Expectation

This is an experimental piece in which I mess around with time and sequence.

She puts both palms on the table and tries to muster a deep, edifying breath. The fire of anger rises in her gut. She cannot believe what he just said to her. But she should believe it, ‘cause he’s taken this tack before. She has read all those self-help books for her anger. “Best thing now,” she thinks, “would be to go downstairs and have a smoke.”

The cigarette smoke darts into her lungs, packets of gas and dust like so many ping pong balls bouncing in a brick garage on the cold cement floor, finding dusty corners in which to slow down and hide. The smoke and the rage travel through her. The anger cascades down the side of the building from him. Does he feel any regret? Or does this all just add to the tension that will eventually make his arteries explode?

She takes a long last raspy “sphlift” and crushes the butt into the sand-filled tray which sits atop the trashcan by the swinging door. She briefly admires herself in the glass, trying to live in the moment. She nods goodbye to the man who still stands there smoking.

“Mama never told me it would be like this,” she thinks, pondering on how she’d been told as a girl: ‘there are three jobs you could have: a nurse, a teacher or a secretary; pick one.’

In the alabaster lobby she touches her crooked arthritic finger to the “up” button. The elevator finally opens and six stern, unhappy faces creep out over their barely-attached flab and legs. She’d read a book encouraging her to always be positive so she smiles at each of them and they look at their shoes. By now she’s no longer angry. She has helped at least one person today. She touches number eighteen.

On the street Chan is walking up from the river. He’s cussing God and damning everything in sight.

Margaret is finally feeling better and playing a game of blessing each floor as it goes by … as she goes by. And when the doors open she doesn’t even have that lump in her throat.

He happened to wreck his kayak in front of an office building because in Richmond the downtown commercial buildings front the river at the exact boundary between the Tidewater region and the Piedmont. As such, there are rapids and falls on the river. He is still in his wetsuit and flopping along like a black rubber tuna.

“Maggie, where you been?” her boss says, but he is smiling.

He knows what a dick he can be and, really, he just thinks it is funny.

“Swimmin’ in the river,” she sasses. “Where the heck do you think I’ve been?”

He could certainly smell the cigarette smoke on her and he knew darn well where she’d been. He didn’t care about the smoke breaks. Kept her jittery and productive. It was just the typos that drove him mad.

Damn cheap plastic thing had split in half on a rock! Chan had knocked his head, but not too hard. More like he hit the side of his face and bruised his jaw. He doesn’t much ponder, as he walks, angrily shaking his head, that he could have died. That was then, this is now. Now he has to get home so he can wash up in time to get to work at Poe’s, the place where he tends bar.

He catches sight of some smokers underneath an overhang capping the door of a tall silver building up the hill. Maybe someone in that group has a cell phone and I can call Billy.

She is there with a couple of silent smokers, all clinging to their white sticks like spears and they are waiting in the tall grass for little animals to kill. Little animals like a paycheck, and some respect. For them, it is a crucial break and a way to keep from going over the edge, hitting a hard place.

Maggie stands below the overhang. It is black, aluminum. It sags over the threshold of glass. It is all very stark and bureaucratic. She takes a very deep, expansive breath and the smoke just scampers in and through her and it swirls around her head and up to the aluminum ceiling under which they stand, shrugging, slouching.

Smarting from the pain in his jaw, Chan is beginning to hike the long, steep hill from where he was, near the bank, in a little park, to the place where those smokers are huddling. Hopefully they didn’t leave their cell phones in their cubicles. Hopefully they are friendly. Smokers usually are. He instinctively would choose them over a circle of businessmen standing outside, plotting. Even most businessmen would. And as he hikes, he feels a little shame, like a boy who has been persuaded to wear a costume to a party and, come to find out, no one else is dressed up and it’s just a joke on him. He squishes and squashes.

“There’s no reason he has to bark at me like that, as if I were a child! It was only a slight typo … his fault, really. I just type what he writes. His fucking handwriting! Ugh! It was his fault.”

“Getting a little chilly out these days,” says a friendly-looking man who’s just now come outside, through the swinging glass door, and he takes his lighter and his smokes out of his holster. Dead ringer for a tech support guy from the brokerage firm upstairs.

Maggie smiles, nods.

“How ya doin’?” she asks.

“Purty good.”

They smile again at each other, knowing how social this can be but that, at times, it is also intensely personal. This is one of those latter times, he somehow understands. She looks down and kicks a pebble, notices a few weeds poking through a crack in the concrete.

“I was trying to avoid that hydraulic by the rocks near the island and I steered too fuckin’ far left.”

His brain was churning on it.

“What’s gonna happen if I’m late? I can tell them there was traffic, I guess. Or that my car broke down. Hell, I could just tell them the truth … that I wrecked my piece-of-shit-second-hand kayak and ended up walking around like Aquaman.

“The next time I’m going to paddle left and then try to swing out by that grassy spot there.

“Shit, fuck. Shit and fuck. Now I need to buy a new one. To get a decent one, I’m gonna have to shell out hundreds of bucks.”

“It’s just not fair,” she tells herself as she stands there.

He looks at her, but she’s quite sure she didn’t say it out loud. Maybe it was written on her face. It is written on the faces of almost everyone in this building, in this city, this state, and this country … maybe even the world.

And then they see a rubbery seal of a man hobbling up a berm.

“Maggie what the fuck, you idiot! This is the sixth typo I’ve found this afternoon. I’m not gonna waste my fuckin’ time on this anymore. Get it goddam right. Got it?” He slaps the binder-clipped papers down on her cubicle and walks off.

“Maggie, look up at the stars,” mother says. “Look at them! If you ever … ever feel like the world is gonna swallow you, look out there; go out there. It’s big out there, and everything else is small.”

“Goddammit, god damn it. I’m about to hit a fuckin’ rock.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Hello, Chan.”

He looks at her. She knows my name? But he doesn’t ask. No one does.

“Excuse me, but do you have a cell phone I might borrow? I’m afraid I will be late for work.” He gestures down to his still-dripping self. He scratches his crotch. There is a bit of chafing when you walk in a wetsuit.

“Today’s gonna be a good day,” she thinks as she drives. “Can’t wait for dinner with Julia tonight.”

“I’ll ask the woman first.”

“This guy treats me just like my ex-husband: no respect.”

“Billy, here’s what happened … can you pick me up at …”

“Fucking secretaries …. When will I ever get a good one?”

“What kind of kayak will I get?”

“You really ought to stop all that smoking.”

Fuck you, she thinks, but she dives back into the assigned task, determined not to screw up again. In her desk drawer she keeps a running list of her mistakes.

There’s nothing like memory or expectation.


(c) Kevin White 2008

YOU KNOW OPP

The great tragedy and alienation of the service-based economy is that one is forced to devote the waking hours of one’s best, most productive and healthiest years to other peoples’ problems, to pretend to care deeply about them, to get all bent outta shape in respect of them, and to respond to the whims of the problemmed people with a speed not suited to one’s savannah-developed brain. A fair piece of this could be chalked up to an overemphasis on the value of “altruism,” not as a philanthropic concept, but as a foundational philosophy of economics. Is that so bad? I suppose not, but look at some of its effects.

My name is Oppenheimer and I live in Baltimore. As you now know, I am something of a do-it-yourself philosopher. Last year I attended a talk by a former NASA astronaut about how my brain – well, yours too – has not yet fully adjusted to today’s (or even last century’s) technological advances and, for instance, chaining oneself to a desk to monitor and respond to hundreds of emails a day is something we weren’t intended for. Well … let’s put it another way : “something we haven’t yet evolved for ….” Ah, but maybe the old astronaut was showing some of the signs of becoming an old, grumpy coot.

