-WWII Europe, a collage technique that experimented with sound on magnetic tape to make “a concert of noises,” a compositional strategy many musicians were looking for. There were other examples of this technique used in rock ‘n roll “break-in” records that combined skits with popular music. The most well-known use of this avant-garde practice would be from The Beatles’ “Revolution #9,” which found John Lennon and Yoko Ono (an important avant-garde artist at the time) building a song around the symphonic archives of the band’s label, EMI. The timeline includes important DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa as well as the book’s discussion of today’s most-popular sampling artist, Pittsburgh’s own, Girl Talk, who mashes-up hip-hop songs with rock and pop tunes into a music the authors call a “parlor game,” as listeners might try to recognize some of the 300 samples on his album, Feed The Animals.

While the second half of Creative License is as well written and researched as the first, its focus on legal issues and solutions to digital sampling didn’t hold my attention as much as I would have liked. The writers complete their due diligence by exploring these matters fully and the writing remains crisp throughout, but I found myself wanting to listen to the music they were discussing rather than read about legal opinions on the matter.

One argument that I did find intriguing was that early hip-hop’s use of older, mainly African-American artist’s work as samples gave many of these now revered figures new musical life. There is discussion here of George Clinton and P-Funk’s reemergence as important musical groundbreakers after their popularity declined throughout the ‘80’s to the point that their records weren’t available commercially anymore. Also, while James Brown is now highly regarded as an important musical influence, in the mid-‘80’s, his music was thought of as sounding old, as it was the music your folks might’ve listened to. So perhaps sampling is not so much theft, as some would call it, but a way of paying musical tribute and a show of respect for a killer riff or a phat beat, as James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” Clyde Stubblefield has been sampled hundreds of times. Creative License and its authors clearly show that by understanding the historical nature of this issue, the reader can be thankful for the musical journey many of the albums from hip-hop’s “golden age” have given to its listeners, knowing it’s unlikely we’ll hear anything like it soon.

—-

Fred Shaw edits poetry for Shaking Lit, writes emminent poetry and is a frequent contributor to all things Shaking—

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Speaking of Townie with author Andre Dubus III

Wayne Cresser — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:07:09 +0000

Townie is a memoir by Andre Dubus III, most notably the author of House of Sand and Fog, and The Garden of Last Days. It begins in the late 1960’s with the upheaval of divorce, that of his parents, writer Andre Dubus II, and his wife Susan. Susan is left with their four children: Andre, his older sister Suzanne, younger brother Jeb and even younger sister Nicole. The story tracks young Andre’s struggle to find a self, a voice and more importantly, a way out of 1970’s down-on its-heels Haverhill, Massachusetts, a fading Merrimac River mill town plagued by poverty, drugs and violence.

After moving from one place to another, the beleaguered family comes to roost in a reasonably roomy house in a reasonable neighborhood in Haverhill. However, paying the rent and other basics, leaves their mother, who returns to school and earns a degree in social work, with nearly no money for anything else. Andre’s father is in the picture. In fact, he’s ensconced across the river at Bradford College, where he teaches writing and shares various apartments with faculty colleagues, earning not much more than enough to pay child support and keep an old car on the road. He sees his children but is shy around them and uninvolved in their lives.

The first scene in the book is telling. The sixteen year old Andre meets his father on the elder Dubus’ birthday for a jog. All he’s got for footwear is a pair of Dingo boots so he borrows his older sister’s sneakers. They are a least a size too small. He runs for what seems like “three days” to him. When it’s over, her takes the shoes off: “My feet were swollen and it was hard pulling them off, the skin of my heels scraping, both socks wet and red. I peeled them away to see all ten toes had split open like sausages over a fire.”

