Stories

I woke up because the IHOP was on fire. Various bullshit acquired importance. The menus sprayed flames and the curtains burned like freebasing comedians.

I blew out two windows with my Austrian pistol and stumbled through the front door. People were standing around the building, star-eyed in the night and red-eyed from the shitty weed I sell them.

Someone told me I owed him five dollars. Someone else said my dick was out. I peeked down.

“Got you motherfucker!”

Smoke rose from my shirt. Shit. I got got.

The IHOP burned down and people turned out for it like it was a goddamn barbeque. Ricky showed up and passed me an L and I contemplated my dick. It was all right, nothing weird on it. Probably smelled like a Duraflame now. Someone jabbed me in the side with a finger.

“The fuck you want?”

Ricky loved that phrase. The McDonald’s on First Street fired him four times for saying that to customers. Once to an infant.

The man who jabbed me ended up being Theo. I suppose he’s a crackhead. That, or his mother engaged in relations with a jackal, because he doesn’t look correct at all.

“Your dick’s out, brother,” he said.

 

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The kettle freed the pressure from my walls. Morning ritual: whistle back at the pot, steep tea, stretch in bare feet, then hide my legs under the kotatsu. The electric kind was more practical on a mountain, although I still entertained fantasies of an old-fashioned charcoal pit in a quaint, smoky room. Never mind how burdensome it would be to haul fuel up and down a snowbound slope, alone.

My hands creaked. Unfinished pages by the teapot. To procrastinate one must lie, but there is too little air in the peaks to waste time with deceit. Survival occupied more of my mind than I’d prepared.

Curls of steam warped the cup’s rim. Ceylon was Maggie’s habit—I neglected sencha now, and didn’t miss it.

I faced the paper on the table and the bands of sunlight that screened it into gold and shadow. My limbs were taut like springs under a weight, but the kotatsu coaxed them into open warmth.

I held my spine straight as I drank, eying the loose book with caution. The words would come, though I didn’t see them yet: simply find the right slit in your fortress.

A tossed clock, the mirror broken from our sedan. Maggie bursting into fury while I withdrew in careful steps, away from a wild mouth and American impulse.

A man beaten on the side of the street, she leaning down to assist, me rounding the corner with a hidden wince of disgust.

“You don’t help each other in Japan?”

 

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The radiator squealed in a brassy tantrum. Jerry Muser rocked back and forth between noise-cancelling headphones, unable to address the appliance’s protest, or indeed any of the world’s problems. The Airedale that shared his room—Mug—warmed the man’s feet with loyal, serene dreams. He’d stay there forever if Jerry did.

A sea of steely hair made an island of Jerry’s bald spot. The skin around his chin hung loose, and it wobbled as he chomped a potsticker with nicotine teeth.

The phone rang, Jerry didn’t hear. Mug hoisted a floppy ear and decided, as with all the other calls, that it wasn’t important. Their shadows twisted against cabinets, dressers, chipped walls.

Police officers arrested a violent drunk outside Jerry’s apartment building, but he was calm and glad six floors up, blasting music. Mug heard everything pretty clearly with the window open, but it didn’t register as anything urgent—certainly not enough to leave his human’s worn, knotty toes.

A Newark-bound Cessna grumbled through the clouds scudding past the window.

Two miles away a BMW 5 series wrapped around a telephone pole and wept smoke. The driver, who was under the influence of cocaine and was on his way to divorce proceedings with his acrimonious bitch of a wife, fled the scene because it was his girlfriend’s car and she was unconscious with a potentially serious head wound.

 

 

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The magician is an asshole. He makes passes at me twice a day; once before practice, when I’m warming up, and once after I jump from the safety net toward the Flying Apollo Troupe’s shared trailer. I hope my dad never tried the same pickup lines.

“There’s a real woman right there. Not afraid to be thick around these skinny kids. Listen, I know you love fondue, I’ve seen you eat it by the drum—we can go to this place I know, talk about where you want to go to school. You want to go to school, right?”

