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Welcome to my website My hobby
If He Sqeals
My sister-in-law
Sylvie had a way of showing-up at family functions way too early and
most often already half drunk; such was the case on the fourth of
July, 1989. Looking back I think she may have been the only sane one
in the whole bunch. Maybe I can write it now; it was too hard then,
I'd get a knot in my gut the size of a Volkswagen and feel like
throwing up. The rituals took
place in Huntington Beach, California at the home of my other
sister-in-law Frances. After exchanging obligatory air-kisses she and
my wife Doris would verbally pussyfoot around each other looking for
an opening. Thirty-odd years of practiced rivalry made this
thrust-and-parry seem endless. Guests usually comprised mostly of
other siblings — also with incendiary attitudes learned from birth
— who frequently started squabbles which often became quarrels that
had been known to degenerate into actual fights. Anyone would think
they hated each other. Youngest brother Jon
and his significant-other, Sue, brought twins Sam 'n Eric; products
of one of Sue's other marital disasters. They usually just
ricocheted around until swatted then hid in separate closets until it
was time to leave. Frances detested Sam 'n Eric and not surprisingly
their father, who was serving eighteen-to-life in Soledad prison for
killing some other drug dealer. Whenever his name came up in
conversation Frances would bustle off mumbling something like, "He's
the kind of guy that gets niggers a bad name". Jon and Sue met over
a roulette wheel in Bullhead City, Arizona where she was croupier in
a riverside casino. Jon past-posted a bet; a practice whereby the
cheater surreptitiously switches chips of higher value for smaller
ones already placed after the little ball stops rolling. The inscrutable Sue wasn't
fooled but nevertheless paid off Jon’s bet without giving the
alarm, in return for which she made him bonk her vigorously for
several hours. A couple of days later Sue quit her job, bundled up
the toddling twins and drove her failing Oldsmobile to San Bernardino
where Jon had told her he ran a thriving Harley Davidson dealership.
The whirlwind romance took a hit when it became clear that he was a
humble auto mechanic somewhat lacking in recognizable personal
virtues; but the sex and drugs were good enough that Sue stayed
anyway. Older brother Barry
brought wife Mickey, short for Michaela. The almost seven foot tall
Barry owned up to being a spy. Once after he'd gone missing for
several days Mickey phoned Doris in the wee-small hours one night to
say he'd called from the Azores or somewhere similarly
remote...Tierra Del Fuego? Casual as the guy was about his anonymity
I supposed Barry was either a very bad spy or an extremely good one.
Frances' Mexican gardener said Barry's face was "Big: Like a
horse". Besides being
married Barry and Mickey were in business together selling
surveillance and security devices; Barry's 'cover'. She, a traveling
rep for a burglar alarm manufacturer in San Francisco, fell for Barry
right away; the similarly smitten Barry closed up the store and
together they zoomed off to Grand Bahama, returning a week later
hitched. Parents Henry and
Marjorie were long and no doubt blissfully dead, thus having the only
acceptable excuse for not showing up at Frances' perennial soirées. When the kids were young Hank and Marge were so often preoccupied
with chiding each other that Barry and Frances more or less ran the
family. After visiting one or more of his favorite watering holes Dad would come home from
work at the General Dynamics plant in Verona and resume the customary
fault-finding he'd begun that morning. Marge would keep him off the
kid's backs by steering him to the wet bar in the den, then in due
course pour him into bed. Following mom's death Barry joined the
Marines and Frances assumed the role of matriarch while dad floated
away on the eighty-proof waters of oblivion. It was while making his
funeral arrangements that Frances met Gary; the mortician. Though he was not
really looking for a wife Gary's funeral home sported enough oak and
brass that his marriage to Frances was soon a done-deal; she was very
into the oak and brass thing. Daughter Chastity was conceived on the