First there is the visceral quality of the imagery, at which Dubus excels. Then there is the introduction of three of the memoir’s most sustained and effective motifs. One, the author’s constant desire to tell his father what his day to day is like, to break that “invisible membrane” that Dubus contends exists between people, in this case the father and son, and finding himself unable. Two, the instinct to protect the ones he loves, in this case his mother, “Where’s your shoes?” his father asks incredulously. “I shrugged. I didn’t want mom to get in trouble,” he answers. And three, the idea that there is no gain without pain, an ethic that Dubus will apply to building his body and eventually boxing to overcome the fear that has made him a victim of bullies and toughs up to this point in his life.

When Dubus learns how to break the membrane, it is to throw punches and fight back, to protect the innocent like some vigilante character from the kind of vengeance movie that was popular in the 70’s. His interactions with his father become more frequent when Dubus attends high-toned Bradford College, where young Dubus’ leather jacket and ponytail mark him as the “Townie” of the title. There he and his father pal around, but he can’t break the membrane of intimacy necessary for the kind of unburdening he desires. He’s becoming a man who can stand on his own but he needs to tell his father how it was for him.

After an accident leaves his father paralyzed and Dubus gets involved in his father’s care, the exchanges between father and son are charged with more mutual appreciation, humor and love. Andre Dubus II dies in 1999, at the age of sixty-two, without young Andre ever finding the right time to tell his father what growing up across the Merrimac was really like for him and the rest of his family.

So perhaps it will be surprising, given the circumstances, that Dubus brings such affection to anatomizing the relationships, none of them simple, between all the strands of family, the tone of the times from the disaffected 70’s through the turn of the millennium, and even rusty old Haverhill, without sparing the reader the cost of any of it to the mind, heart and soul of the writer.

Shaking recently had the special opportunity to ask Andre Dubus III a number of questions about writing Townie. We were interested in some of the memoir’s major themes, the screen adaptation he is writing for the book, and some final thoughts on the setting of the book.

***

Shaking: As a child of divorce with three siblings and an academic father, the family situation in Townie really resonates with me. I remember that on the material level it felt bad, but worse on an emotional level, like nothing could be done to help us if dad didn’t come back. I felt that in your description of the moves you made right after your father left, ending up on Lime Street in Newburyport. Is that the level of desperation you were trying to relate? I mean, “Slime Street” certainly paints a picture.

Dubus: So much of my writing process, be it fiction or creative non-fiction, especially in the first drafts, is semi-conscious and largely intuitive, so a part of me was not trying to capture “desperation” so much as the total experience, as I remembered it years later, of being the oldest boy in dangerous neighborhoods, small and weak and afraid, but having somehow internalized that it was up to me to be the man in the house now, a role I was clearly unsuited for. Looking back at the scenes I wrote, I believe I included the one of my father confronting Clay Whelan’s father for this reason: It was clear to me, at that moment, that my father was not going to be able to protect me at all. He wasn’t a fighter, and he wasn’t around, though I was grateful to him for trying.

Shaking: In the New York Time’s review of the book by Darcey Steinke, she says Townie reads in many ways like one long rebuttal to “The Winter Father,” a story your father wrote, about a dad leaving, and as he drives away he is called a bum by one of his kids, just as you describe your younger brother Jeb doing as your father drove away. Unlike the father in the story, who is able to reconnect to and reassure his kids not long after, you suffer years of deprivation and emotional uncertainty. Was Townie a conscious effort to set the record straight?

Dubus: Not at all. In fact, I hadn’t read “A Winter Father” in years and forgot that that scene of the son throwing the rocks and calling the father a bum was even in that story. I also, once it was clear to me I was writing some kind of accidental memoir, had no intention of writing about my father in any way. Why? Because I knew there was some unplumbed shadow between us, and I did not want to betray my father, a man I love and miss very much, who’s not even here any longer to defend himself. But if I’ve learned anything from writing all these years, I’ve learned this: the writing is larger than the writer; if we’re writing honestly and deeply enough, it will take us places we could not possibly imagine beforehand; the horse knows the way.

Was I consciously trying to set the record straight? No. But, in many ways, the entire book is the conversation I wanted to have with my father and never did. I wanted to set the record straight with him, no one else. Did I say how much I miss him?

