When I was growing up, my family lived next door to a perfect clan of six. My sister and I were the same age as their oldest two and so, despite growing apart in our high school years, we all still got together every year around the holidays for dinner. Celebrating Christmas a few days late with the Brady Bunch didn’t just alleviate the pains of letting distant relatives down, it also made you feel like you were on TV. And who doesn’t want to be on T.V.? Propped up and posed for the camera, laughing and cheersing each other.

It was during the most recent of these dinners that the youngest of my neighbor’s family, Tommy, began telling an anecdote about how he had managed to stay out far past his curfew when he was 16. He spun a tale of window leaping and tree branch swinging that would have made the Ringling Brothers look like they had muscular dystrophy.

What was more interesting than his fibbing at the dinner table was his willingness to do so. Here Tommy was, only a year after having committed the crime, and he was blurting out the trade secrets of teenager-hood to his parents. He’d taken a dossier of classified information and splayed it open to the Russians, to his mother, the Boris Yeltsin of adolescence.

Later, I asked him why:

“We have ‘free days’ ever since Sarah (his oldest sister) moved out,” he told me in confidence, over a beer in his snow-covered driveway. “When everyone is home for the holidays, we’re allowed to talk about whatever we want, admit to anything we’ve done, and my parents have agreed to not get mad about it. It’s gone, done, and they said we should all be relaxed on the holidays.” He took a last gulp of his beer and shoved a piece of gum in his mouth. Continue Reading »

So I’m sitting here in Orange County. It’s a place so close to L.A. that you can hardly see your hand through the opaque, suffocating smog if you held it out in front of your face (never mind your eyes squinting shut from the chronic smoker’s cough you’ve developed over the course of your stay). I’m in Orange County, the place where Midwestern lungs and hearts go to die. I am having a coffee and a cigarette on a sunny morning, looking at the trees. Five minutes earlier, I felt my breakfast of a fresh orange, a piece of toast, and two cigarettes come surging up my esophagus as I pedaled my bike, hunched forward over my handlebars, towards this café.

What had appeared to be a sixteen-year old girl driving a Range Rover had just made an illegal left turn and almost clipped my front tire. I don’t know whether it was my sudden fear of death at the hands of the privileged and undeserving or my subconscious hope that I could vomit this close to the passenger side of her car that made me feel sick. Were it the latter, maybe then I could have leaned to my left and thrown a hearty Chicagoan OOMPH behind the mixture of orange peel and tobacco-blackened stomach acid, so as to spray the substance all over the side of her car.

Though it’s not likely, I wonder, “Maybe she won’t notice it and it will rot for days on the side of her car. Maybe the stench will be unbearable and her perfect life with her perfect boyfriend under her perfect blue sky driving through her perfect unending strip mall lined with perfect (and not indigenous) palm trees will come to a screeching halt because she doesn’t smell like the perfect Abercrombie model and now her perfect boyfriend won’t let her spend suck his perfect dick.”

Or maybe she would have noticed. Continue Reading »

most of this happened. let me know what you think.

She asks if I will drive and that is where it starts. It is her car – I don’t even own one – and two and a half hours is not an unbearable stint for anyone her age. Her glasses, much like mine, are faintly hiding an unspeakable wish. I run my hands through her shorn-short hair, kiss her forehead, and calmly say, “Of course. Get in.”

It takes us only two hours of filling the stale air of the car with babble about bands we love before we’re greeted, hesitantly, by my parents. She acts polite, pushing the fish my mother has reheated for us around the plate rather than to come out and inform her that she hasn’t eaten anything that ever had parents in five years.

Later, there is the usual shuffling for drinks made quietly while the rest of the house sleeps. I lead the way upstairs and am sure to lock the door to my bedroom, unchanged since I’d moved away, to avoid unwanted peering from eyes that know all too well what is going on here.

The days are cold and biting and we drive into the city every morning, inevitably missing the trains we plan for. We go down my favorite roads, to my favorite bookstores, my favorite bars, all the usuals, and it feels unimpressive. She’s polite, but I’ve prepared for this with the expected flaw of everything I do: I expect it to be perfect.

The vodka sours I’m making nightly don’t taste right, my friends are abrasive, the sun is lying about warmth each day.

