So, a while back, a gentleman named Lee Berman put together a project called UprightDown.com. The idea was that it would be a novel that would be co-written by artists in several different fields using a variety of mediums. I contributed to this project as a writer and I have decided to post the four [...]]]>

So, a while back, a gentleman named Lee Berman put together a project called UprightDown.com. The idea was that it would be a novel that would be co-written by artists in several different fields using a variety of mediums. I contributed to this project as a writer and I have decided to post the four contributions I made to the site here in memory of Lee. He isn’t dead, but he has left Brooklyn, which is pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, you can go have a look at the site if you crave context. I like these pieces on their own, though. I don’t do that much fiction and, by themselves, these come off as somewhat abstract micro-stories, which I kind of dig.

Chapter 11. Chucks

The thing about Chuck Taylor’s is that they were originally introduced in 1917. They were designed for the growing basketball market at the time and were just called All-Stars, until they caught the attention of the Highschool Basketball Superstar of the day, Charles Hollis Taylor. After suggesting some design changes, Taylor signed the shoe and it was a hit throughout the twenties and thirties.

Then it fell out of favor. Until Rock-a-billy came around in the fifties and the greasers took it up. Ever after that, The Chuck Taylor All Stars would be associated with a kind of underground identity.

Rock-a-billy became Punk Rock in the seventies. Then it was all about Joey Ramone up at the front of the stage, the toe of his black sneakers hanging off the front, shouting “Blitzkrieg Bop” so loud that even the underage kids that couldn’t get into CBGBs and were relegated to smoking out front, even they could here the lyric. All of them wearing the same black Chucks that Joey was. Then it was the eighties and the skaters were all about the Vans and the Hip-Hop kids had their Nikes. You’d see All-Stars every once in a while, usually on the underdog getting the crap kicked out of him by the jock in a John Hughes movies.

And that was why they were special. They were always an identity thing. You’d see them on John Cryer in Pretty In Pink, and you knew, he was one of yours. It was important, the way that those signifiers are always important, especially when you’re young and out of place in school, in your family, in your own body. They were a way of grounding yourself. And what is more appropriate than shoes for that job? You knew something had happened when you saw Kurt Cobain wearing them in heavy rotation on MTV. You knew the wheel of fortune, the cosmic wheel of fortune, not Pat Sajak’s, had turned and you and your kind, all you outcast kids, were now on the high side. You were kings and queens of the media driven, pop culture world. At least for a little while, that wheel does turn fast. But in the meantime, in that moment, you were standing on top of the world and you were standing in your Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

Then it was just a competition with all of the other newly minted cool kids for colors and styles. Zelda was a genius. She had taken her unbleached whites out to the alley and applied a coat of lightening yellow paint so electric that when you looked at them, you tasted Ozone.

Or maybe Louis tasted Ozone because of the Mescaline. Where did Dana even get Mescaline?

Where did she get Zelda’s sneakers? Her Day Glo, teeth grinding Yellow Chuck’s. He had seen them. Where? Outside, on a telephone wire. Which means something, sneakers on a wire, that has some significance in street symbolism that he used to know, but now can’t place. Did it mean the one time wearer is dead?

Someone head threatened him with death. Who and where… it was recent, someone giving him the slashing motion across the throat, the one truly universal gesture. When he saw the sneakers. That was it. He had seen them on the wire and tried to knock them down and hit a limo with a brick. Mescaline makes things fuzzy, but it occurred to Louis that Michael Bloomberg had threatened him from a stretch limo.

It is hard to hold on to things, hard to remember why you are lying on a floor. Easy to focus on basketball shoes so bright and familiar as Zelda’s Chuck’s. Now on Dana.

It is a little known fact that there had been a tennis version. They were called Jack Purcell’s after a Canadian Badminton player. No shit, Badminton. They had one fatal flaw, at least in the original design, which was that, when you got them wet, they smelled like death.

Death. Shoes on a wire means death. Shoes on a girl means… what? Shoes on a girl, padding slowly towards you wearing only a slightly oversized T-Shirt and maybe nothing else. What does that mean on the street? Maybe Bloomberg knows. He must have his ear to the ground.

Then Dana is pushing Louis over on his back. She straddles his belly. His shirt has ridden up and he can feel her pubic hair, under her shirt, tickling his exposed navel. She doesn’t shave. At least, not completely. She is leaning close and talking. She is showing him something. It is a Star of David. Yellow. A tamer shade of yellow. An ominous shade of yellow. As if you could take a color, burn it, rub it is ash, and leave it to the dry wind.

Dana says, “These were made in China. Along with the ones that Zelda and her friends put in the Holocaust Museum. The originals are gone and now Zelda is looking to absolve herself. She thinks that she can cleanse her soul in some Vikram Yoga studio down an alley in God knows what part of town. Not Park Slope, that’s for sure.”

Louis is virtually certain he should know what that collection of syllables is supposed to mean. But Dana’s pubic hair, and her drugs, are making things hard to sort through.

Pubic hair.

Chinese factory workers making fake Holocaust relics. With probably no more thought than they give making sneakers. That is the work order. Star of David badge of death. Sneakers. But only in the standard catalogue colors. You want some crazy shade of yellow, you gotta do that yourself, Whitey.

Pubic hair.

Meaning.

Meaning is so hard to figure out. But it seems so important.

Sneakers on a wire.

Dana takes off the shirt. And now she is just wearing the Chuck Taylor’s. Zelda’s Chuck Taylor’s. Chuck Taylor All Stars, which are always about identity, especially when you hand paint yours a color that can be seen from space. Or from China. Always about identity. If Dana puts on Zelda’s All-Stars does she assume Zelda’s identity, Does she become Zelda? Is Louis’s arousal incestuous when Dana is wearing Zelda’s Chuck’s, when she is Zelda? Is that what all of this means? And does it mean that if Dana never takes the sneakers off, if she is always Zelda, does it mean that Louis has found her and now he can stop, now he can sleep, now he can stop trying to figure out what all of it means?

Sneakers on a wire.

Or. Maybe, he is wrong.

Maybe, sneakers on a wire…

Maybe, it just means you’ve lost your shoes.