“Oppenheimer,” said my ex-wife Martha, “you spend too much time thinking about shit that doesn’t matter.” And maybe she was right. All that thinking made it near impossible for me to be attentive to the needs of Martha or the children, so here I am, divorced.
But in my more conspiratorial moods I blame the inattentiveness on having been hypnotized by the computer all day, having carried the water for all those “other people” during my waking hours, and just having been tired when I got home.

So you know me. Upon my divorce, I ran out and purchased that BMW I always wanted. Some men, during their mid-life crises, will buy a sports car. I don’t consider the BMW a sports car. But I purchased the car because it was the model I had seen some of my superiors driving. I also felt that it could display a material tidiness and advancement that didn’t otherwise bowl one over upon meeting yours truly. And I suppose that worked for a while.

But then I got used to it. Now I don’t perceive that the BMW makes much of an impression on anyone. Certainly not me. I am accustomed to it now, it doesn’t have that new car smell, and somehow the gas cap fell off. So now every time I approach the car’s left side I feel ashamed that the pock-marked car is mine. I am too lazy to get the thing fixed or, if you prefer, I spend too much time on other peoples’ problems to have the time to solve this one.

When we got divorced, Martha took custody of the children. Just as well. Now I can log on and view my pornography whenever I please. The good thing about pornography is that you can shut it off when you are finished and, if you are unencumbered by the more pernicious aspects of guilt, you can forget about it fast after disposing of your mess.

Now, reader, I’ve been working on other peoples’ problems long enough to sense that something that I’ve said may have left you with the impression that I am not a very nice guy. So, this is to indicate that I feel a little guilt as I imagine the pain or confusion I may have caused you. So, as I have learned to do, I now apologize. But, because my heart is not wholly in it, and now that I’ve dispensed with the social imperative, I can tell you to go stick a fork in an electrical outlet. See what that does.

Let’s see … by a sort of accident of history, because my last name is Oppenheimer, I was able to enjoy the trust of many clients who saw my name as a sign that I’d be a very strong financial advisor. And I suppose that I strove to avoid their disappointment, by working hard, putting in lots of hours, reading up on the research and analysis, and keeping in close communication with my clients. Further, I lived up to the image of a sober financial adviser by spending a good deal of money on dark, overpriced suits, uncomfortable shoes and conservative ties. I decorated my office with a dark mahogany desk and hung shiny plaques on the walls, attesting to my education and merit. I included a bookcase displaying how-to books of various stripes, which I rarely thumbed through, but which promised to make you, me or whomever else that cracked them open, a very rich man (or woman). On the eighteenth floor of my office building, I click-click-clicked with my murderous shoes back and forth to the bathroom and the break-room all day, just as an excuse to stop by my colleagues’ offices and be gregarious, to chat about the weather and sports, to hear about the newest porn sites, and to keep upon office gossip. Ostensibly, I guess the purpose of all the wandering was to keep apprised on what people had heard about the “markets.” But because the markets are whatever people are doing at a given time, and they are not plottable in any rational sense, all chatter about the markets can only be old news, a historical “see what I know” type exercise.

Martha and I were involved in the Camden Foundation, which is a receptacle for rich peoples’ money. We didn’t have a name-your-own-building-sized stake in the Foundation, but we nevertheless announced to all who asked – and many who didn’t – that we admired the Foundation’s mission because it disbursed its money – well, the interest but not the principal – to a variety of local charities in support of the Baltimore community. This was an easier way for us to feel like we’d made an impact on our community: easier than, say, working as a community organizer, but it was all we could do given the little time we had. In the competition between other peoples’ problems and still other peoples’ problems, the other people with the money to pay you mostly win out.

Today I am not a stock broker and I’m no longer a patron-level Camden Foundation supporter. I suppose I’m on inactive status with both. My licenses to sell stocks and other paper won’t run out so long as I attend one or two seminars per year. I attend mostly to watch the people and come up with fodder for my stories. But it is comforting to know that I can always go back to that business. Today I am a copy-editor for a financial magazine. So I still work on other peoples’ problems, in a round-about way, and I spend my days wordsmithing, which has greatly improved my writing. It is still tough to find time to write for pleasure, though.

Whilst bleeding my red ink on various self-promoters’ “see-what-I-know” articles, I slowly develop my stay-at-home philosopher’s frustration: the necessary anger and overwhelming irritation that drove me last year to read Marx – despite my rock-ribbed Republican roots – and to explain away my divorce and my shitty behavior towards my wife and my children, among other things, as symptoms of my alienation in a socially-constructed prison of a world. Boo hoo.

I am dating again. The woman is in her late twenties. “Good for you,” all my buddies say, and I say this to myself at night as I flex my muscles in front of the mirror. I have little regret over this because man has evolved to seek out youthful women who are fruitful and can easily multiply. But I certainly don’t want to have more children. Mine are great, fund, beautiful, I love them, but you’ve got to be rich to support more than two in this service-based economy. My great-grandfather sired fourteen children by two different women to help him run his farm. Somehow I think he was better than me.

Birth control might as well have been invited by the Catholic Church to give them a problem to work on. More likely, though, it was developed by employees of the Secretary of Commerce. Who said we don’t have a command economy?

The woman I am dating is named Jill. Not only is she fifteen years younger than me, but she has a name right out of a nursery rhyme. She is only slightly less good than my wife was in bed, but I feel better about myself for associating with her youthfulness. By the way, the feminists will accost me for only focusing on Jill’s (i) youth, and her (ii) sex. Let me step back a minute, power up my left brain, and tell you all the reasons I admire her as a woman and a person and not just as a sex object.

A. Jill is a nurse. This is an example of tending to other peoples’ problems in the extreme. She seems to me a very caring person and, instinctively, I just know she’d be a wonderful mother. Shoot! There goes that instinctual shit again. I apologize, Ms. Feminist reader.

B. Jill is genuinely interested in my philosophical writings, the same type of stuff my old wife hated because they took time away from the domestic imperative. Okay, okay. I guess this one was a little bit selfish too.

C. As a nurse, Jill appreciates science and so, when her patients are near death, she doesn’t spend precious time and energy pleading with a speck of lint on the ceiling fan to spare them from eternal damnation and barbecue. Instead she treats the dying with a kindness and gentleness that believes nine out of ten of us never do anything so bad during our lifetimes to deserve all this guilt.

I have been seeing a doctor for the depression wrought by the breakup of my marriage. Even though I am happy with (i) my new career, (ii) the new sex, (iii) my new outlook, and (iv) my compassionate girlfriend, I still miss the stability of Martha and the kids. The doctor says I take too much of the world’s problems on my shoulders. One time I replied, “If I don’t who will?” He just asked, “Barack Obama?” It didn’t strike me as all that funny, but I get it. And just look at the resistance he got, and I’m sitting here without the good looks and the millions in campaign donations.

I don’t want to go into politics because it’s easier to complain in peace. My neighbor Jack ran for city council a couple years ago and you should hear the stories of the major dunces you have to bow down to, just to get a party’s nomination. He lost the election and now his great pleasure is to mow the lawn and place the clippings on top of his compost pile. Who needs other peoples’ problems when you have a yard to maintain?

A Poem in Three Paragraphs

We are all locked in a small room or confined in a partially fenced yard. There is a farm and hills on the unfenced side, but those who know say you get shot if you go there.