Shaking: You say early on in the book that when your father went, so went your mother’s lifeline to the world. All your father’s friends went with him. For me, that raises two questions, one, being so far from her Louisiana family, was there any discussion of pulling up stakes and just moving all of you back to Louisiana despite her father telling her not to if she ever got divorced and two, do you think that the choice of family friends to side with your father was a reflection of the times or a reflection of the writer/teacher culture of your dad or what?

Dubus: If there ever was a discussion of pulling up stakes and moving south, I never heard about it. I think, though, that there was not. Years later, my mother told me she just couldn’t go home; her marriage was the failure her parents feared it would be.

I don’t think my father’s friends staying with him was a sign of the times, the late ‘60’s, because I see that kind of ex-spouse dumping happening with newly divorced people in my own life in 2012. I do think, though, that the overwhelming majority of my parents’ social life was tied to the small liberal arts college where my father taught. When he left, he remained employed there, and my parent’s friends became his friends only. It still makes me sad for my mother to remember this. She was just as charismatic as he was and a lot prettier and maybe smarter, too! (He would agree with me, by the way…)

Shaking: Townie, among other things, I think, is a coming of age story, but one, to paraphrase one of Hemingway’s characters, which has nothing to do with dates and calendars. You’re a published writer, celebrating the sale of your first book with your mother and sister Nicole in Key West one minute, and sending a young man to the hospital after fighting in a Miami airport the next. By this point you’re pushing thirty and you’ve been fighting like this since you were fifteen. What kept driving you to behave this way even after you had started to find your voice as a writer? Did you see yourself as the great avenger of the innocent victim or was something else going on?

Dubus: Good question, one I hope is at least partly addressed in the book. I guess the honest answer, to use a cliché, is that old habits die hard. The truth is, to this day, nothing makes me angrier than injustice and cruelty and the strong dominating the weak. In that scene at Miami International Airport, I was absolutely incensed that those two men had terrified that woman, and I did want to teach them a lesson, BUT I had also just left a conversation with my mother and sister that had something to do with my father which had triggered a rage in me begging for some kind of release. As I write in the book, I believe I was right to have stepped in and tried to help that lady, but there was no need for me to exact physical revenge on those two men to accomplish this protection. I did that for me more than I did it for the woman I was trying to help. But that fight was also the beginning of a turning point for me, spiritually and philosophically, which is why it’s in the book; while I got pats on the back from the cops and a few men who’d seen me do what I did, I knew intuitively that what I’d done was wrong to the core and that this path I was on could go nowhere positive.

Shaking: You talk about breaking the membrane, the invisible barrier between people. With sex and love, you say, people do that willingly, joyfully even, with the violence that you knew you were capable of after you knocked Steve Lynch’s front teeth down his throat, breaking the membrane was a different thing altogether. Could you clarify how that worked on you and ultimately what you came to understand about that? I’m thinking about that kid who went from being small and afraid to the teenager “who looked in the mirror now and saw the boy who hadn’t backed down or run or pleaded. I was smiling at him, and he was smiling back at me.”

Dubus: Hopefully, my answer to this is already in the book. The membrane insight was semi-conscious in my fighting years, but I was always aware how much nerve it took to step into that moment of physical violence with another human being, a blind act of faith that this will all work out somehow, that leap into the unknown. It felt strangely familiar, and I knew years later it was not unlike that much more loving and positive physical intimacy that is consensual sex. The reason I was proud of that teenage boy – that night I knocked the bully’s teeth down his throat- is because in a fight situation there’s no waiting for permission to break that invisible membrane around the other; you just break it, and if you do it first, and with the right moves, you most likely will come out ahead.