Chapter 13. Jackasses

It was hard for Louis to be certain what he was seeing. The man standing in the doorway seemed to be a Nazi. Not a Neo Nazi. Not some scary looking guy you see on the subway and happen to glance a prison made swastika tattoo creeping out from under a sleeve. No, this seemed to be a Nazi Non –Commissioned officer in the grey Hugo Boss designed uniform, black collar and shoulder boards, skull and crossbones pin on his officer’s cap. Louis was suddenly caught by a vague memory that Hugo Boss had been fined and had lost the right to vote after the war, because he had been a Nazi sympathizer. That must have seemed like a slap in the face when, for the previous eight years, everyone in Germany had been a Nazi sympathizer for all Boss could likely tell. The rise of the National Socialists and his party affiliation and their obsession with military affectation had saved the clothing designer and manufacturer from going under. He had been bankrupt in 1930. By 1940 he had been the style maker to The Thousand Year Reich and his designs marched in lock step right into his bank account. By 1948 he was disgraced, stripped of citizenship in his own country, and finally, dead. And now, here he was, high and tight, crisply creased, and draped over the man holding open the door to Louis.

In an act of universe destroying paradox, the man in the doorway smiled brightly and said, with a slightly Minnesota accent, “Hi, can I help you?”

Louis had made his way to 209 Houston and found himself standing in front of The Film Forum. He had spent the train ride down with his mind unable to shake Zed’s final expression. The look of disbelief, that moment when something irrevocable has happened, that moment when all you can think is “No, wait.” He had such gleeful menace only the second before. In Louis’s mind, every commuter on the train wore that expression. As he talked to the ticket girl, her face flickered in and out of that expression. Only to him. She had been bored. Irritated at having her texting interrupted. When he asked her about the “Smithsonian” she had sent him around to a side entrance and then gone back to her phone before he had even walked away.

Next thing he knew, he was standing in front of the door with a Nazi who was polite to the point of eager.

“I’m, uh, looking for the Smithsonian,” Louis said.

No, Wait flashed across the man’s image. Quickly replaced by a big real world grin. Louis grinds his jaw. Now. Fully back to the now. Louis focuses.

“Oh, sure! Come on in.”

Louis is brought into a room of Nazi officers. Men and women standing around with drinks in their hands, all Grey and Black and precisely tailored, adorned with arrays of medals and black lightning and silver skulls. Aside from everyone being dressed like the greatest evil mankind has ever known, it seemed like any other cocktail party of Manhattan professionals. Post grad school twenty-somethings in their pre-stroller hey days regaling one another with their wit and insight.

Apparently, Louis’s face betrays his confusion. His host comments. “Oh, ha ha, don’t worry, we’re just ironic Nazis. You know, we’re not really Nazis. Except, of course, we are.”

This gets a round of laughs from some black clad SS officers nearby. Louis is blank faced. His reaction is always going to be whatever they want it to be. They know he’s so shocked and they’re so daring and they will project the reaction that satisfies onto any blank slate that comes their way.

All Louis sees, when the laughter dies down, is No, Wait.

Louis shakes it off. “Is this… Is this related to the Smithsonian?”

The Grey Shirt gets this somewhat amused, somewhat disbelieving look…

No, Wait

… like Louis is either nuts or naïve or gauche or all three.

“Um, well, heh..,  You know what, why don’t you wait here and I will see if he is around.”

The Grey Shirt walks away into the crowd. Louis has had enough. These people are idiots. Worse. Rich, educated idiots and they have no idea, could have no idea what is at stake for someone like Louis who can’t get the final flicker of mortality from the dying thug who was only moments before going to hack him to pieces, that final expression could have been warn by him, but instead it was up to Louis remember, to record it, to see it forever, to be the custodian of the final moment of the man who wanted him cut to ribbons and these first year lawyers think this is fucking shocking?

“Would you like a drink sir?”

The waiter is wearing black and gray striped pajamas.

Louis is nauseated. He turns and leans on a small table. Puts his hand to his side. That’s when he feels the broken Luger. Remembers it. He’ll leave it and go. He’ just put the broken gun on this table and walk out of this, find his sister. Not going to find her here. This is a dead end.

He puts the Luger down and spins around towards the door. He turns too fast, unaware of the black clad SS Reichsführer who is standing behind him. One of Louis’s elbows catches a tumbler in the man’s hand. The glass goes flying and smashes against the base board of the wall. Louis looks after it. Embarrassment on top of everything else is not an emotion Louis could even begin to communicate right now.

It doesn’t seem to matter, The man seems to regard the broken glass and lost drink like someone passing on the street that he half remembers but not enough to stop for. He turns back to Louis. He has his jet black hair slicked back and a prominent brow and nose that shadow already dark eyes. Those eyes are no level at Louis.

“If you are here, then I would suppose that Zed is dead.” He looks away, casually taking a new drink off the passing tray of a survivor, “It is an unfortunate fact of our world that sometimes one can feel happy about another man’s well deserved end.”

Louis would point out the irony of that sentiment coming from a man in an SS Uniform, but what’s the point. The man takes Louis’s hand.

“My name is Joe. Come with me. We’ll talk in private.”

Louis follows. He’s not even sure why anymore. He passes a waiter, No, Wait, and takes a drink off of his tray.

Chapter 17: The Celebrity Photograph

Louis stares at the three photographs directly across the bar from him. They are lined up vertically nailed into beams between shelves of liquor. Most anyplace in New York could be judged by its relationship to celebrity ass kissing. Places you really want to be are those where you will see the celebrities but never a photo of them. From there it winds down through the scales of fame, starting with say a Polaroid of an ironically grinning Bill Murray in some Williamsburg hipster bar that he once crashed. Then it is a long slow slide until you get to a picture of Anthony Edwards from over a decade ago in some diner on the far east side of Midtown.

The celebrity photos at The Russian Teeth Room are as dissonant and cacophonous as the place’s theme. George Clooney up at the top. Actual photo of him in the bar, looking tolerant, but clearly yearning to leave. The ones below are headshots. The middle one is signed, “Thanks a lot, Barbara Hershey.” Whatever happened to her, anyway? The bottom one is so familiar, but also, so unplacebale. It is older than the others and Louis knows the face, but he just can’t pin down where he knows it from.

Han is talking to the Bartender/Hygenist. She has burst into tears. Some girl named Kat.

Who is that guy?

Louis is having a hard time concentrating. He has been drugged and hit in the head a lot over the past couple of days. Now it feels like his brain has been rearranged in entirely random order, like mixing up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to make it more challenging. At least, Han was apologetic about the last one. Is it that or something else? Something more basic.

Goddamn it, he knows that actor! What’s his name?

Suddenly, Han is standing there. He says, “Izzy, leader of the Zionists for the Absolution of Nazis (ZANAZ)–a heretical Catholic organization attempting to hasten the Apocalypse by “saving” Nazis, converting them to Judaism, and sending them to Israel–has just been here. He has the teeth.”