Just across the street you can take refuge in a small house, a hospital ... if you get get past the wire. But some who escaped there last night got caught and things just fell apart. I can imagine the raid.

This is a world run by juveniles who confine us. This is the human who hunted and slayed the neanderthal. This is the way of the brownshirted crowd, that values spirit over the mind. This is the way of my nightmares.

The Dinner Thing

The editors have invited five of our favorite famous people - alive or dead - to join us for dinner, and we've prepared the following questions for them:

1. Carl Sagan. Are you, or are you not, a badass?
2. Albert Einstein. Question in process ... still calculating.
3. Abe Lincoln. So whattaya think of today's Republican Party?
4. Jesus Christ. Is it true what they say about you?
5. Sarah Palin. Would you please answer on behalf of number 4?

We've yet to receive RSVPs, but stay tuned.

Short Joint in Progress Part Deux

THIS ISN'T EVEN REALLY A STORY, BUT IT HAS SOME FUNNY LINES IN IT IF I DO SAY SO MYSELF.

***

I’m from Virginia and I live in Chicago. I work for an insurance company. I have two roommates, Jim and Teddy.

Jim is from Portage, Indiana. Not two days after my arrival in Chicago I find Jim buck naked on the couch sipping hot chocolate with his long legs slightly crossed. Jim’s body is all chapped and peppered with hair.

“Hey, Smith.”

He had not a bit of shame and didn’t even twitch when I opened the door and came out of my room to find him in his nakedness.

“Hey check out this month’s Maxim. They published a letter from this girl I knew in Portage.”

“You fingerbang’er?”

I had discovered last night that “fingerbang” was his favorite expression.

Teddy is from somewhere, Pennsylvania. He has a dark complexion with black hair and he likes to slather a lot of hair gel in it and tussle it around in the latest fashion. Jim likes to lay eggs for me about what he really thinks of Teddy: “I’m trying to find out what kinda porn he’s hiding,” “look at the way he walks” and “what’re you doing in there Teddy?”

We rent the furnished first level of a bungalow on a side street near the el train stop. Three other guys live in the basement but we haven’t really met them yet. “Why don’t you go down ‘n introduce yourself,” Jim says to Teddy.

When you enter the front door there’s a long den or a living room with a couch on the left and a coffee table. Cattycorner to that is one chair. I steal the chair and sit there mostly. This leaves Teddy to park by nudist Jim on the couch and Jim begins to slowly sidle over toward Teddy until Teddy can’t stand it anymore and pumps his hands down in disgust like a toddler and marches off to his room. Jim just looks at me and cackles, his junk jiggling. I’m just glad I get the chair.

Across from the chair is a 19-inch television on a particle board entertainment center. My bedroom door is opposite the couch. Beyond the living room is a hall and Jim’s room is on the right behind my room and then Teddy’s room appears on the left opposite Jim’s. The kitchen is in the back. Next to the kitchen is the only bathroom in our apartment, and Teddy has pretty much claimed that room with all his bottles of hair gel and stink water. Jim has taken to steal and hide different elements of Ted’s collection in sundry nooks and crannies but because there are so many bottles I don’t think Ted misses them. Because of Jim’s antics I keep my toothbrush and my deodorant in my room. I think Jim keeps his down below the sink next to the Drano. Worst thing in the house is the toilet, which offends me because it holds only a splash of water and flushes with a “wiss” instead of a “whoosh.”

Four days before I left for Chicago some friends threw me a going-away party in Richmond. I don’t remember much from the party because I got so drunk. The only thing was that for some reason I got clocked in the jaw by this girl in torn jeans and a halter top. I called her white trash only after she hit me, not before. I swear. At least that’s how I recall it. And then her boyfriend seethed on the couch between two other dudes, not held back by them but maybe more restrained by the recognition that his girlfriend was a bitch. Either that or he could count: I had lots of friends there to back me up who, by the way, felt it was hilarious that I got “beat up by a girl.” I explained that it wasn’t like that and, what’s more, the punch didn’t even hurt. Probably because I was so drunk.

I don’t have friends to back me up here. But Jim is pretty cool if you look past his buck nakedness and his torture of Teddy. I’m just glad to be on his good side. He talks so fast you can’t get one over on him.

First thing we did when we moved in together was go out to a bar to get acquainted. We still do this almost every night, like contestants on The Real World. Anyway Joe knows and loves a certain bar in Lincoln Park whose name I can’t recall because every time I go there I get drunk. In any event it is a short hop on the el train and I can feel my way home if I need to. The bouncer at the bar has an English accent and the first time I meet him I ask him where in England is he from.

“Rayly I’m from Sowtafrica,” he says.

Then he tells the story about how he was in the South African army before apartheid ended and that he’d “shot a lotta little black boys” in a war.

“It rayly wasn’t hahdly faya,” he commented. “They came chahjing over a hill with theya speahs raght into ouwa barrage of weaponray.”

Teddy is disgusted by the bouncer. Jim is in love. I am indifferent from a political standpoint, though I find the story somewhat interesting. On further reflection I suppose it is easier to be enchanted by apartheid if you are not from the South.

I decide to separate for a while, so I go to the bar and order a gin-n-tonic. I settle in and stare at myself in the mirror above a Technicolor array of liquor bottles and below a wood-paneled backsplash as if I were on a boat. Sometime after this a slight and cute blonde girl approaches me and says hello and asks what I do for a living and after that inquires “what’s your favorite zoo animal?” I reply zebra because I like words that start with “z” and I get a kick outta those beer commercials with the zebras as referees to the horses. And then she says wow most guys always say lion or tiger roar roar! Something tells me this is a line she lifted out of Cosmo and then she proceeds to ask me a bunch of blunt and weird questions about my past that make me uncomfortable so, instead of buying her a drink and trying to fingerbang her, I pay for my drink and go back to Jim and the bouncer.

Nails

in a white room
looking at the mirror
my tanned skin and long fingers
my adam's apple
I could've done so much
and then that girl wanted me to do that thing
and I killed him for her
Now I don't know whether I'll be caught
or killed first;
bloodly long tan fingers
dirty under the nails;
nails and floorboards, groans and creaks,
as I pace and look at the glass.
Is this what it is for:
To make a thing and do it,
And then wish it were never done?

(c) Kevin White 2008

Short Joint in Progress

I started with Whitehead when he was a federal prosecutor in Richmond and I was fresh out of law school. When we worked together he walked into my office one day and gave me a file to peruse. It was a stack of documents showing the long list of the petty offenses of an old black man. Things like cussing at police officers. He did have a pretty serious armed robbery conviction and then a bunch of federal drug possession convictions. Seems this time that the man, Mr. Jackson, had been turned in by an ex-lady-friend who’d told Jackson’s parole officer that he had a rifle. So the marshals hauled him in on a parole violation. Whitehead and I found out at the hearing that the firearm was just an old antique rifle he’d found in the barn of the guy he cleaned horse-shit for. Jackson had been fixing up the gun to sell it and augment his minimum wage. In fact, Jackson testified that his employer said he could have it. So when all this came out at the hearing I huddled with Whitehead and expressed my worries about sending the man back to prison, but Whitehead – with his political ambition – felt hemmed in by reputation and the gotchas that might someday bite him so he just joyfully said, “this guy is no good; we need to take him off the streets.” I admit: the employer probably didn’t know Jackson took the rifle, but I don’t think he was fixing it up to use it in a robbery. I disagreed with Whitehead.