I’m approaching an intersection on Michigan Avenue. The light is yellow and I fly through while hunting for a very specific song to play. Three blocks later I find it and the grooves on the volume dial feel like they are screaming to be spun.

She listens and smiles. Comments about how it’s the right length and the right amount of worry in his voice – we speak in hypothetical, nonlinear languages and it is far too natural.

Her favorite line is the one about Elliot Smith. Mine is about the girl with the AK-47. It’s the beginning of an ending that has always been approaching.

I shove the accelerator down harder and we race to a finish line that neither of us can see. We both only know it has something to do with how fast and deep the sun is setting in the November sky.

I received a phone call last night. Late. Very late. It was an old friend. Who am I kidding? We dated. Seven years ago. Back then, the day after I broke up with her, I walked on crutches into the place where I’d always gotten my hair cut.Lisa was the name of the girl who cut my hair. It was a “salon” type place. I always felt awkward going there because it was the sort of “salon” that existed in a brown brick strip mall on a cloudy street sandwiched between a 2nd run movie theater and a Wal-Mart. There were always lots of women my mom’s age and less well-to-do, eyes blue-shadowed and bright red-lipped in that way that you only see in documentaries about people in trailers but then you walk two steps off the beaten path to the salon where the girl works who cut your hair since you were a baby and you realize “these are not trailer people, these are my neighbors and their shadow blue eyes do not want me here.”As I was saying, I walked in, on crutches, one arm still in an air-cast (that’s a type of cast that isn’t really a cast, you can take it off, but you shouldn’t because then you may unsettle things and you’ve clearly unsettled enough recently) and Lisa, now full-time cutting hair, part time designing images on a computer, and modeling at car shows on the weekends, looks me up and down. Her mouth drops open, scans from the cast around my ankle to my arm and to the top of my tousled hair that I haven’t touched in weeks.

I’ve only been that vulnerable in front of her once before then and I don’t think it counts. You can’t really help but be vulnerable when you are four months old and a strange girl in her late teens is swinging sharpened blades around your head snipping here there and your father is sitting next to you both looking around here there and up and down her here there. But I can only assume. I was four months old.

She says out loud, “The first time you can drive yourself here, and you stumble in looking like that?” I am sixteen with messy hair and two casts on. I am a wreck. There is no way for me to be more awkward.

I follow her to the back. As if the clientele isn’t giving me enough strange looks, the normally friendly girl who does nails looks at me like I’m going to split apart any second. I tried that once. That’s how this cast is on this arm. That’s why I haven’t been able to have my hair cut, the stitches had to heal. A two-story drop will hurt you just enough to make you look like you will split apart at any second. Continue Reading »

I sit where he did once.
In a booth, drinking coffee and eating a muffin (banana nut $1.65)
His words are tattoo’d on my arm ($120.00)
And I wear sunglasses ($6.00 from a vendor on St. Mark’s) that were his trademark
The waitress smiles as I order another ($2.25, though I’ll tip her more)
I dig in my pockets and offer her more of my loan money (far more than I need).
He screams at me (digitally, I know these are just zeros and ones streaming into my headphones ($65.00))
“HOW DOES IT FEEL?”

Sorry, Bob, I’m afraid I still don’t know.

My Writing. His Illustration.

He was head over heels. For a moment he thought to himself, “Have I lost control?” but quickly dismissed the idea, knowing from all of the movies and songs that “if it seems so right, and it feels so right, then it has to be right.” It’s gotta be right. He was able to see the night’s sky, stars for the first time in months.
Just a few hours earlier he’d left the valley behind, citing that he had a little extra cash, though his hands were deep in his pockets and held on to nothing. “Of course you can take my bike. Just don’t let anything happen to it,” Chris had said, scratching at the beard that wasn’t so much a beard as well-defined laziness. Daniel pulled at his hair and said, “Thanks, man, thanks a lot. Really,” his foot tapping, looking down at where the motorcycle’s tire touched the cement flooring of Chris’s parents’ garage. Daniel pulled on his hair in front of his face, silently cursed himself for his bad habit, and wobbled over to the bike. “I mean it, man, I won’t put a scratch on her. Don’t worry about it.” Continue Reading »