Louis wonders if that would sound like complete babble to anyone or only to someone who has the kind of brain damage that he must by this point. Or maybe it isn’t brain damage. Maybe there is only so long, physically, any human being can focus on a single thing. Even if that thing is finding your sister. Maybe there is just a biological limit to concentration, then your brain forces itself elsewhere. Maybe. Brain damage is more likely, though.

That guy. Is he French?

Some people, celebrities, are so easy to find. Everyone is already looking for them. Louis wishes Zelda were famous. He would have so much help, then.

He looks around. The Russian Teeth Room. Another ridiculous New York novelty. Like the bar with the phone booths or The Box, where famous people and junior partners over-pay to masturbate in public. It is tiring, all of this crap. Always a new scheme to get people to spend money and always just layers of imitation and gimmick without substance. Always one more meaningless way to waste your time and money because that is all most people have in New York. Or Hollywood, where the people in these pictures are manufactured and shipped out to the buying public. The nation is book marked by slightly different expressions of hollowness. Manhattan and LA, like geographical quotation marks. The entire country is in air quotes.

As if no one really means it.

And the only thing Louis wants is to find Zelda, find somewhere to sit with his sister, find somewhere to have some time before there is no time left. Order a pizza. Watch some random movie, “The Breakfast Club” or “Speed” or “Braveheart,” rebroadcast on some random basic cable station. A “House” marathon, for God’s sake, while he and Zelda just sit and don’t even talk. No more disembodied teeth, Hitler’s or otherwise, and no more shitty novelty bars.

Han grabs his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Louis gathers his jigsaw thoughts and turns to follow Han. Just as he turns, the change in perspective makes it all clear. The guy in the picture is the guy who played LeBeau on “Hogan’s Heroes.” George Clooney, Barbara Hershey, and Robert Clary. In that order.

Louis turns to go after Han and feels something both crunch and squish under his foot. Cockroach. No wonder Clooney looks like he wants to leave.

Chapter 24. SHRRRK!

Tied to a chair. To Louis this seemed kind of corny. Certainly he was frightened and concerned about the situation, but there was something so Hitchcock about being tied to a chair. Somehow he knew that he would not be in one of the Cary Grant films, one of the good ones. No, it was all Torn Curtain for Louis.

He looked around the room. Someone had done a lot of shopping at Bowery Restaurant Supply. Everything was stainless steel tables and shelves. Easy to clean, never stains. It didn’t bode well that those two traits were important. As if to drive that point home, the shelf nearest him was lined with jars of unmistakably human teeth. They were labeled with dates and what he guessed were the initials of the former owners. Those nearest the front had recent dates and the contents were gleaming white with silvery fillings. Behind that he could see yellower jars, with yellower contents.

He wanted to get up and have a look and see how far back the dates went, but getting up was something he had already tried and failed at. That was how he discovered he was tied to a chair.

Ok. If this is Torn Curtain, then what would Paul Newman do. Louis could see shelves directly ahead of him, maybe fifteen feet. There were crates stacked in front, but on the shelves there were medical supplies and tools, all gleaming with the stainless steal motif that dominated the room. There were also canisters with labels that said things like “industrial” and “solvent” and “acid” and “caution.” Paul Newman would find someway over to that shelf and use something there to get loose of his ropes.

Louis rocked back and forth and so did the chair. He then hopped. Forcing all of his weight forward in a kind of all over flinch, a stunted paroxysm. “Shrrrk!” and he was an inch closer.

“Shrrrk!”

“Shrrrk!”

“Shrrrk!”

“Shrrrk!”

He hoped his captors had forgotten about him, because this was going to take a while. He stopped to rest. He noticed that he was now close enough to see inside one of the crates at the base of the shelf. It was full of ornate beer steins. They were inscribed as if they were commemorative items from the 1936 Olympics. But the crate was labeled “made in China” and the steins were clearly too clean and new to be real. Around the Olympic rings and inscription there were various kinds of German Gothic ornamentation. Proud looking bucks and vicious wolves, together with scenes of the gloriously industrial “volk” and all of it dominated with nods to the Thousand Year Reich that was just on the horizon at the time.

All of this Nazi crap. Here in America. Louis had been to Germany, briefly. But to him, all of this death’s head ghoulery seemed like a distant remnant when he had been there. The sort of medieval, dark iconography that the original Nazis had embraced and updated into their black hearted high fashion terror seemed, in the face of Germany’s modern incarnation, to be a kind of last stand for that aesthetic. Sure some of the old gargoyled building were still around, but most of the country seemed to be like an echo of the Frankfurt airport where Louis had landed, one big sprawl of clean angles and square spaces, the whole place a kind of experiment in publicly accessible modernist abstraction without bias or passion enough for race deep hate.

Seeing all of this stuff end up here in New York, it reinforced the notion that evil can’t be killed. Maybe you can purge it from one place, but it will only pop up in another. Like chasing mercury with your finger. Another way to wind up mad.

Louis had rested enough. He scrunched and jerked, “Shrrrk!” Then again. But the second time, something different happened. “Shrrr – whup.” Then he was tilting wildly forward and left. All he could see was the nearest crate rising quickly towards his left temple, a nice soft entry point for the rapidly approaching corner to force its way into his brain as he fell towards it. When he had landed painfully, but safely unlobotomized, his head only a centimeter away from the crate, Louis suddenly felt as if he had made the leap from Torn Curtain to Get Smart. “Missed it by that much.”

His being on his side, his cheek pressed into the rug which he had apparently not seen until it caught the front leg of his chair, this was not the only thing that had changed. His seat had lost some of its structural integrity. The chair was broken. He couldn’t see where or which part, but he knew there was suddenly more give in the ropes. He knew, kind of instinctively, that he could wriggle free. He started to twist his body trying to writhe loose.

Then there was the sound of footsteps. He looked beyond the shelves. From his new vantage point he could see the bottom of a door. He heard voices beyond it and then saw shadows fall in front of the light streaming through the crack at the base of the door. One of the voices…

Was that Zelda?

So there I am at the bar talking to Angie.

Who’s hot.

I haven’t seen Angie in years and when I last saw her, she was at her going away party with her boyfriend, Ted. This was at the close of a two year association. I had met the couple right after the break up with Julia. [...]]]>

So there I am at the bar talking to Angie.

Who’s hot.