So Jackson wept in front of the crusty old judge while the defense attorney rubbed his neck and searched for his glasses, which were sitting on his wavy head. The judge gave Jackson a real talking-to, then pronounced his twenty year sentence. That would probably mean the rest of his life. On the way out of the courtroom Whitehead laughed and suggested we go have coffee and a doughnut.

My legal career had started off well. I had landed a gig with the federal prosecutor. You just couldn’t get that job without experience, but I did: from a mix of budget cuts (it was a part-time position) and my decent law school grades. But things didn’t work out and after a couple years I started doing the same drugs we were sending the blacks to prison for. Whitehead stood by me, sent me to rehab, and afterward got me a job with his brother-in-law tying flies at a fishing shop. That’s a job where your hands have to be steady, so if you start fucking up the flies they know you’ve been using.

So I owed Whitehead a lot of favors and when Whitehead threw his hat in the ring for Senator I pledged myself to him. I bade farewell to my flies and moved to a studio apartment in Arlington where I paid $2,000 a month for a shithole but was satisfied.

© Kevin White 2008

The Dinner Table

When I was fourteen, my best friend invited me over to dinner. It was the first time I’d had a sit-down dinner with Richard’s family. Usually it was pizza and Coke in the den. This was a special occasion though. Richard’s dad, a helicopter pilot in the Army, was leaving the next day for training for Desert Storm.

Richard and I sat on one side, his little sister and brother opposite, and Richard’s parents were at the heads of the table. After everyone was seated, they muttered a quick prayer and crossed themselves. I was Methodist and had never had grace with Catholics. It startled me and made me feel awkward.

Richard’s parents gave a toast and drank red wine with their dinner, something my parents never did. Now I know what an honor it was to be included at that table.

Richard called me in the morning about a week later. He had never before called me in the morning. I could barely understand him, his voice was quivering so. He started to explain but then he just asked me to tell his teachers he wouldn’t be in class that day. I guess he couldn’t bear to tell me and I was too naïve to inquire or figure it out. A teacher had to tell me, and I spent the rest of the class in a daze, not hearing anything.

While running rotations on a training course, Richard’s father’s helicopter had crashed into a tree. They were using early-stage night vision technology, and the tree didn’t show up on the screen. Richard’s dad was dead. Our relationship would never be the same and we drifted apart. Then he moved away. I tried to contact him years later but his grandma thought I was a telemarketer.

© Kevin White 2008

Eddie Lee

_______________

We walked through the woods to Carter's Market to
buy candy and games.

In the woods we played war using sticks as guns.
One day we stumbled accross a black snake which
we killed with Daddy's shovel.

Poor ole snake;
He didn't mean no harm.

And then at school we played on the soccer team
An' rode the bench together eating sunflower seeds.

We haven't talked for years and I suppose he's married
and working for kids,
While I work to fund my porn subscription.
_______________

[Copyr. 2008 Kevin White]

All Bones and Gravity

FULL STORY

All Bones and Gravity
By Kevin White

When I came out of jail my old friend John Grant picked me up at the corner down near the county dumpsters and across from the in-town offices of a rock quarry that I had stared out at through my little window for all those months.

“You look good,” he said.

I didn’t have much to say.

“Grant … thanks for comin’ by.”

“Fuck, man.”

That’s all he said back.

To cheer me up he rambled his red Ford pickup around the gravel driveway at the dead-end where the jail and the dumpsters nuzzled together and he peeled out with his foot all the way down to the shiny pedal and we tore out of there almost as fast as the pigs had thrown me in. He took me for a good meal at a diner on the top of the hill just up the street from the jail.

We reminisced about the days before they threw me in.

The day before they hauled me in Grant and I had sat in this same restaurant, him trying to comfort me, and I suppose that’s why he brought me here again. But this time it was uncomfortable because of the memories.

Voices had whirled, tons of voices had mumbled, bounced around the sponge inside my head, their miniature gibberish and their whispers united in a low buzz. Some of them were really insistent and that could be heard in their tone, though the volume was as muted as the others and the language indecipherable. I had spent the previous night in a maelstrom of drunkenness, drunken 2003. In the morning I had rolled around in bed as if wrestling against invisible men: the owners of the voices? Then at the restaurant with Grant I couldn’t keep my head erect and the field of my vision morphed into a frosted window or maybe more like the smoke of a distant forest fire. Waves of entropy curved inward and crashed in sequence as my whole view became muddy and now and then it became clear again.

“Maybe you should just drive, man … to Mexico or something,” Grant had said.

I didn’t ever respond, being despondent from my hangover and the guilt: thick, heavy guilt of the kind I used to get every morning-after, but that time it was worse. My brain and my sinuses had swelled inside my skull, like driving up a high hill and feeling the pressure in my head ramp up, but it just stayed there at the breaking point, and I wished it would just explode and I could be done with it.

“But I killed someone’s dog,” I had said.

I couldn’t get over that fact; forget the damage to property and the third DUI.

“I killed a dog!”

Grant had brought me the newspaper article and I had felt like that was a really cruel but necessary thing for him to have done.

* * *

So now I was out of jail and I felt a little beside myself that we were still so close to the jail and so we left the diner after just an iced tea and Grant proposed the idea that we should go see his lady.

“Where does she live?”

“Beyond the bridge, outside town.”

“Oh yeah Steve used to live down there. He was a good guy.”

“Good guy. Yes.”

We strolled back to the truck. I stood impatiently by the rusty door until he unlocked it and I jumped in, and after that shuffled through the CDs that he had strewn on the carpet. The disks were all scratched, some worse than others, but I found one of David Allan Coe that I felt like hearing and I slid it into the grinning mouth of the player.

“Doesn’t work,” said John.

“Motherfucker … nothing works.”

He laughed at me and, though annoyed, I had to laugh also.

The bridge was on the other side of the hill from the diner. You could get there too by worming around the little valley near the jail, past the greenhouse where I used to work and then down the mill road by the river. But we were already on the four lane highway that led directly to town.

The bridge sat down the hill from the diner and on the other side of the water a bluff peered over the green summertime water like redoubts in an old-time battle, back when men actually saw other men on the battlefield and the soldiers wore uniforms.

“Down below this hill, man,” said John.

“Splendid,” I said, like the voice of some character I’d read in the jail’s library cart.

The Ford noodled around into a gravel drive just off the end of the bridge. The driveway wound down and back under the bridge and we bounced like mustachioed men on horses, down that potholed drive where two troughs of eroded gravel crouched alongside a great hump, an island of dandelions in its middle.

“Here we are,” as we rolled up to this Victorian house on the other side of the bridge, down in the floodplain; some old rich motherfucker must have built this place and then abandoned it and now all these college students and hippies just lived there together.

We parked in front of a gray oil tank and underneath a clothesline. There was a sick barn off to the right, overrun by vines and a little patch of woods that climbed its way back up the other side of the bridge.

“This is where she lives.”

“Jane?”

“Oh hell no, didn’t you get my letters?”

“No. Who writes letters?”

“It’s Mary now.”

And we went to the door. Mary met us at the doorstep, but Grant kind of shoved his way past both of us and into the foyer, not saying hello.

“You must be Michael,” she said. I smiled and nodded.

“I know so much about you already … John really looks up to you.”

I introduced myself and didn’t respond to the words about John looking up to me. I didn’t know why he would. And I really couldn’t say anything like John has told me so much about you because he hadn’t really talked during the seven minute drive and I hadn’t read his letters.

“Care for a drink?”

“Uh no thanks,” I said and instantly regretted it but I didn’t have a chance to take it back.