floor of the viewing chapel with the bride still in her wedding gown. Sylvie considered
herself to be a hopeless romantic - her words - but a penchant for
switching lovers with the frequency some people change their bed
linen hinted that Sylvie's condition was more of the
obsessive-compulsive kind. She also expressed it as a taste for
strong drink. Drinking had been a
favorite pastime for Sylvie since childhood when cocoa was her
beverage of choice. Marge made it on school nights but Sylvie wanted
it all the time and started making herself huge mugs of it laced with
enough sugar to stun a small horse. Barry began calling her Coco and
it stuck. Determined to become
a painter Coco succeeded in winning a scholarship to Pittsburgh Art
Institute. There she learned to her chagrin that [a] life for most
artists is a constant struggle, [b] fame almost always stays two
weeks away, and [c] pregnancy can be terminated with lots of gin and
hot baths. She married fellow student Donovan Malone, who
accidentally took a fatal overdose of methaquaalone and Beaujolais
before Coco got the chance to tell her family. In those days I was
a musician enjoying something resembling life in the Pittsburgh jazz
scene, and home was a rented apartment in a converted north-side
warehouse. Coco and Donovan were my neighbors across the hall. After
Don died I did what I could to console his widow; we compared past
misfortunes - for which we were naturally blameless - and I learned
she wasn't one for small talk. The look she gave me on Frances' patio
over a half empty tumbler of Chivas Regal was pretty graphic; it said
"We have to talk." I strolled over with feigned
nonchalance. "There's
somebody here I don't know," she said as if a little piqued.
"The guy over there by the pool; who'd he come with?" For a second I
wondered if Frances had planned an ugly Hawaiian shirt competition as
part of the afternoon's revelries; if so its easy winner stood beside
the pool swizzling his drink and scanning the scene through
reflective shades. I said I didn't know who he was but that I
thought he looked a little nervous; furtive even. Coco was already
edging towards the patio steps. "Someone should
check him out," she said, tossing her ash blond hair the way ash
blond airheads sometimes do. That was the last I saw of her for two
weeks.
One day while I was
downtown hounding my agent I ran into Coco at a sidewalk café.
She was breakfasting on Danish pastries and latté and looking
all L.A. Bohemian in a wrap skirt over a backless swimsuit,
sunglasses, Huarache sandals and a contrived shabby straw hat. I
sat, and in lieu of a less hackneyed greeting said "Hi stranger;
where'd you disappear to the other day?" "Oh, hi!"
she said, hiding a crumb-garnished smile behind slender fingers. "You went to
Ojai?" I quipped. "No, silly;
Gavin and I flew to New York." "Gavin? The
Hawaiian shirt guy?" "The same,"
she said coyly. A large waiter
arrived and I ordered a Pepsi. "Ve haf no
Pepsi," he lisped in Anglo-Transylvanian; "Coke?" I nodded. He minced
off. "How was the
trip?' I asked, "Seems to have agreed with you." The woman
was beautiful despite being a lush. "Terrific,"
she said; "You want this other Danish?" The morning rush was
over and the lunch-crunch beginning to build. "Downtown's not
bad this time of day," said Coco, oblivious to the world
grinding by so close to our little cast iron table. "But you
wouldn't wanna be here after office hours; they hose the place down
to keep the bums out". I didn't want to be steered away from
the Gavin thing. "How come your
buddy was at Frances' party?" Coco shot me a
rueful look over her Foster-Grants. "Hey, pal;"
she said flatly, "I'm all growed up now and do what the hell I
want." With a middle finger she pointedly repositioned her
shades. "Ok, I'm
chastised," I said, "But you know there's weirdos out
there." My drink arrived as Coco dismissed my concerns with a
shrug. "I can take
care of myself," she said. "Anyway, Gavin and I go way
back. I didn't recognize him at first but we were at Pittsburgh art
institute together. He found me in the phonebook, my service
forwarded his call to Frances and Gary's and Gary invited him over." A seamless
explanation. "And," she
continued with girlish delight; "He wants me to do some
paintings for his gallery in Lawnguyland!"
continuing...