I haven’t seen Angie in years and when I last saw her, she was at her going away party with her boyfriend, Ted. This was at the close of a two year association. I had met the couple right after the break up with Julia. I had moved to Brooklyn and I immediately began to lust after Angie. In a quiet way. We had a lot of mutual friends and Ted was a very nice guy, bit of a lug, but a nice guy. He had that kind of densely packed roundness that only slightly balding guys who wear baseball jerseys can pull off. He was quiet, unassuming, harmless.

This was in high contrast to Angie who was this little spitfire of a girl. She had been a dancer when she was younger and had that kind of wiry limbed thinness that girls who were dancers when they were younger have. Those whiplash arms and that skinny little torso that you know you could just wrap around you and wear for days. Great big smile, really engaging, painfully alert, and always laughing. She had these long quick fingers that you felt sure would wander everywhere if you gave them the opportunity and so you spend all of your time looking for the opportunity. Or at least you do if you don’t have a bunch of friends in common with her long time boyfriend.

If you do, you adopt quiet resignation as you attend their going away party the day before they, the happy couple, move to Florida. You file it under “never gonna happen.” They become a friend. A hot friend, but a friend. So it goes.

But a year and half later she is back, without Ted, for a short visit to New York. Great. So we sit at the bar with a bunch of other mutual friends and catch up. Eventually, as happens, people’s attention drifts and consolidates and everyone is having smaller conversations. I am having my smaller conversation with Angie. We do the “state of the life in progress talk” and I go first.

Now at this point in time, my life had progressed its way down a deep dark hole. This was just after I had broken up with a girl who had been a nightmare of a human being. Around the same time I had lost one job that I liked and had taken another that I despised just to make ends meet. And as the new job didn’t pay as much, I was also facing having to move into a place with lower rent and had begun a very painful search into neighborhoods renowned for their fine collections of spent shell casings and broken glass because that was what seemed to be in the budget for the foreseeable future. So, because I have gone first and I am in friend mode with Angie, because she has after all moved to Florida with Ted, I tell her the truth. This is how it’s going. I keep it light, I keep it jokey, I skip the almost complete nervous breakdown I had the previous week, but still it is what it is and I say as much.

Then it’s her turn. Details go by, bartending, getting her social worker’s license, lives near the beach, Florida’s beautiful. No mention of Ted comes up, so I ask.

She had broken the fuck up with fucking Ted! No fucking shit! Dumped his ass and was on the fucking loose!

I’m sorry, that must have been painful, you guys were together for such a long time.

Well, it was a long time coming and she thinks he’ll be ok. Eventually.

And so we talk, to each other, to the rest of the group, to anyone, and as we talk and the evening wears on, this wonderful thing begins to happen. Angie’s hand keeps wandering over to my knee or my arm or she’ll take my hand in hers. She keeps touching me. And I am being charming and funny and she’s laughing and I’m thinking “Great!”  It would not be a surprise to me at all if Angie knew I had the hots for her. Politeness and discretion aside, I do tend to wear things on my sleeve, probably gave myself away at some point. But now it seems that not only is she aware, but amenable to the idea.

What’s more, this couldn’t be a better situation. I know I need to get back in the saddle after the dumping, I know it would be good for me, that it would be nothing short of therapeutic, but I absolutely have not been able to muster up the desire. Especially, not to deal with a total stranger who I don’t know what they will want or what I will want. Then here’s Angie, fresh out of her relationship with Ted and going back to Florida. We already have a comfort level established, we know each other, we know our stories. There couldn’t be a better situation. Really. Perfect.

Well, eventually, she stands up. She has driven and she needs to get home before she gets too drunk and too tired to drive. I am not worried about this as I know that we all have plans with her again in a couple of days and I am in no big hurry. So we all stand up to say our goodbyes. After a lot of hand shaking and hugs to the gathered crowd, she turns her attention to me. She leans in, gets her body right up against me, squeezes me very tight, and says into my ear –

“Don’t worry, things will get better soon.”

I lean back and look into her eyes. I now realize that I have spent the entire evening mistaking sympathy, or actually, pity for attraction.

Then she leaves.

Me? I stay at the bar and wear a very fake smile just as long as dignity, what little I have left, demands. Then I say my own goodbyes, go home, and sit in my room in the dark.

I’m so glad I am married now.

The first time was when I was [...]]]> Someone very famous and quotable, whose name I have forgotten, said, “All art aspires to the condition of music.” I hate that that seems to be true. Especially because there were a number of times in my upbringing when I was offered music lessons of one sort or another.

The first time was when I was nine or ten and my Mom walked in to find me hammering around on her hand me down organ. She came around the corner and cocked her head at me. “Well, Brad, would you like lessons so you could learn how to really play that?” It is sad that I was unable to just grab that opportunity. I was a pretty weary kid. Given what school and home was like, I had an impression of the world as hostile and any new environment was seen as a new front with new potential enemies. My Mom was being encouraging of an interest I was taking and, instead of seeing that as an opening, I looked at her like she was nuts, an expression that said, “not without a shiv.” There is no Tea Party militia in the foothills of the Rockies, waiting for Obama to come to personally escort them to the marxist re-education camps, that can hold a candle to the sort of paranoia I was cultivating in my pre-teen years.

Normally, I am content with the kind of writer and performer I am. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on skills I would have learned, if I had known I wanted to learn them, when I had the chance to learn them. Then, I hear something like God Help The Girl and my imagination just reels. This is a side project from Stuart Murdoch of Belle And Sebastian and it entertains me to no end. I am posting a video below. And this is the kind of thing… Oh, if I had learned to play that damn organ. Well, lets say I would have hoped I would have done something like this but with more visual style. God bless Murdoch, but the fact that the singers are not dressed in matching outfits, and he isn’t sitting behind a vintage Wurlitzer dressed like someone put Burt Bacharach and Mick Jagger in blender, with the rest of 1972, and then poured the contents out onto a piano stool, that is just a missed opportunity on a scale with not taking music lessons when they are offered. I mean for God’s sake, man, how many times in your life can you rock blue tinted sunglasses and feel justified?

The only other time is when you wake up to find out you are Steve McQueen.

But the band didn’t go that way, they dressed like normal people. And I didn’t learn to play the organ, I ended up performing in burlesque shows. So, I think we can all see how that happens.

Still, for all of that, if you really want to do music of some kind, you will find a way, it will resurface. And so when I was sixteen I taught myself to play the harmonica. Alone in my room. And now I play with BTK at least once a month and, well, it ain’t a Wurlitzer, but its something.