She led me through the foyer, John long gone, and I saw this wooden throne with two flat arms, circular at the front, and behind those a high back with a mirror implanted and four decorative pegs above it for coats. Only thing that hung there was a plastic grocery bag with a lump inside it. The foyer was long and dark and besides the chair there were only dust bunnies in the corners and I saw an intricate spider web on the trim above an archway.

“This is a neat place,” I said.

She smiled and took my hand and led me into another room straight back shotgun to the back of the house where there was a great-room. There I saw like a half-dozen guys and girls, some of the guys with beards and a few seemed normal, but not so entirely attractive in any real way, and girls, some of whom dressed like college students and some like flower children.

She went into the adjoining kitchen and got me a drink without asking what I might want and I went around playing the name game with all the beards and the flower skirts and observing the tits and the asses and the muscles on them. That was the last I saw of that bunch and after I'd decided I had nothing to say to them I followed Mary into the kitchen.

“Here’s some strawberry wine,” she said when she saw me, “all we have right now.” She shrugged and smiled.

“That’s OK,” I said, “thank you.”

“You want anything to eat?”

Without waiting for my response she put on a display of all they had in the kitchen and then she left me there because John had just reappeared and he interrupted her and told her to come upstairs with him. They climbed up a creaky back staircase that came off of the kitchen and told me to come up after I finished. John just stared at me over his shoulder and winked and I got the chills.

John looked different, by the way. He was working on a beard – poorly – and his clothes were rattier than I’d remembered and his eyes were smoky and like he was hiding something.

I sat the wine down on the counter and left it there. I rifled through a pantry cabinet that Mary had left ajar and I found some pecan halves and placed the bag on the table. In the fridge I found some bread and some cheese so I made up a cheese sandwich. There I also saw some iced tea in a pitcher and I took the pitcher out to the table for my meal of pecans, cheese sandwich and iced tea, and I swigged the tea from the pitcher. I sat alone at the table, peering through a window at some overgrown bushes where, if the bushes had been trimmed, I could have seen the flow of the river. The pecans were rather old and hard but I couldn’t complain because they didn’t have pecans in jail. When done I left everything on the table and, as an afterthought, I just took the pitcher back to the refrigerator where I paused for a minute and had this crazy idea or recollection that I should piss in the pitcher as a joke. But I didn’t do it.

After this I turned around and surmounted the creaky stairs and discovered that there was only one room up there in a loft over the kitchen. The room was triangular and it sprawled down under the eaves like a Cape Cod. As I opened the door I saw Mary and John stretched out on a full-size bed. I plopped down on the bed also, the temptation being too great because I’d been on a cardboard crate for nine months.

“So Michael I hear that you’re a painter,” she said with a great smile.

“Uh, well … I guess,” I said, “but you could more properly have called me a drinker.”

At that John got up, said he had to go see about something, and mumbled as he descended back down the whining stairs and left us alone. I loosened up a little and Mary resumed talking to me.
She really wanted to know if there was any sex in prison. I said it wasn’t like that and, besides, it wasn’t even prison. She said that John and she were really intrigued by my addiction and the fact that I’d done time but that John would be too shy to ask me all the details and I just tried to answer her questions when I could although the whole thing confused me. Then she began to tell me some story about how she and John had discussed getting married in Colorado and wouldn’t I like to come along for some purpose.

After a while John came back and said to me “let’s go on a ride,” and I followed. Mary stayed reclined on the bed. I saw that she had her hand against her leg way up under her skirt. She waved goodbye with the other hand but didn’t say anything. We went back to the red truck and I climbed back into the cab and when we sat down he reached into a knapsack and gave me a joint and one for him and I thanked him and off we went for a ride. We rode clear into the next county toward Fairfield, which was one of those old towns where everything looks so much like an American Legion post and they probably still have parades on Labor Day. During the ride I just daydreamed of Mary masturbating on that bed.

You come into Fairfield through the flood plain of the Monahala River; we drove through the basin and the truck scaled up a steady incline on the other side, lined with stately trees. Out of nowhere came the factories of outer Fairfield, more than half of them shuttered. The naked structures sat there, guts hanging out, bruises all over, no one or no official having shame enough to arrange a burial, or at least to cover them with a sheet. After the cement corpses came the crossroads, with its general store on one side and a similar building on the other side where there was a diner called Sawhorn. We turned right at the crossroads onto High Street and, within a thousand feet, High Street splits into a fork-n-the-road. Jutting out into the fork was the Triangle Bar. That’s where Grant stopped.

We went into Triangle, catching the cigarette smoke as we went. John lit one up and we sat at a bench. There were two rows of benches and that amounted to the only seating in that little dark bar. We both had hamburgers and beer and consumed them quickly.

On the way back from the ride we found we were passing a line of cars with their lights on and an alarm sounded in John’s head and he whipped around in the median and headed back towards town behind the parade.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

John said, “you’ve heard of wedding crashers how ‘bout funeral crashers.”

This made me laugh and I went along with it.

We rolled up in front of the columns at the funeral home. Saw the black hearse outside and we walked up and let ourselves in through a heavy wooden door. Come to find out it wasn’t the funeral yet, but it was a wake for some old woman. I think we went through the wrong door in John’s impatience. Anyway for kicks Johnny decided we should wait in line to see the old lady and afterwards we happened upon the undertaker on our way out and John mentioned to him: “You done a good job on that one.” And I thought the undertaker should have at least winked and smiled but of course he didn’t.

Then we actually – actually – went to the luncheon for the wake. It was in the social hall on the other side of the building. There were two unused parlors adjoining the hall and I sat down in one of them as John went to get a plate.

To my left, near the door from the parlor to the social hall, a beautiful woman approached. She had light brown skin. Her breasts were jug-like: big nipples, I expect. She had a long neck and long black hair showed around her skimpy dress. Her body curved below her breasts past a slim stomach and out to wide hips. Her thighs were long and elliptical. Her toes and her fingers were slender. It was like she wanted to pick up guys.

She said, “Auntie Mae was a good woman.”

“She looked good,” I said.

I daydreamed that she sat on my lap, played with my lips, then slid down, her loose vagina slinking along my leg … but that didn’t happen. While I daydreamed she got bored and walked off, maybe realizing she didn’t know me after all. When she left I found that I had to pee.

So then I walked around that social hall behind the funeral parlor looking for the bathroom and when I found it and got in the stall I started daydreaming and getting all choked up thinking about my own death and the songs that I wanted played when I die.

* * *

That was then.

Today I am a pallbearer at John Grant’s funeral. Poor guy died of an overdose out in Colorado. Wife came in one night and found him hunched over between the toilet and vanity, face white like an albino. I don’t know the other bearers; they’re all friends from Colorado I surmise.

The funeral director says “follow me” and we militarily carry it out the side door of the church to meet mourners at the graveside, which is in the same yard as the church. The body patters down, crowding into the low end of the box, all bones and gravity, as we climb down the stairs trying not to catch one another’s heels.

After the graveside I finally approach Mary and she says to me, through her tears, “You come and be with me tonight.”

I look down at my feet and the dirt and I can’t decide.

© Kevin White 2008

Trying Not To

_______________

lacking paper
writing on the back of a healthcare form
trying to be pragmatic
as the room fills up with fumes
trying not to scream

lacking perspective
answering questions in an official style
searching for reality
while the Earth begins to stink
trying not to notice

lacking inspiration
going to bed before the news comes on
hoping for the best
as if my days were numbered
trying not to boil
_______________

© Kevin White 2008

At the Beach

I am on vacation this week. Here is a description of a storm that came up on the beach last night.