Shaking: I wish you would explain the title of the memoir to our readers since the divide between the rough and depressed streets of Haverhill, where you and your siblings are growing up in the 70’s, and the manicured greens of tony Bradford College , where your father teaches, writes and lives, right across the Merrimac River, feels like such a load for you, especially in the presence of Andre Dubus, your “Pop,” to whom you can’t explain the daily rigors of poverty, drugs, and fighting in Haverhill and how these things are affecting your brother and two sisters.

Dubus: The title is actually not the original one I’d written. The original was River, Fist, and Bone. I liked this one, but it ran into some resistance from my publisher. It was my editor, the brilliant Alane Salierno Mason, who came up with Townie, and I liked it immediately because in one word it addresses what in many ways the entire memoir is about, that chasm between our lives across the river and what my father was living on his green, walled-in campus. It’s the conversation with him I never had and wished I’d had before he died. I believe he died never fully knowing what our childhoods were really like, and while I did not write this book for him – I suspect I wrote it for it – I’m glad I finally leapt into that chasm, creatively.

Shaking: You announced last November, I think, that you’d be writing the screenplay for Townie. Could you fill in some of the detailsof that undertaking? For instance, do you plan to work with Vadim Perelman, as you did in House of Sand and Fog?

Dubus: At this point, it looks like I’ll be co-writing this with a professional screenwriter, a man who works closely with the producer who’s optioning the book. (She co-produced Revolutionary Road, among other notable projects). Anyway, I’m going to go into this slowly and carefully. It wasn’t easy, on an emotional level to write this as a book; I’m going to be doubly careful to try and be as honest and fair as I can be in this adaptation. I’m feeling very protective of my family in this process.

Vadim and I are friends, but I haven’t heard from him on this one, though he was interested in possibly adapting my novel, The Garden of Last Days, but that’s been optioned by the Scottish actor, Gerard Butler.

Shaking: In the third and final section of the book, which is called Holy Head, there’s a scene between you and your father. He’s wheelchair bound now after being hit by a car after he’d stopped on the highway to help some people in trouble. AND YOU WRITE: “Pop had made his peace with his crippling. Once, sitting straight in his wheelchair, he’d look over at me in his small dining room and said, “I’d stop on that highway again. Even knowing what I was going to lose, I would.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve learned so much.”

What now do you think he meant by that?

Dubus: A few years ago I stumbled across this prayer from the Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “God, I always remember to thank you for the roses, but I keep forgetting to thank you for the thorns. Thank you for the thorns, God. Thank you for the thorns.” I think my father was saying that he’d learned so much on a spiritual level from all the physical suffering he’d endured as a man in a wheelchair that he couldn’t imagine having learned it in any other way.

Shaking: One of the abiding motifs of Townie, something the reader should appreciate deeply by the end, is the litany of Haverhill landmarks, that palpable sense of place, you create with such lines as, “I’d drive straight through the intersection, the Basilere Bridge on my right, Bradford shimmering on the other side,” and the bars, boxboard factory, train trellises, the Avenues, Captain Chris’s Restaurant. I’m thinking if somebody dropped me into Haverhill, I might be able to find my way around. What finally is your take on that town? How do you feel about it now?

Dubus: Well, I love that town the way Solzhenitsyn loved the thorns! It is also home to some people I’ve known since I was a kid, people I love as much as my own family. It’s also changed for the better in many ways since I lived there in the 70’s. That said, it still depresses me a bit when I’m there, though I suspect that has to do more with me than with it.

Shaking: Final question, when you, your brother and your lifelong friend Sam are digging the hole for your father’s coffin, your mother comes with sandwiches and you observe, “that many times over the years, my mother had told me Pop had been the love of her life. “He was a self-absorbed son a bitch, and we could never stay married, but he was the one.”

My question is do you think that your father’s self-absorption was just the other side of insecurity? Several times he puts lines from stories you tell him into his own fictions, and he’s perhaps too proud of your ability to fight. He flirts with co-eds when you’re at Ronnie D’s together, when you know he’s got another wife and new kids at home. What do you think he was trying to prove there?