JERKS!

Cyndi chose this theme. She’d had a bad day. But it put me in mind of this story.

I have an aunt that made a hobby of marrying well. And by well, [...]]]> So it is time for the second ever Standard Issues show, for which we have a ridiculous line up and a great theme, which is…

JERKS!

Cyndi chose this theme. She’d had a bad day. But it put me in mind of this story.

I have an aunt that made a hobby of marrying well. And by well, I mean they had money, not personality or intelligence or anything in common with my aunt. Well, I am sure they liked their money as much as she did, so at least they had that.

Ophira Eisenberg, on the bill and not a jerk.

Anyway, the aunt in question, as I understand it, had always been a hot commodity in a small rural community where true beauty comes around once a generation, at best, and that attribute might be what gets them out of the back breaking grind of shit jobs that makes most of their peers look twenty years older than they are. It also might be apocryphal (Greek for bullshit) since in these small towns where you are always short of people to play all the parts in the show, you assign people a role. So “The Pretty One” suddenly becomes Helen of Troy, instead of the cutest girl in her graduating class. And people legitimately see them that way and make asses of themselves accordingly.

At any rate, my Mom had to grow up with this. Or more to the point my aunt grew up with it and Mom grew up without it. While my aunt was the queen of a parade that never seemed to run out of gas, Mom fell into the role of caretaker, the woman in any redneck family that (barely) keeps everyone upright, somewhat fed, and with as many teeth as possible still in their heads. And this was how they rolled into adulthood. My aunt married a (or another) real estate baron who went on to weigh four hundred pounds and Mom became a nurse who made regular rounds to all the aging hillbillies who refuse to die.

Jeff Simmermon, also on the bill and not a jerk

My people are ridiculously strong and resilient, to the point where the only two things that can kill us are our own stupidity and the unrelenting march of time.

Anyway, the last time I visited, Mom ended up talking about the phenomenon of my aunt and her “legendary beauty.”  And she fell upon this story about checking in on a particular older set of second cousins who could no longer get out of their house much. My aunt was visiting from Kansas, where she had moved with the real estate baron and his fat, and was driving around with Mom to all the relatives she had to keep track of. Now, at this point, my mother had been the thin line that kept her cousins from becoming one of those horror stories, the ones where the old shut ins are eaten by their cats after they keel over from eating spam gone bad, and had been for about three years. And we lived about two hours away, so this was no mean feat. And mostly, what these people did was complain about what was not in the care packages Mom dropped off, if they acknowledged the kindness at all.

Wade. Not a jerk. On the bill.

So, Mom pulls up out front, grabs the box of food she has brought and starts heading up the walk, while my aunt lags behind to touch up her face. The old woman comes out of the house and greets Mom with a leathery squint and a blunt, unsmiling “Carol.” My Mom hands her the box and at that moment, the cousin looks behind Mom and sees my aunt heading up the walk and suddenly brightens, the leather flattens out into a broad grin and she exclaims, “Oh! And she brought the pretty one!” Suddenly, the old man was in the doorway, smiling as well. He couldn’t be bothered to get out of his seat for the woman who was keeping them alive, but for “the pretty one” he would find his feet.

Mom had grown up in this shadow and she thought, after they had grown up, that she had gotten past it, that it didn’t bother her.  But as she found herself suddenly yanking the box out of the shocked old woman’s hands and telling her, “You and that jerk you call a husband can fend for yourselves or starve, for all I care, you old witch!” and heading back to her car, well, she had to guess that it was possible she hadn’t quite gotten over it. And you should make no mistake, Mom wasn’t being over sensitive, the old woman knew what she was doing. For some old hillbillies that kind of pointless spite, that jabbing a boney finger into your pre-existing bruises, is a pastime and compulsion they just can’t resist. Or as Mom says, “They’re just plain old mean and they got nothing else to do but get better at it.” And mostly, people let them get away with it. But that day, Mom had had enough.

Ben Lillie. On the bill, not a jerk, apparently dreamy.

In the end, Mom didn’t let them starve. But they got a little skinnier over the next few weeks.

So, we are proud to present our second edition of The Standard Issues with Andy Christie, Ben Lillie, Adam Wade, Jeff Simmermon, and Ophira Eisenberg,with Cyndi Freeman and me as your host. And Jerks.

Andy Christie, on the bill.

Cyndi Freeman, co-producer, not a jerk.

Brad Lawrence, your host and, y'know, yeah, occasionally.

Join us at Pacific Standard, this tuesday at 8. The show is free, the entertainment is the best you will get, and they have a rockin’ beer selection. Look forward to seeing you there.

So, It is fall of last year and I’m outside my local coffee shop, smoking a cigarette, when the schizophrenic guy comes walking up. It was more of a shuffle really. He was a red headed guy who had let upkeep slide for long enough that his naturally curly hair had formed into kind of [...]]]>

So, It is fall of last year and I’m outside my local coffee shop, smoking a cigarette, when the schizophrenic guy comes walking up. It was more of a shuffle really. He was a red headed guy who had let upkeep slide for long enough that his naturally curly hair had formed into kind of clumpy ad-hoc dread locks. As had his beard. He was wearing a dirty army surplus jacket and cords that had seen better days, days of washing machines and being folded at the end of the night, rather than slept in.

Now, a few minutes before the arrival of our psychologically imbalanced friend, a woman had come up, tied her German Shepard to the light post on the corner directly in front of the coffee shop, and gone inside. I was standing next to the light post. Having my coffee and my smoke and watching people on the sidewalk. It was a nice September day, a Saturday morning, and Brooklyn had a pretty relaxed atmosphere to it. People were gathering in groups and chatting on the sidewalk, or walking their kids or pets or whatever else might require walking, all with a fairly leisurely air.

This all shifted slightly with the arrival of Schizophrenic Dude. I think, by now, we all know why there are so many crazy people wandering around on the streets and, yes, hopefully Ronald Reagan is getting the pitchfork enema for it right now. That said, the proliferation of the unattended chemically imbalanced has served to create an interesting social dynamic, especially in large cities where many of these folks seek shelter. Almost any public environment might undergo a sideways shift in atmosphere or tension level with the arrival of someone who is talking loudly to a host of people, none of whom are actually on the crowded subway train with them. All in one station stop. Between 23^rd and Union Square, the secretary, just off from work, might sit with her novel closed in her lap and people watch or read the runner ads. A young professional might exchange furtive glances with his female counterpart across the aisle or, if he’s really feeling bold, strike up a conversation. Groups who got on the train together laughing and chatting will keep going without missing a beat, the act of keeping up the three points of contact balancing act on the moving train, not affecting the flow of conversation at all.

