Category Archives: shards

January 14, 2018 · 6:00 pm

giving away trade secrets

GIVING AWAY TRADE SECRETS

After two weeks of water boarding, they put him in a dark cell with a Koran and a wool blanket. He screamed after them that he was Irish-Catholic, he wanted a Bible, but they didn’t listen. They already had what they were after: a list of names comprised of an entire Brazilian soccer team; his admission that the bong they found in his Madagascar apartment could be made into a bomb; and receipts from the money he’d been sending the Christian Children’s Fund to aid starving children in Indonesia, children who would grow up to be terrorists.

After six months without bathing, they dragged him into the courtyard and hosed him down with cold water, then gave him a shave and a haircut. Next, to fatten him up, they started pumping 4,000 calories a day into him, mostly starch and fast food from the franchises around the Guantanamo perimeter. Once he put on some weight they dressed him in jeans, a t-shirt and tennis shoes and flew him stateside. They dropped him on the streets of Cleveland.

***

His testimony gave rise to questions:

*Do terrorists have trade secrets?

*Did Dylan Thomas cross over to the dark side after he wrote Adventures in the Skin Trade? He was, after all, Irish-Catholic.

*Does living in Madagascar with a bong pipe lead to building bombs?

*Is money sent to feed starving children in countries with questionable attitudes toward American foreign policy used to turn these children into terrorists?

*Are people who collect picture cards of Brazilian soccer players networking with terrorists?

Learning the answers to these questions would make America great again.

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January 12, 2018 · 5:42 pm

looking into the future

Looking into the Future

It’s all song and dance. Slapdash and balderdash. A magical mystery tour. Handicapped pickpockets on skateboards. Everyone reading from a preordained script. Snow-capped mountain peaks, gold-capped crowns. Long in the tooth, we slide into phase two of the master plan.

Fight the urge to explain yourself, it’s part of a program embedded just under the skin. Hope for a better tomorrow.

I bring you glad tidings. Smokers aren’t the enemy, bankers are, the real junkies who never inhale, thinking ahead to when they might run for office. Money makes the world go down.

If anything I’ve said so far makes you want to meet me, drop a line. We can go out for coffee or, if your sex is right, on a blind date. You bring the killer dog, I’ll bring the stun gun. Together we’ll romp through the market place, upturning apple carts and stalls, soul mates until the end of time.

For years they kept me strapped down and I never yielded one thing specific–I knew what they were after, I’ve got the sixth sense of a lymph node. With the concentration of a werewolf I refused to opt. Not even for illusion. Eventually glaucoma set in, and they set me free; watched from a high window as I tapped my way down the street. They took my children, my wife, my lovers and my friends, but I never looked back, even when I had tears in my eyes.

 

***

 

Nine years old on an army base in Wyoming, standing outside the car in stopped traffic, everyone saluting a flag coming down. It was five p.m., we could hear the bugle coming through the speakers, we knew what to do.

A long line of stopped cars in both directions, doors open, soldiers out on the street,saluting at attention, women with their hands over their hearts. Back in the car again, my father drove sitting up straighter, gripping the wheel, jaw set, like we were surrounded by enemies. My mother stared straight out the windshield, and I braced myself, knowing what the future held.

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January 10, 2018 · 4:36 pm

life on the high wire

Life on the High Wire

This is the love story of Wilcox Bennington, a world-renown high-wire man who worked without a net, and a young girl named Joanna.

When Wilcox was fifty and at the apex of his career, Joanna stole his heart. Each night under the big top she sat in the stands in a special seat cordoned off from the crowd and clapped delightedly, driving Wilcox to escalating feats of death-defying boldness.

There were two spotlights, one on Wilcox and one on Joanna, until one night Joanna’s spotlight fell on an empty seat, and Wilcox took the first fall of his long career. Joanna vanished.

Broken in both body and spirit, Wilcox left the limelight of circus thrills and drifted into the grayness of everyday life where he worked as an usher in a big-city theater; between shows he swept up candy wrappers and popcorn. He was a man without a muse, until one night, alone in the dimly-lit theater at closing time, there she was again! His heart erupted with joy.

It was Joanna and it wasn’t Joanna. It was her beauty, quick mind and youth, coalesced into a shimmering apparition. Wilcox, expressing his love the only way he knew how, leaped on stage, and–with a broom that he held like a balancing bar–stepped out onto the thin wire of memory. He crashed into the orchestra pit and Joanna rushed to his side, resting his head in her lap.

“You silly old man!” she laughed, and lightly kissed his brittle gray hair.

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January 8, 2018 · 7:23 pm

lessons on how to write a story

LESSONS ON HOW TO WRITE A STORY

Suddenly nothing works. Your teeth rot out and the music stops.

Start over.

Suddenly nothing works.

Scratch suddenly.

This isn’t working.

Strike up the band!

I knew a guy with no teeth who could gum down steak. He eschewed false teeth. He shot tournament pool with a broom, bristles and all. He lied about his age in reverse for a guy of fifty, said he was older than he actually was. He was gay and mean and an ex-Marine.

There are those who would frown on this. Not the gay ex-Marine who’s now dead from an overdose, but where I started telling the story. They would admonish with a wagging finger. Hell, they’re doing it now, startled to suddenly have a spotlight put on them from the guard tower.

“Halt! Face-down in the garden plot! Hands locked behind your head! The interrogation team will be along presently.”

These finger waggers would suggest I start this story with paragraph seven. (Tell me you didn’t just go back and count paragraphs. Tell me you didn’t wonder if those one-liners actually count as paragraphs. Tell me it doesn’t feel good to be so much a part of the story.)

These arbiters of style and usage would also suggest I do away with the last three paragraphs and edit the piss out of this paragraph. “Tighten it up!” they say. “Slash and burn!”

One day this gay Marine rode into the Cornerstone Tavern on a horse along with a leather-faced woman also on a horse who once ran with John Dillinger’s get-away driver. They sat tall in their saddles and scowled down on us. We were a rowdy bunch, but we grew silent with reverence.

Finally, something to look up to.

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· 9:56 am

left brain, right brain

Left Brain, Right Brain

The way we were before we became what we are. Linear thought and cosmic engulfment. A few trillion fiber-optic connections between the yin and the yang of it, a wide-lane freeway without toll booths–focus on that and you get an uneasy feeling: did we miss where the action is?

People resent me because I won’t sit and chat. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” I say to appease them, and they breathe easy. See? He’s one of us after all.

We all make concessions to the alphabet.

School is where children learn how to geld freedom. It’s a slow process. The last bell rings and they bolt into summer. Twelve years old and still climbing trees.

It will be a while before they learn the meaning of oil.

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January 7, 2018 · 6:31 pm

left jabs, solid upper cuts & punishing body blows

LEFT JABS, SOLID UPPER CUTS & PUNISHING BODY BLOWS

Sitting on the hill smoking a cigarette on a gray winter’s day, I thought about the only fight Jake LaMotta ever threw, how he started it off by slamming a fist into his opponent’s face so hard he almost knocked him cold, just so he’d know who was really top dog when they declared him winner. Then he pretty much stood there for five rounds and let this clown pound on him until the ref called it a technical knockout.

Jake climbed through the ropes, went to his dressing room, and cried like a baby. His trainer, a big man with a broken nose and broken knuckles, gray hair and an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, clumsily held Jake in his arms, and he cried too, both men bewildered by the soft wave that washed over them for which they had no name but more articulate men called grief.

Cruelty wears expensive suits and comes at you smiling with its hand out.

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