Jacket Woman
This is the rough
of a story I'm working on. The family are some of my real
ancestors; Martha is a great-grand-aunt.
The central theme of
History is not so much what happened, but what people felt about it while it
was happening.
Set in the England of Queen Victorian
and King Edward the story focuses on Martha, fifth of nine children born to rural
blacksmith Moses Attridge and his wife Ellen. People struggled with lifes complexities in a time of burgeoning technology. Martha
fought desperately for survival in a world she
barely understood; one she had little expectation of influencing. Victorian and
Edwardian nobles, together with other wealthy land-owners and merchants constituting 'The Ruling Class', squabbled over blood-lines, real estate and commodities, while
people like Martha went unheard. Attempts to improve one's
lot generally meant working 'in service' of the more privileged, or enlisting in the military. Serial foreign wars drained the nation's life blood, while the few 'rights' of ordinary
Britons were continually eroded by the demands of a bloated and
increasingly unmanageable empire.
Martha’s oldest
sister Miriam, eight years her senior, dreams of an idyllic
motherhood of her own but falls ill and dies from consumption;
tuberculosis. Their mother sinks into a morbid depression and it
falls to next oldest daughter Frances to tend her; ultimately
becoming woman-of-the-house after Ellen’s death. Frances performs
loyally but marries out of the situation at the first
opportunity, her family duties transferring to Martha. The demanding
Moses insists Martha’s younger sister Eleanor, or Nell, help with
the drudgery of household chores, besides the care of three infant
siblings. Martha and Nell
become increasingly wayward, a situation Moses thinks to remedy by
taking a new wife—the haughty Rebecca; a woman thirteen years his
junior. By the time Rebecca conceives a child the defiant Martha has
also managed to get pregnant, but stoically refuses to implicate the father. While Rebecca’s baby thrives Martha’s child dies
of what Moses reports as ‘a gastric disorder’. Tension in the home
builds until Martha gets pregnant again and Moses throws her out to
have the baby at the notorious local workhouse. Nell is also found to
be pregnant, earning Moses’ wrath and her own place at the
workhouse. There, unmarried
mothers are customarily separated from newborns and made to wear a
garish yellow jacket as a mark of shame. Readily giving up her baby,
Nell is allowed to return home, but Martha grabs her child and escapes. She finds work as
a domestic servant in Eastbourne, a fashionable coastal resort some
miles away, thus beginning a new life. Though she never marries
Martha goes on to have three more children.
More later: PR
Here's a related
short; currently high on publishers' "Most Rejected" lists.
With pallid fingers
Martha grasped the top of the coverlet as tightly as she could and
pulled it up beneath her chin. Across the room sheer curtains
billowed on the breeze that wafted off the English Channel and in
through the open French window. She could barely make out where the
sea blended into clouds the color of old pewter. Somewhere out there
was the place she had come from.
She could hear her
father pounding something in his forge, the anvil ringing and hot
metal clashing as he steadied it for the next blow. Martha watched
him between the boards of the outhouse where she hid, waiting for the
old bastard to turn away so she could bolt across the yard and into
the house.
Sounds outside the
window drew Martha back... children playing around top hat-ed and
parasol-ed parents as they strolled along the seaside promenade. A
Punch ‘n Judy show down on the sand.
Martha drifted
again.
She ran, battling
the sudden downpour and clutching her precious bundle firmly; never
would she give up her child to the baby farmers just to get out of
that wretched workhouse. Pity the poor cows that did! The road to the
coast was dark and unpaved beyond the edge of the city; a wide track
furrowed by cartwheels and horse traffic and pitted with holes.
Martha’s muddied toes kept snagging the threadbare hem of her
sodden dress, but she dared not stumble for fear of the wardens dogs.
How close might they already be?
Beyond the
treacherous road and the unholy darkness was a better life―albeit
one of servitude; but after the bollocks she’d already been through
that would be easy. Oh, the money wouldn’t be much at first but
Martha would find a way: “Thousands of the London ‘oi-polloi take
‘olidays at the seaside―and some decent gentlemen among ‘em,”
they said. Martha’s thin eyelids fluttered as she dozed fitfully
and the sullen clouds blew a little closer.