Then the train slides up to the stop, the bell dings, the doors open, the conductor announces all the relevant transfer points, and on steps a guy wearing three coats, two hats, and is engaged in a shouting match with an invisible person who is, apparently, trying to feed him rats.

And for some reason the guy in all the coats has drawn a large letter B on his forehead in, what appears to be, “Mocha Mystique” lipstick.

The secretary opens her novel. The young professional open his Wall Street Journal and his opposite opens her Times (they never would have gotten along, anyway). The conversations lower to a whisper, until whoever was speaking when the doors opened can finish their sentence and, once that is done, the conversations stop entirely. Everyone looks down, either at the floor or something they are pretending to read. Ipods get turned up and the nodding along with the music gets more pronounced as the listener tries to communicate greater absorption in the private world that headphones create. No one makes eye contact with anyone.

Well, the young professionals might still attempt a couple of glances, the libido is hard to defeat.

But, for the most part, the crazy guy now has the floor and everyone is going to do their damndest to act like they haven’t noticed. Even though the bare fact of the guy has changed everything about their behavior.

That may sound like a criticism. Like,  “Oh, how terrible that these cold and callous New Yorkers ignore the suffering around them! What bastards!” But, it’s not. I do it too and I know why. Someone is acting in an outsized manner in a public place. But it is only a public place for those observing. The crazy person is responding to an environment and situation that we, the rest of the populace, are not participating in and the rules of this person’s reality make distinctions like public or private entirely irrelevant. They are off the reservation. In this case, the reservation being the general mass conception of a shared perception, in the most basic sense, of their common environment. Those three adjectives, mass, shared, common, all gone for our friends in the many coats.

Basically, yes they are talking, but they are not talking to you and, depending on how far gone they are, it may be entirely impossible for you to talk to them. At least in any way that they would understand. There are people who go to school for many years just to be able to get the mild to moderately severe cases to a level that is simply functioning. There is nothing you are going to accomplish between Union Square and 8^th. Except, probably, to scare the hell out of the poor guy.

So, look down and let them do what they gotta do.

In this sense, the German Shepard was a consummate New Yorker.

The Schizophrenic Dude got to the corner and stopped. He stood close to the building, across the sidewalk, and his gaze fell upon the dog. He obviously wasn’t too severe a case as he still seemed somewhat aware of the people around him and his focus was fairly steady on my fur bearing, Bavarian, smoking companion.

For his part, the German Shepard waited patiently for the return of his mistress with little regard for anything else going on around him.

I was watching Schizophrenic Dude out of my peripheral vision, mildly curious as to where this was going.

Schizophrenic Dude, S.D., watched the dog and began mumbling to himself. When he was back against the building, I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but then he began to inch forward. He wasn’t more than seven feet from the dog starting out, but it seemed to take him forever to reach his destination. Shuffling tentative step. Stop. Shuffling tentative step. The streams of foot traffic broke around him as he edged towards the German Shepard. Eventually, he got there, and for several seconds he stood awkwardly over the animal.

The dog glanced uncomfortably towards S.D. and then looked back in the direction his owner had gone. He stiffened a little, but didn’t move. He seemed determined to ignore this, to wait out the unwanted attention until his mistress, who was, of course, God, would return and make whatever this was go away.

S.D. continued to stand there and now I could make out one word from his mumblings. That word was “free.” I knew what was coming. Sure enough, once the courage to break through his private dialogue was mustered, S.D. bent down with sudden speed, found the latch on the dog’s leash, undid it, and laid it on the ground. Then he bolted across the street, narrowly avoiding getting creamed by a service car.

Through out this, the dog never moved and, in fact, did his absolute best to act like it wasn’t happening. After S.D. was gone the dog looked up at me, then back at the door his mistress had gone into. And remained exactly where he was.

I have to say at this point, that this was not a very well though out delusion on S.D.’s part. I don’t know how you qualify the concept of freedom, but my conception of it entirely rules out this dog’s fate should he have chosen to seize the opportunity that S.D. was so sure he was waiting for. There is nothing free about leaving behind all the love you know to go live on the cold city streets of New York, get mange and fleas, heart worms and eventually something worse, while rummaging through trash cans for something on the barest edge of edible, until you are fatally injured by a Taxi cab and manage to drag yourself under a bush or an overhang to starve to death. This dog knew what side his bread was buttered on and he wasn’t going anywhere. He was going to wait right there until his owner came back and took him back to his nice warm apartment and the spot on the end of the couch that he had taken all these dog years to get perfectly worn in. He was going to be fed something that did not involve licking remnants from Styrofoam after finding out exactly how hard it is to catch a fucking squirrel. Later, he might chase that ball.

But only if he really felt up to it.

Still though, I figured there were some things that even the smartest, savviest, four legged New Yorkers can’t resist. In particular I was worried about other dogs. All dogs want to interact with other dogs, even if just to show them who’s boss. Eventually, someone would come by with a Shitzu or a Chihuahua and old Fritz might be tempted to go say hi. Suddenly, there would be this leashless beast with inch long canines coming over to give Muffin a sniff on the keister and then, well, let the typical Gotham histrionics ensue.

So, I bent down and put the leash back on.

He ignored me just the same as the crazy guy.

I felt bad invading his space.

In a way, S.D.’s actions weren’t that delusional. In a sense, it was almost too linear a logic. Nothing wants to be tied down, nothing wants to be on a leash. This seems like it would be an obvious truth. But it’s hopelessly wrong. We all spend a certain amount of time on a leash and most of us want to be on those leashes. A leash gives a life structure, after all, and in structure there is security, community, a little less guesswork. It ties you to the person or institution that holds the other end and we spend a great deal of time and energy to find that illusive combination in a person that makes us want to trust them with our leash and who wants to trust us with theirs. Then you can get down to the business of working in your respective sides of the couch.

Maybe chase a little ball later.

Dirty joke.

The chemically unbalanced folks that Reagan put out onto the streets of our cities now wander amongst us, off their leashes. They are unmoored from the structures that tie us to one another. They exist in individually constructed realities, as we all do to a certain extent, but without the intersections that make a collection of private lives into a social system. They wander through the spaces in between those connections. They are too free. Free from warmth, community, safety, the smidgen of certainty about what’s real that allows the rest of us to hold jobs and pay rent. We look away because their freedom is the precarious kind, the painful kind, the kind that precedes an early death in the cold somewhere. We don’t relate and we wouldn’t want to.