I look at the storm north up the beach as I sit below the elbow of the front. It is like five oclock and off to the west I see the yellow of the diminishing Sun peaking through the curtains of curled, winded rain, looking like the lame yellow of a bruise, with all black around it. Below the black sky the ocean is green, but closer to me where it is cloudy rather than dark the water is white. I am the only person out here. I see the headlights of the trucks up the beach where it is raining. Further I see lightning cutting through the bruise and afterward hear the grumbling thunder, same as the roar of the ocean but louder. I gather my book and my chair and I trod through the sand back to the house for dinner.

The Dark Game

This is an excerpt: the first 875 words of a 4,500 word story I wrote last month called "The Dark Game". It is loosely based on my time living in Ferrum, Virginia (although in the story it is set in southern West Virginia).

* * *

“Don’t worry Simon we’re here together. You’re such a good kitty, kitty.”

We sat on the floor of that new, old, new-to-us house, which Danny rented from the mine company, out in the middle of nowhere mountains, West Virginia. My big brother recently started a job in the mines. Both our parents were dead. He brought me with him and he brought me up. I was only fourteen years old but Danny was twenty. My only companion mostly was the cat. Danny worked too hard and I hated it. But he fed us. So I loved him even though I hated that place, that situation.

“Don’t worry kitty kitty. Where’d you go Simon? Where’d you go?”

On a Friday afternoon I crawled around the floor in my shorts looking for the kitty, wanting to have a friend. I felt a lonely tremor creep to the back of my mouth, come up from my gut. We arrived in summer so I hadn’t been to school. I didn’t have a job of my own, being too young perhaps, but also being new there and not knowing anyone.

Here sat the little coffee table, there the old velvety brown couch, in many places poofs of fur-balls and lint and dust floated. I scooted about on my burning knees, travelled over the hardwood floors. We had kept all of mom and dad’s old furniture so we lived like fogeys although our ages only summed to thirty-four.

I could see him over in the kitchen under a chair sauntering around like looking for a bug or a mouse. He was a little overweight, Simon, with long grey and black fur with some white on his belly. He saw that I was looking at him and he stared at me for a moment with a wise expression and then turned about on his pawpads and scuttled the underchair spot, smoothing over near the back door of the little kitchen, back there where vines from out back pierced through the thin paneling, just jutting out of the walls, and there sat a little table for drying dishes or perhaps laying out laundry.

“Come on back kitty kitty … I love you love you LOVE you kitty kitty.”

And then “RRRRRRRRRRRRRING.”

I heard the doorbell and I heard some giggling come from the porch.

I scrambled up to my knees and stuck my wrist out against the couch and torqued up and I dutifully strolled to the door, although sometimes I wish I’d never answered it.

“Hay!” giggled one of the girls. She was tall, standing hands-on-hips at the other side of the door, and she had one of those 1989 hairdos: a wave of blonde hair that rolled back over itself and said “whooptedooo, hello!” Another girl stood beside her, kind of gaped at me.

“Hi.”

“Ahm Janet. This is Cindy.”

Cindy struck me as more reserved, didn’t say anything, but I thought she was more beautiful. I instantly saw that Cindy had a bigger body than mine: not fat but just bigger. The first one – Janet – was taller but skinnier. Could they be my age, my grade? As a boy I knew even then that you had to graph these things out, size them out.

“I’m Kenny.”

“We live down thar, next door,” said Janet.

Down there. There weren’t hardly any houses down there. We had a cow pasture across the road. An old man lived over to the right: to the right if you’re standing on the front porch and looking at the cows. There was a graveyard on the left and nothing seemed to exist beyond that, just road.

I stepped out on the porch and shut the door behind me to keep the cat from sprinting out, and maybe also to cover up my inner sanctum (of which I was somewhat ashamed). I looked down to the front of my shorts to see if anything was hanging out of my fly. I pressed my palms across the fly. Though nothing was hanging, I felt that they could see everything. I smiled and I blushed and blustered.

“OK, where is your house?” They were pointing “down there” beyond the graveyard.

Janet took my hand and pulled me off the porch and I almost slipped and broke my face but my feet shuffled shuttled kicked and slinked down those steps and my hand felt warm where she was taking it and then she repositioned it on my wrist who knows why.

Cindy just stood where she was and pivoted and I could feel the light beams from her eyes staring down at my ass. I could feel my ass burning from those prickly beams.

Janet and I catapulted caromed through some high grass out front and under the outer reaches of a big maple and she said look down there. I looked down there beyond the graveyard and she said see where the road kind of curves off to the right. Yeah. You see it? I saw it on the left of the curvy road: a little ranch house and you could even see the pinholes of windows at the top of the basement.

“Well come on, come on down and meet my brother Chan and my dad. They’d love to welcome ya.”

I didn’t, I … “well I don’t know I got the cat in there and ahm harum ahh.”

“Come on letz go,” said Cindy, and those were the first real words she had said to me all day. I obeyed them as if she were my mother.

We almost ran down the country road, trucks and other vehicles slamming past us, missing us narrowly. Cindy was my mother but Janet was the drill sergeant who pulsed us on, pump them legs!

“I figgurmy brother’ll be home by seven I gotta be back by then,” I said with no particular opening for it, which must’ve sounded strange to them but I guess my mind was still up in that tall grass in front of the porch thinking of excuses not to go.

They ignored, “Where’d you move from we saw yerr brother’s truck de’udder day, we saw you coming out movin’ stuff.”

“How old’s yerr brother?”

“Cindy thinks he’s cyoot.”

“No I don’t shett up Janet!”

When she said shut up I could tell that Cindy was younger than Janet, not just shorter. She had said shut up and then a rose grew on her face.

“How old are you guys?” I said.

“I’m 16; Cindy’s 14.”

“I’m fourteen too,” I said.

We slowed down a little and then, after knowing I was her same age, though she was still bigger than me, I took a closer look at Cindy. And since she seemed a little shy, and with that rose in her face, I could look at her without expecting the strike of the tongue that had come a little while ago from Janet when I was looking at her hairdo and then looking at how she had freckles below her neck and above where her weird v-neck t-shirt wagged its thumb down toward her perky breasts.

“What is it?” she had said. And then I had said the thing about figgerin’ my brother would be home.

Cindy didn’t wear the same type of t-shirt. She wore what was almost a dress but it had shorts instead of a skirt or whatever. These baggy ruffles surrounded her sleeves and below that her blank white arms hung thinner than you’d imagine, seeing as how they came out parallel to those sizable fourteen-year-old tits. And Cindy had blond hair too but hers was a little darker and her eyebrows were real dark but not so big like my caterpillars. Her face was like a perfect plus sign or the sign of the cross, with big eyes in the top two spaces, a long nose running down the middle and a small mouth hugged by freckles like her sister’s. Cindy’s face didn’t make a circle as some girls’ faces do; it was thinner like a man’s, but she seemed much more sensuous than a man could be even in his thoughts.

I stopped my ogling short when she looked at me and so I darted to look up at the graves beyond.

“You been through therr yet?” Janet interjected.

“No.”

“Want to?”

She turned ninety degrees and scaled the high hill from the road up to the angular side of the yard and I went up after her not thinking about it and Cindy was behind me. Then I slipped on the dark grass and I almost fell into Cindy. But she didn’t touch me at all, and I didn’t touch her. I recaptured my footing and plodded on, right up to the top. I guess I should’ve reached down and given her a hand at that slippery spot. But anyway she was alright.