The servants lined
up in the entrance hall to be presented. “This is your new
parlour maid Martha, sir,” said the butler. Martha did a small
curtsey as the posh gent silently appraised her, she didn’t meet
his eyes, but there would be time for that. The gentleman moved on
by. Down the line of arrayed ghosts waited a son he would never own.
A frown creased the pale skin of the sleeping woman’s forehead.
“Oh, you can dress
‘er up but I’d know ‘er anywhere,” they whispered with
knowing winks; “She was ‘is ‘ouse-keeper”. “Got some nerve,
she ‘as... wearin’ white like that,” they said. In her dream...
or not... the below-stairs doorbell jangled.
Martha opened her
eyes and smiled at the figures beside her bed; “My dears! You all
came,” she said quietly, “How wonderful.” On the beach the
donkey rides stopped and the tethered animals turned their haunches
toward the approaching squall. Soon it would be over and they’d be
back in business.
Plague Moon
"Thou, who like to
the spotted leopard are diverse in manners and in mischief, whose
head now is growing gray, who are seated on a throne full of deceits
and from bottom to top are stained with murder and adulteries;
Vortigern, thou foolish tyrant, why art thou so stiff? Do such
violent gulfs of sin not yet satisfy thee, especially since the end
of thy life is daily approaching? Why dost thou clog thy miserable
soul with the sin of lust by putting away thy wife, and after her
honorable death, by the base practices of thy shameless daughter?" (Gildas: De
Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae)
The invader’s
leaving gave rise to riotous high spiritedness as die-hards
and young fools savaged anyone they felt had too easily adopted
foreign ways. Before the place calmed down there was a good deal of
slaughter. But the Romans’ abandonment hurt us all; at least that's
what my uncle Cornelius said. He reckoned the killings were just a
mark of it. No one seemed to know what to do next; it was
as if men’s wits had been sucked out. The canny Vortigern’s
hastily recruited group of louts and bullies took charge, and nowhere
was safe as they plundered at whim, filled with liquor and lust. I,
Silas Half, was little more than a suckling when hell came through
the wall, the thunderous crush of men and horses shattering a summer
night and my sleeping parents’ heads. Cornelius fought hard until
he was knocked down by a punch from a mailed fist. His body fell
across me and in the stupefying havoc we too were left for dead. Much
more I can’t remember, except for the drizzle of burning reeds from
the roof and the stink of corpses in the ruin of our home; and my
sister Megan’s screaming as they took her away.
Working on this:
PR
Waiting (An exercise in
creating characters of the opposite sex.)
The last train to
anywhere was gone. Outside the night was foul; rain spattered on the
windows and ran down the glass in sorry rivulets, leaking through the
skylight at a couple of places where glazing putty had cracked and
fallen away. I’d mentioned it several times to the maintenance man―
while he was busy gazing at my boobs. At a back table of the
otherwise deserted waiting room sat a man, poring over a newspaper
laid on the Formica tabletop. Something about him seemed familiar: Forty-ish, I
guessed; Charcoal gray suit, conservative necktie, and pale shirt
with just the right amount of cuff showing at the wrist; Dark, well
groomed moustache and hair, the latter graying slightly at the
temples. Perhaps the familiarity I felt was simply that he fit my
idea of how a well-heeled middle-aged gentleman should look. I squirted Windex at
the huge mirror behind the refreshment counter, furtively watching
the man’s reflection. Without lifting his eyes he slowly moved a
sun-browned hand to a black trench coat lying on the seat beside him
and took a silver cigarette case from one of its pockets. Then he
pulled out a lighter… not a seventy-nine cent disposable but a
hefty little chunk like a Dupont or a Dunhill. Suddenly he looked
directly at me and, feeling a flush come to my face, I fell to
buffing the mirror with exaggerated care. Should I say something? He
must have seen me eyeing him. “I made fresh
coffee,” I blurted out, unnerved by the stranger’s sober gaze.