H says to me, “Why don’t you just hit me?” This brings me to a dead stop. We have been fighting. It’s a volatile relationship. Mainly, because we are twenty years old. I for one am in my Angry Young Man phase. I have an opinion about everything, almost all of them malformed by my [...]]]>

H says to me, “Why don’t you just hit me?” This brings me to a dead stop. We have been fighting. It’s a volatile relationship. Mainly, because we are twenty years old. I for one am in my Angry Young Man phase. I have an opinion about everything, almost all of them malformed by my youth and zeal and almost all of them fortified with my absolute certainty that they are correct. I have no idea what we were fighting about, but I was much more verbally adept than H and once I got going on some self-righteous rant, I was a steam roller for anyone to debate. Most didn’t even try. H, faced with yet another diatribe that equated whatever personal problem we were having with whatever larger political wrong I was obsessing over at the moment, fell silent for a long stretch before popping out with this.

“Why don’t you just hit me?”

I just stare at her, mouth open.

She isn’t being sarcastic. This isn’t an absurd statement meant to bring me back to reality, which is my first thought. She says it as if it were a solution to the conflict. Like, if I just took a swing at her, took it out on her physically, that it would be the catharsis we both needed. Then it would be over.

“I probably deserve it, anyway.”

An avalanche of confusion, rage, and pity crashes down on me.

“What in the world makes you think I would ever hit you?” I completely subtract the fact that I may be the only person who has complete confidence that my bottomless well of wrath would only ever express itself as tirade. But I press on. “What makes you think I even have the right to hit you?”

She looks away, then down. “BR used to hit me, sometimes. Sometimes, I had it coming.”

Oh right. BR. If I were secure enough I would have listened more closely concerning H’s past boyfriends. I would have been willing to hear the details. But I am twenty years old. I have years before I am that secure. I do know that BR only scratches the surface of how screwed up H’s relationship history is. She grew up in a seriously sheltered religious community and was not nearly prepared for what kind of bastards roamed the secular world. When she left home on an adventure with her best friend, who had grown up in the same place, every asshole in the southwest had seen them coming. The friend ended up stripping in gangster hangouts. H ended up dating a crop from which the abusive BR might have been the best.

Now she is with me. I am a ball of white hot anger coming out of a bleak and lonely childhood. Not the kind of person who should be re-educating someone towards healthy relationships. But you work with what you’ve got. In this moment, it’s on me or no one.

“First of all, you never have it coming.”

It will be some thirteen years before another woman brings up the idea of me hitting her. This time I don’t have the energy for the same depth of emotion. This time I am mainly offended and annoyed.

“I am worried that you will turn violent. I am worried that you will hit me.”

E doesn’t sound worried. She sounds like she is practicing a scene, from a poorly written play, in her bedroom alone. I don’t even want to address this. Like so many things, like so many of her scenarios that are reasons enough to put off having any kind of true relationship with me so that she can call me in three days, or three hours, and cry for me to come and have sex with her, this has the ring of newly minted fantasy. What is offensive is that it also has the tinge of class prejudice about it. E comes from a middle class family of intellectuals and professionals. The unspoken thing here is that I am from violent rednecks and my true colors will inevitably shine through.

This is just tiring. She will always have one more thing and I don’t even want to deal with the latest. The hypothetical that I might someday take to beating her will really have to wait behind all of the other twists in the corkscrew of dysfunction that is our relationship. We still have to deal with the infidelity, the mutual sexual obsession, the total co-dependance and complete lack of trust, not to mention the constant insomnia that has begun to plague me personally.

Then I look at her. There is something else in her eyes.

“Is that something you want?”

I wish I were as perplexed as I sound. We are so far off the map at this point.

She just looks away. The only thing silence means with E is that she wants to reserve the right to not commit and to have no statements that she must stand by at some later date.

I wish this surprised me. I wish this was enough to make me walk away. I wish I didn’t know the demons we might actually be willing to make deals with in order to keep one another bound to this affair while we each continue trying to escape. She hates being free and she hates being kept, she is only happy with the struggle and I am just the same. This is what we bring out in one another. We have each begged the other, we have each had the power to crush the other’s spirit in small but excruciating ways and we have both used it.

But, Jesus, would we really go this far? What would we sacrifice to make sure the other can never walk away whole? Her safety? My soul? Are these things available for sacrifice? I am looking into her eyes and I know that she would subjugate herself to the point of risking her health and well being if I were willing to throw away everything that makes me a man. If it will dig the infection of this nightmare relationship deeper into one another’s internal organs where no surgeon could cut it out.

I want to be horrified by this. I know that I should be. I should be running away now. The fact that I even have to ask the question, the fact that it would even occur to her, divorced of anything else, that I might abuse her, hurt her and debase myself so completely, that should be enough to have me gone. This thing we have is now so twisted, it might actually be genuinely evil, evil in the supernatural, succubus, vampire, selling one’s soul kind of way. We are smart people, with friends and families and dreams that are already having trouble living with the horrible spectacle the two of us present. Maybe that is the goal, to take one another so low that only we would have us. If everyone else who loves us leaves, then we will have to be together. If I value myself and the people I care about more than this sick addiction, then I should leave right now. So should she.

But I don’t. Instead I talk. We do this, we talk when we should walk. Words are how we buy more time.

“Do you want me to hit you?” I sound truly confused. Which is only partly true.

She says nothing. She’s not committing. Neither am I. That is part of the game. Take each other to the brink and look over. I don’t walk away. I can’t jump, any more than I can commit, any more than I can walk away like a healthy person would.

We do get disentangled from one another, eventually, and without ever having to find out if we will make ourselves go to the darkest places a man and woman can go. But, to my shame, it doesn’t happen this night. It would take months yet.

So, back in July, I [...]]]> So, once again, it is my day to post over at And I am Not Lying. This post has video. I know how y’all like the movin’ picture shows. I do too. So click on image, go to magic land, then come back and read the story I am posting below.

So, back in July, I went to my friend Kenny’s wedding and they just recently returned home from their honeymoon. Upon arriving home, Kenny promptly changed his facebook status to “married” and his facebook friends showered him in congratulations. So, that is it, ceremony, honeymoon, fb update. That marriage is underway. Hell, its old news.