There in the graveyard we whistled around and I marveled at those girls how they got chattier in there while I got sullen. I saw how the sides of the yard sloped up all the way around and the middle of this little graveyard was like the bottom of a cereal bowl and there sat a single statue in the basin like a water-well for the dead. In effect the basin was sprouting this great marble tree with upraised arms as if Jesus or the Anti-Christ was buried down there just sipping on the corpses’ blood.

Janet whirled around like a three-year-old with a flower in her hand as she fired questions at me, one by one, about my brother and where we’d come from and what we liked to do.

“We just moved from Petersburg, which is like just south of Richmond.”

“Cool,” like she didn’t know where that was and didn’t care.

“Let’s go home an’ play the dark game,” said Cindy.

I asked what that was.

“It’s like hide-n-go seek in the dark. Weel hafta wait til it gets dark.”

“It won’t be dark before seven. I gotta go home an’ make dinner for Danny.”

“What are you, his waff?” Janet said, and I didn’t have the heart or the nerve or the balls to say anything about my dead mother and dad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“Lessgo,” said Janet.

© Kevin White 2008

THE REST OF THE STORY IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

Spirit

I wrote this short poem in 2003.

Spirit in me
That is in you
Shedding dirt
Swimming on
Above a cascade
Super love in the way
The way you loved me
And will always ever do
We will see each other soon
Be mine 'til then and again
Stay as good as new

© Kevin White 2008

Chan

The three of us sat on a ledge fifteen miles north of campus.

“Ready to go?” yelled Jay.'

Nobody replied. We had driven out from campus in our bathing shorts and left my car on the far side of the bridge. We took off our t-shirts, walked out to the middle. We sat on that scratched-up guardrail in the middle of the bridge: a concrete ring on the finger of spidery Lake Anna. Around the bend a nuclear power plant warmed the lake’s water with its discharge, while the mixture of the water and the air blew a cool breeze on our ankles as we sat there, dangling on a rail. We stuck there and wondered whether to go. Patrick studied the current below. I felt a ball of mucous in my gut.

“You should go bridge jumping,” Chandler had said last night as we drank at Maldini’s restaurant in town. He couldn’t go of course. He had to go haul furniture for his girlfriend’s sister, who was moving. Chandler and his girl and the rest of us were seniors. The sister was a couple years older but we didn’t know her well.

“That pussy,” said Patrick.

“What?”

“Chandler is a pussy.”

“Yeah.” But he wasn’t. He had done this before. Why in all these years hadn’t he brought us along? I guess he had that little outside world of his, the living with his girlfriend, the ecstatic exterior where we didn’t belong. Jay, Patrick and I were members of the fraternity; we’d lived in that odorous old frat house long enough to be insane. But Chan was our guiding light, our twelve-step sponsor; we followed him lamely.

“Jay, it looks like you’re shaking,” I said.

“Damn right. I’m about to shit my pants.”

“Wait until you hit the water; that’s what Chandler’s girlfriend did.”

“When did he say that?” said Patrick.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s full of shit.”

“And a pussy,” I joked.

Patrick took it seriously, agreed with it. He couldn’t handle that Chandler split his time with us and with that girl. Patrick was very black and white. I don’t know how he got that way, growing up in that motel like he did. I eyeballed him as he sat there on the ledge fidgeting, smoking a cigarette and no longer looking down.

“You’re going to swallow that thing when you jump.”

“Fuck you,” he replied.

I turned over toward Jay and I saw how he sat straight up and stoical. He was tall with an athletic build, though he hadn’t played a sport since high school. His forearms bulged as he gripped the guardrail and his substantial veins pumped in measures. I could also see the veins in his broad neck and, as he scanned down, his ample muscles primed and gripped the rusty side. And he was the first to notice a deep rumble and a buzz in the air. I witnessed the tremors roll through his arm as his grip tensed further. Jay craned his thick neck and he looked beyond me. For a time Patrick just sat there, his cigarette dangling from his damp lip.

Around the bend a lone motorcycle appeared, roaring down the hill with ample speed. Then more choppers showed up and before I knew it there were fifteen sable horseflies buzzing around the bend, staccato, dicing the air and splaying molecules over our heads, over the edge, vectors of sound spreading over the chasm and collapsing into the water and in the thickets of trees. In retrospect there were probably only six or seven bikers but at the time it felt like fifteen: a laundry load full of leather and bandanas and chrome plating end-on-end that burbled toward us. They had smiles like jackals.

I looked back at Patrick and saw his frown and how he held that cigarette secure and close to his nipple. Then I glanced at Jay. His facial expression was serene but his veins popped more than before and I couldn’t tell if that was fear or if he were priming for a fight. Jay was the guy you wanted with you in a brawl. On the other hand … he might fight fair, so it paid to have Patrick: someone who would grab balls and kick shins.

Then the motors slowed to a halt. The lead biker unleashed his kick stand and blasted his metal heal against the concrete. Then he very casually took off his helmet but the sneer on his face wasn’t casual until he asked us “what are you scared?” And then he started to cackle and the whole blob of leather and denim and chains wambled like jelly with scornful laughter.
I guess his question meant “scared to jump” but now we were scared of him and his clan.

We sat dumb and I believe Jay was formulating a response when one of those bears lumbered over and shoved him in the back of the neck. Jay just dropped off the bridge, through forty feet of air. Patrick and I looked at each other with panicked quickness and before Jay hit the surface we jumped. We could hear the brutish laughter as we fell.

By the time we had swum through the swift warm water and over to the bank the bikers were gone and I laughed at the hilarious fun they must have had. Patrick was pissed off. Jay seemed indifferent.

“At least those motherfuckers got us to grab our balls and jump off.”

“They pushed you off, dumbass,” Patrick replied.

* * *

We headed to Tokyoe Bar on Wednesday night.

We pulled off the paved road down the narrow gravel lane, bumping over potholes to enter the rippled parking lot behind Tokyoe’s kitchen. Chandler tossed his cigarette out the window as we rounded the corner and found a spot between two Buicks. Patrick clung to his cigarette as always. The rest of us didn’t smoke. After stopping we opened the doors and rustled out like a deranged football team, whooping and clapping before the kickoff. So we were drunk. We had pre-gamed the bar.

Old rainwater rolled down the stream on the opposite edge of the parking lot. It hadn’t rained for a few hours but it was catching up to us, flowing down. This all made a gothic background to our swiveling feet as we shuffled past the kitchen, back up the driveway on foot, and into the side door of Tokyoe.

Chandler was our designated driver. His old lady saw to it he didn’t drink, but he smoked like a chimney at any rate. We all loved his girlfriend though, strange to say. She let him come out with us.

The side door swung open like Old West. Smoke hit our faces, invaded our nostrils, and mixed with the smell of stale beer, which seemed baked into the hardwood floor. Tokyoe is a dark place, restaurant booths all around the edges and a sunken island in the middle. It was packed. We were wasted even before we got there, except Chandler, who drove.

Big chief entered the Old West door. Chandler had swagger. Hard to believe he didn’t drink. Called out to some girls. And we rode his coattails, rode.

Nothing like old Tokyoe, haunt since freshman year, when we weren’t even twenty-one.

The girls giggled, shaking like paper streamers hanging off lanterns. We stretched in eight directions, swaying like octopi, shaking the hands of boys and patting the girls on their bottoms. We passed the leather green booths, gathered back up, reverse octopi, strolled like Reservoir Dogs to the other side of the bar, flipping our shades up on our foreheads and winking to whomever might be near.

“This is what it’s all about,” said Chan.