He comes on after the Russian swing with a cloak and a phony grin. Sparks, hidden doves, levitation. I want to punch his nose into applesauce.

“Sweetheart, remember to keep your back straight so your tits pop,” he tells the new assistant from Ekaterinburg.

“How is pop?”

“Like pop, you know.” He cups his hands under his chest and turns out his hips. Charming.

“O.K.” She arches her back, pulling the shimmery spandex against her breasts. Her nipples are pretty goddamn visible.

“Perfect, gorgeous!”

“It’s a family show, Don,” says Jim Crewer, the stunt cyclist. His face looks like Muhammad Ali’s hands, which everyone jokes is the real reason he wears a helmet in the show. People say he sings to the wart on his cheek.

“Like hell it is. People come to see tight bodies doing impossible things, nevermind what the playbill says. The wives get the African dancer with muscles on his eyeballs, sit in their chairs and play fantasy. Kids just picture themselves doing the stunts, sure. But dads, you know—Tatyana gets their minds going. Right?”

He winks broadly, adds a lame cape flourish. Tatyana, lost on the topic, bares careful teeth in a parody of Western smiles. Maybe she understands. What woman can’t understand the lechery of a man?

 

 

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He had tumors behind his eyes the size of dumplings. With all the booze he’d drunk over the years, the rest of his brain would be sloshing around like chicken stock. Which made his skull a cauldron, I guess.

He certainly housed enough metal in his head from the ER trips, like after he ramped his Harley over the neighbor’s station wagon on a dare from—me, actually. But I was eight, in my defense, and I didn’t expect him to destroy the woman’s prize-winning lawn, never mind a budding (if shaky) link with the community.

On his first day back home, he kicked my dog in the teeth and said, “Shut up Frank, you shite!”

Frank is my name.

His was Grandpa Farron, although he went by the Beast of Cork before Ireland chucked him out for assaulting one mayor too many. From 1955 on, he was America’s problem.

“Dr. Howes to the basement,” said a dreamy voice over the PA.

“All over soon now,” said Grandpa.

Outside, Tampa steamed in the plum dusk. Thunderheads over Hillsborough Bay.

“Nonsense. You’ve got all of us around, you’ll be fine.” Aunt Rhonda squeezed tears around her dimples. She always said things that weren’t true.

Uncle Greg said, “You want to know the basketball score, dad?” Florida-Marquette in the Sweet Sixteen.

“I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

Greg quailed under Mom’s glare. “Or maybe we should say an Our Father.” No one took him up on it, not even Mom, but for form’s sake he mumbled the words.

“We love you, Pops.”

This from Uncle Greeney, whom I’ve been taught to shun since I could walk.

 

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More people press in close for the hole. Jim Daily was the first to find it, just off I-10 in Glendale. Nothing but desert for miles, and then this little oasis right here. He went again on his way back from LA, and the relief was just as great as the first time. How many things can you say that about?

Jim told Danger Mike, his friend and fellow trucker, and Danger Mike had gone way out of his way (and his employer’s wallet) to see the Eighth Wonder, or I guess to experience it, since half the fun was you don’t see anything. He left the restroom exultant.

Then Fadden happened on an online forum full of dangermike77’s all-caps exultations, and he became a devoted acolyte. He brought his cousin, his uncle Leif, and his best friend Doogy. They all took turns—twice—and became very difficult to reach by phone.

A member of the press got wind of this “small-circumference Shangri-La” and wrote several rejected articles on the topic, establishing credibility through multiple physical confirmations of the so-called “Layman’s Lourdes”, although he exceeded the 400 word count on every submission, mostly due to his lengthy and impassioned (and ultimately futile, he would say) descriptions of the intensity of the feelings involved and the magnitude of the relief and joy that occurred post-miracle.

 

 

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