But it put me in mind of the following piece I wrote some time ago about the last wedding that both of us were in attendance for. When I wrote it, I sent it to Kenny. Kenny’s girlfriend, now wife, read it over his shoulder. Then, after coming to a certain section of the story, she demanded that Kenny describe her vagina to her. Right then. Kenny was not happy with me.  So, enjoy the story, it continues after the jump, and don’t let anyone read it who you don’t want to have to describe their genitals to.

Kenny and I are at the strip club out of moral obligation. And a lack of any other ideas.

It is two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and we are almost the only two customers in the club. We are probably the only customers in the club that have ever known contact with a woman that we didn’t have to pay for. And we are definitely the only customers in the club wearing tuxedos.

The strip club, called Roxy’s, is covered in red velvet. It is as if Red Velvet were a kind of invasive fungi that started off in one damp corner, perhaps behind the main stage or under one of the cocktail tables and, left unchecked, had consumed the place. Sort of Kudzu’s less tasteful cousin. Red velvet just eats light and, in a place with no windows, even the twirling spotlights can’t penetrate the stuff. So Kenny and I sit in the dark in the middle of a spring afternoon. Not completely sure why. We just felt like something had been left undone.

We had seen Matt off to his honeymoon by noon. Matt is the reason we are in St. Louis in the first place. His wedding. Kenny was the best man and I was a groomsman. Matt’s idea of a bachelor party was a trip to Dave and Buster’s, a kind of Chuck E Cheese for grown ups, no children allowed. Its where an adult can be a kid and a kid can be at home with a babysitter. Or not. Depending on how conscientious a parent you want to be. This is part of Matt’s born again Christian deal, no strippers, no girls. So instead we end up in a video game arcade that sells steak and beer, which Matt doesn’t drink anymore.

All the guys in the wedding party gather around these games, which have screens so large that the characters seem life size and the distances and environments are almost 3-D, simply by virtue of their being the only thing you can see. You and a partner each get a florescent gun that has a wire leading back to the machine. Columbian Drug Lords pop out from behind cargo crates on a digitally generated boat dock and you shoot at them, trying to kill them before they can get you. At first everyone laughs and shoots from the hip and shows off, but it is amazing how quickly the repeated viewings of Lethal Weapon, from when you were fourteen and they played it on a continuous loop on HBO, takes hold. Pretty soon we are all holding the guns in the standard two handed grip and swiveling from the hips while keeping our shoulders level and our base steady. Silence descends and all you hear are these little bloodlust grunts. Nothing is more satisfying than that reload sound! It is fucking glorious. I mean you know that sound from every cop movie and you have always wanted to be the one that made that sound. It is a sound that says you have been playing until now, but you are about to go over the top, blue flame spitting, kicking some serious ass. The only thing that is needed to make that moment complete is some super macho one liner, “I’m going to rip your intestines out and wear them like a hula skirt, Piss-Bag!”

And I am seconds away from delivering just this line when a cartoon tweaker with an Uzi pops out from behind a pile of sandbags and takes me out of the game. I am half inclined to really drag out my death scene, “Its dark, Chief, I’m so cold,” But instead I hand the gun over to the youth pastor from Matt’s church and go to the back of the line.

Standing back, watching Matt and the pastor paint a computer generated South Miami with blood and brains, I get a fresh perspective on all of this. We are here instead of a strip bar. Christians don’t do the demon lust, so simulated sex is completely out of the question. Simulated murder however, Christ is totally down with that. If he were here, and of course he is always here, but you know, here in a way where he might express an opinion, that opinion would apparently be, “Dude, don’t you love that reload sound.”

I do drink the beer that Dave and Busters sells.

That was the bachelor party. I explain this to the dark haired girl whose stage I finally approach when she asks about the tux.

Kenny is talking to a blond dancer who came up and sat down next to him. This is Kenny, He can get anyone to talk. I mean the girls are supposed to come over and flirt with you and ask if you want a lap dance. But when it is Kenny it isn’t too long before the girl is sitting down at the table discussing the difficulties of finding babysitters during the saturday day shift and how she can’t wait till the kid is old enough for day-camp. Kenny went to day camp when he was a kid, he eventually became an Eagle Scout. No shit, Eagle Scout. It’s like the ninja of Boy Scouts. And Sienna thinks her boy might really get into that.

I fucking hated Scouts.

They stare at me blankly.

Sienna is just Kenny’s type. Blond, maybe twenty-six. Very white, very midwestern. Kenny likes girls who look like they own at least one pair of very expensive, high end, hiking boots and are entirely comfortable putting them to use while wearing a thong. This really is a type, mainly found in towns with ski-resorts or a midlevel University. I used to see them all the time out in the middle of the country. Now I live in New York and rarely come across them. I like your neurotic jews or half crazy Mediterraneans. That is why I now live in New York.

It is also why when I notice the curly haired brunette take the center stage, I excuse myself. Her stage name is Chastity and when I realize that I have gone up for a stripper with a keen sense of irony, I know I have chosen well. There is no fighting for Chastity’s attention. The few other guys in the bar right now are regulars. Sienna had told us, by way of explaining why she doesn’t do the night shifts which one would assume to be the big money shifts, that the regulars come in three to five days a week, during the day, alone, and drop about five hundred dollars a visit. Also, on the night shift, you have to deal with the finance executives and the frat boys whose standard reaction to an exposed vagina is to empty their wallets, pour beer on themselves, and then get swearing angry at said vagina as if it had just rear-ended them in traffic. The daytime regulars are respectful and grateful. And a sure thing. The girls had those guy’s money from the minute they woke up that morning. Kenny and I are new meat. In tuxedos.

When I approached Chastity she had been wearing a blue dress slit up to her rib cage, but after a few turns she is completely naked with one heal on each of my shoulders. She uses her calves to draw me in as she rotates her vagina in my face. It is a light shade of pink, barely differentiated from the rest of her flesh. The right labia intrudes neatly on the left, folding over gently in what must be a habit formed by a lifetime of very small panties. It is very pretty. Then she sits down and I know that it is time to give her money, which I do. But she doesn’t leave. She has to know. Sitting naked on the edge of the stage, one high heel on each side of my chair, Chastity asks. “What’s up with the tux?” I explain about the Dave and Buster’s Bachelor party and about Matt and Jesus. Something in my tone of voice or expression must give away what I really feel about all of this and she looks at me, purses her lips empathetically, and says, “Oh, He went over…” I nod. Then Chastity takes my head and cradles it between her bare breasts, strokes my hair, and whispers, “I’m sorry, Baby.”

As if Matt had died.