Dubus: Man, this question would take an entire book to answer, one my father should probably write, not me. But, as you know, he died thirteen years ago next month, and I’m so grateful he left behind his masterful body of work. The honest answer is this: I have my theories about what he was trying to prove with his infidelities, etc., but I truly believe every human life, contrary to what so many self-help books tell us, is a nearly impenetrable mystery. I think you’re right that my father – charismatic and brilliant as he was – was also deeply insecure on many levels, but that’s just the beginning of who he was, and I’m hesitant to try and reduce him further. Our job as writers is simply to paint the gray, to try and capture the mystery – not solve it – as honestly and clearly as we can. I’ve tried to do that with Townie and my fiction.

Townie is now in paperback, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Wayne Cresser is co-founder and editor emeritus of Shaking. His recent fiction can be found in All the Livelong Day (Motes Books) and The Ocean State Review, and in the next few weeks and months in The Sound and Literary Art Book and The Written Wardrobe at ModCloth.com.

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My War: Killing Time in Iraq

Rehann Rheel — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:00:37 +0000

My War: Killing Time in Iraq
By Colby Buzzell
Berkley Caliber, paperback

The mission flag in Iraq has been lowered, and the last of the troops are on their way out. A war that has existed for a decent part of my life has come to an end at last. Apropos to this enormous conclusion, I’ve decided to talk about My War: Killing Time in Iraq, a memoir written by Colby Buzzell.

In his late twenties, Colby looked back at his life and realized that he was almost thirty and had done absolutely nothing with his life. So he decided to join the Marine Corps…and ended up in the United States Army instead. Despite a rough start, Colby eventually became a machine gunner and was sent over to Iraq. With nothing better to do in his free time (of which is had a considerable amount), Colby divided his attention between a plethora of books, his journal, and his blog. It is the creation of those last two that made this book possible and provides readers with an insight into a country where violence has become a part of daily life.

I’ll admit that I was completely shocked by how much I enjoyed this book. I almost exclusively read fiction, and upon hearing that it was a memoir, I had my doubts. I guess have this stereotype that stories about real people are boring and dry. Sort of like reading a textbook (and I read enough of those already, thank you). But Colby’s tale is anything but dry; it’s colorful, and in more ways than one.

Take, for instance, the tone. Colby Buzzell, as a member of a counterculture, is disrespectful, anti-authority, and very “I don’t give a shit.” As such, he isn’t afraid to swear. A lot. I’m pretty sure more f bombs were dropped in his memoir than actual bombs were dropped in Iraq. But that’s one things that makes him seem so real. When people are in the moment, experiencing very genuine emotions, they really don’t give a thought to censoring their words.

And Colby’s story isn’t what you’d necessarily expect from a war memoir. Though he of course mentions the time spent “on the job” completing assorted missions, the memoir is more of a focus on what’s it’s like to be a human being in Iraq. Readers get an understanding of what exactly soldiers have to go through, and the hypocrisy of the whole situation. For example, Colby writes:

“Another good example of when knowing some Arabic was helpful is when we were doing a dismounted foot patrol through a low-rent part of town or something and everybody was just staring at us uncomfortably, you’d just bust out the smile and the wave and say, ‘Salaam aleikum.’

“It would totally ease up a tense situation, make us not seem as threatening to them, and they’d smile back and say, ‘Aleikum salaam’ (the return greeting). And that barrier between you and them would kinda go away. Then you got one of your interpreters to politely ask them where the fuck are those goddamn weapons caches that I know you fuckers are hiding?”

It’s moments like these that really hit you hard. Colby’s more than honest, he’s blunt. And that characteristic can be felt in the emotions created by Colby’s truths; the fact that the truth isn’t mitigated makes them all the stronger. Time and time again, Colby will tell us what the Army wants civilians to know and then and goes and tells us what they don’t want civilians to know. Such moments are so pervasive that My War sort of makes CBS News seem like a work of fiction.

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Rehann Rheel was a Fall 2011 Shaking intern.

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