“Would you care for a cup?” The man lit his
cigarette, one of those acrid smelling French things. He puffed
smoke, slid scholarly looking reading glasses down the bridge of his
angular nose and quietly cleared his throat. “Thank you, yes;
That would be nice.” “How do you take
it?” I asked with forced geniality. For some reason I expected him
to order it black but he asked for it creamy ― “With a little
extra sugar!” I set a clean cup in a saucer and took another glance
in the mirror as I turned to the coffee maker; his reflection was
watching me. “The south-bound
is gone,” I said; “Nothing will be through here for some time,
not counting the one-oh-five fast freight.” He folded his
newspaper, then his glasses and laid them on the paper. Leaning back
in his chair he passed a well-manicured hand over obviously tired
eyes. “I imagine it will
be here soon enough,” he said, a little pensively. Outside the rain
paused and a watery moon crept from behind tattered clouds into a
patch of indigo sky. I wondered again about the man’s familiar look
and decided to take a stab at it: “Haven’t you
been here before?” The dash of cream I’d put in his coffee made a
little whorl. “You’re very
observant,” he said, and for the first time I noticed the hint of
an accent. The legs of his chair scraped noisily on the floor as he
stood and started forward, negotiating his way around the furniture
to stop directly in front of me. “I came this way once before but
it’s been a while.” He was quite tall
and athletic-looking, and I made an attempt at what I hoped was a
disarming smile ― though I wished I’d had a gun hidden somewhere
close. The coffee cup rattled in its saucer as I slid them across the
counter. “No charge,” I
said, my heart in my mouth; “You’re our millionth customer.” A smile brought
friendly wrinkles to the corners of dove-colored eyes, and he spoke
in a tone cool as stream water. “Please; you need
not be alarmed young lady,” he said. Nevertheless my heart raced. “Oh?” I bleated. “I’m old enough
to be your grandpa,” he chuckled, “and feeling none too nimble
right now.” My anxiety eased a bit; “I get some real characters
in here sometimes and, well… you know.” The man crushed out
his smoke in an ashtray and, squaring his shoulders a little,
extended a hand across the counter. “My name is Kirby Roush,” he
said; “May I know yours?” I flopped my hand
out like a wet fish and swallowed almost audibly. “Sylvia Malone;
my friends call me Coco.” He laughed softly;
“Enchanté, Mademoiselle Coco.” Then gently taking my hand
he bowed slightly and began to lift my flaccid fingers toward his
face. “Oh God!” I
thought; “He’s gonna kiss my friggin’ hand!” But he didn’t.
Releasing it he picked up his coffee and turned away. My stupid hand
hung in the air. Thunder growled
nearby as Kirby Roush returned to his table, chair creaking sharply
as he sat. I busied myself with side-work as rain again began seeping
through the skylight to drip and puddle on the cracked linoleum. I
glanced at the man more openly. He sipped his coffee, holding the cup
handle almost delicately between finger and thumb with his pinky
raised like a little antenna and the other hand cradling the saucer a
few inches below his chin. I wondered incongruously if the posture
was meant to demonstrate good breeding or merely showed a simple
desire to avoid dripping coffee on his tie. “You picked a
rotten night to travel,” I said; “There’s a storm-warning for
the whole east coast.” He rested his cup carefully in its saucer
and gave a faint smile. “Yes,” he said,
looking up at the roiling clouds outside the window. “Thank
goodness for trains; I’ve always hated flying in this.” We exchanged banter
about the weather for a couple of minutes before the conversation
lagged and I retreated behind the counter. A squall carried the
distant wail of the approaching freight train. “What kind of
business are you in?” I asked, looking up. But Kirby Roush was
gone. As I tidied his table I noticed the headline of the newspaper
he’d left. It read: “Train wreck demolishes station.” A single
chime of the ancient wall clock marked the passing of the first hour
of Friday, October thirty-first.
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