* * *

Thursday night. We headed out to the Iron Monkey, another bar in town. The fraternity’s Pig Roast would be that Saturday. But Thursday was our pledges’ last night of hell week. We pre-gamed again.

There was one thing about the annual Pig Roast: last year I stood beside Chandler on the rotten back deck of the fraternity house, and listened to him rattle off about how much it sucked and the girls were ugly and the pig was all burnt. All the while Patrick and I had hung our heads over the railing, smoking lonely cigars, holding back laughter, looking all stoic and serious.
This year would be different. Chandler had taken the weekend by the balls, shaken its shoulders and told it to shape the fuck up. We were seniors. This meant all we had to do was just show up at the right time, the right hour, for the finale of hell week, and then laugh our knowing laughs and smile our mocking smiles at the freshmen.

At the Iron Monkey we ate sandwiches. Most of us drank beer while Chan had sweet tea. Then Chan did us a senior year favor and picked up the tab. Some reason it took the bartender forever to process Chan’s card. Maybe it just felt that long ‘cause we were in a hurry.

Patrick and I waited in Patrick’s Explorer while Chan and Jay sat at the bar styling limericks and the bartender crawled around adjusting glasses and just generally wasting time.

Finally we left. The boys bounced out of the bar. Jay fired up the engine and had the car in motion before Jay had his feet off the pavement.

“Shouldn’t I drive?” said Chan.

“It’s just a couple blocks, dude.”

“You should have seen Jay’s face when that burly motherfucker pushed him offa the bridge.”

“Hahahahahah.”

* * *

On the way back to the house we stopped at Ali Mart. Two of us – Jay and I – bounced out of the car and into Ali’s. Ali wasn’t there, so we had to deal with some little redneck pussy who gave us shit. I bought a case of Coors Light, and waited impatiently while the clerk talked shit about whether we were old enough and smoothed out our dollar bills like he hadn’t seen money before.

* * *

The house: a shit-hole. When we got there I stowed my Coors Light behind the upstairs bar and I made for the bathroom upstairs. Walked down a boomerang-shaped hall to the rear of the building where there was a bathroom, clad from head to toe with grimy off-white tiles. Some were yellow and some were almost red with age and dirt. I entered the chamber. To my left was the cavernous shower – no curtain, three shower heads. There were three sinks at the right, oversized holes in the tile for the pipes. Shit like toilet paper and cigarettes stuck in the extra space there. A mirror above each such sink, glass adorned with zebra streaks of toothpaste and god-knows-what. At the back of the bathroom were three stalls whose doors hung loosely. There was one urinal, between the entrance to the shower and the first stall, and I headed for that one. It gave off a ripe stench. The smell of old recycled Natty Light: recycled through so many dirty digestive systems, now caked to the porcelain and boiling in the shallow frothy water, recycled and recycled again by microorganisms.

* * *

On hell night we seniors were guided like foreign dignitaries up to the attic, where the younger brothers had blindfolded the seventeen freshmen. We saw these oddly barrel-chested guys with their five-o’clock shadows belying their young ages. They were all thrown together in wrinkly khaki pants and blue blazers and ties and the occasional Vineyard Vines belt, which we mocked. We were ushered into the special secret room. This room was stark, with only a couch and a coffee table. The walls were empty. There was no carpet on the floor, just the wood plank of the attic. In front of the coffee table sat a single bright desk lamp with its neck twisted so that the light shone upward from the floor.

“Move that fuckin’ coffee table,” yelled Patrick.

A younger brother moved it without an added word.

We were all on the sofa, crammed together, with Chan on the arm and the rest of us sunk down. The pledges were marched in one by one to have their blindfolds ripped off so they could stare into the light like suspects and answer quiz questions that had no right answer. They suffered such indignities for beer and a chance to score.

* * *

Friday night we stayed up all night to cook the pig. We bought more beer and stowed it in the ‘fridge in the closet behind the downstairs bar. We all sat on splintery chairs on the back porch. We laughed about the alumni who had in brought in the pig. Old redneck sons of bitches. One of them on the way out to his car took another nod at the dead pink carcass, its mouth open, cheek fast against the grate, and the alumnus said, “Looks like my ex-wife.”

We felt nostalgic now. Graduation was close.

“Glad this shit’s almost over,” said Jay, and I didn’t know whether he meant the frattiness or the drinking or the academics. Four long years – a little less than a quarter of our existence on Earth – had come and almost gone, like those bikers around the bend.

“Yeah, I’m ready to be done with all this theoretical shit and make some money,” Patrick said.

Patrick planned to go home to work with his dad as an insurance salesman. Jay would work for some bank. I didn’t know what the fuck I would to do. We didn’t know what Chandler had in store, other than marriage and kids and endless family and propagation of the species, but we didn’t care.

“Dude, I hope there’s some pussy out tomorrow,” Patrick said.

“Our last hurrah,” I replied.

“It’s gotta be better than last year,” said Chandler, drawing on his cigarette.

“Enough bullshit, I’m gonna get some pussy. I’m sick of this shit.”

Patrick got up and went back into the house, probably to behind the bar.

“Hey get me another one!”

“A’ight.”

Patrick had asked me if I wanted to come along and work with him and his dad. I thought four years might be enough of Patrick. Besides, I didn’t spend four years studying philosophy in order to sell premium.

I stood there staring through the darkness at the pavement of the driveway, which was about twenty feet off to the right of the back porch, the other end of the pig cooker. We didn’t talk much, didn’t need to.

* * *

We stayed up with that old bastard’s ex-wife until six in the morning, when some of the juniors came out and said they’d take it from here. That was the tradition but we still thought they were sons of bitches for getting their beauty sleep and leaving us out there all night.
We had naps until noon, when Chandler came around with an old broom handle and whacked it against our doors. My door was the only one that didn’t lock, so he came in and damn near whacked it against my head and, as it turns out, Chandler and I were the only ones who got up at noon.

“Let’s go to Almas,” he spat.

I’d never known a teetotaler who loved bars so much.

“Damn Chandler it’s barely noon.”

“I know you want to drink.”

I got up and threw on a ratty t-shirt and some jeans. We walked down the hall and out the front door. We had to cut through Snead Hall in order to shave a few minutes off our walk. The doors to Snead Hall were not locked in those days, so we went through. We walked through the lobby and out the back door of Snead. Stepping down from the concrete landing, we entered the narrower path that came out the rear of the building. The landing ran up against a berm that led up a hill and through a sort of forest to the other side of town.

The back path led up the berm, through the wooded hill, into a passage topped by a canopy of larch, hemlock, oaks and thorns.

After some paces Chan took out his cell phone and scanned a text message.

“It’s Jay. He’s already there.”

“What? I thought he was still in bed.”

“I did too.”

When the path finally clawed its way out of the woods you could see the town, and you hopped down another short hill on to the sidewalk of Washington Street.

Alma’s was a triangular structure at the corner of Washington and Jefferson. Its exterior was covered with a thick green paint, an eyesore compared to its stately white neighbors. We stepped through the lobby, past the ATM machine and a rack of brochures. Inside the bar the place buzzed even with a small crowd.

We went up to the bar and sat down. We didn’t see Jay.

“Where the fuck is he?” I said.

“I don’t know who cares.”

After I ordered a gin and tonic and Chandler ordered an iced tea, Chandler sat his little cigarette pack down on the bar and poked at it a couple times, looked a couple moments at the mirror behind the bar and then turned straight towards me.

“It’ll never be this real again,” he said.

© Kevin White 2008