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