The Boxer

When you step over the ropes, old hands

say you should be prepared to die.

A lifetime spent coming

to that moment…

jabbing,

bobbing,

weaving,

feinting,

clinching,

rope-a-dope in a pinch

absorbing all the blows,

the pretense that they never hurt,

eyes glaring the lie—

“Is that all you got?” with

arms flopped at your sides,

a heart about to burst, stomach

knotted in fear, legs that

want to turn traitor. Yet

you wobble on. Corner men

splash water on your face,

styptic and vaseline for the gashes,

a snort of ammonia, catch

your breath and out you go.

For, once down,

a count of ten

is all you get,

a blurry glimpse

into the fleeting void.

Photo Shoot, Roseland Park Cemetery, July 1985

The photos arrived, tucked inside your letter with its paragraphs
of charm as preamble for the main point, dagger-honed,
that stabbed me by surprise. You’d made an effort

to tiptoe around the graves, you said, and not disturb
the dead—as you’d been taught—while Jade and I 
traipsed upon the grassy mounds. We laid our lissome

bodies down, entwined long limbs, and posed while you 
fiddled with the focus on your new Canon and subdued
the stirring in your khaki pants. Lovers, closeted

even from our close friends, we took advantage
of the chance to ham it up, to touch. Like me, she wore 
black: leather gloves, my fedora, and a camisole stark 

against her pale arms and sharp collarbones. She’d brought
fancy silver cutlery and her handgun, which I triple-checked
to assure the chambers were bullet-free before I cocked

my head and pressed my temple to its snubbed nose—
Behind me, a granite family marker slumped, engraved
with my last name, and behind it, Jade draped

her thick cascade of hip-length hair across the tombstone.
That’s perfect, you praised, and sank to one knee 
to take aim. At yet another grave, she straddled me,

pretended to plunge a knife into my jugular vein
as I arched back, feigning agony. Your gat-toothed grin
lurked in the shadow of the lens. The day was sunny,

but you’d misjudged the aperture or shutter speed,
and the photos came out underexposed, in grainy shades
of green and black, our skin a phantom pallor—

a success of a mistake, a complement to the grim
backdrop. As for your after-the-fact admission 
of prim disapproval, you hypocrite, my friend:

the locale was your suggestion, the photo shoot a fantasy 
you bashfully confessed. And while we were game—
game as in happy to indulge, game as in the target of your hunt—

your letter keeps us in your crosshairs a different way.
I note you failed to specify which pictures you blew up 
to mount like trophies for prominent display.

Van the Tree Man

When Tom Blake was a young insurance agent in downtown Cincinnati, he worked for his Uncle Walt at the Walt Blake Agency, a well-known but decrepit local fixture. Walt and his long-dead partner, Fred Prendergast, offered general liability insurance to all comers, but their mainstay dominated the surety bond business for bail, appeals, and judicial orders. Their second-story office was at Ninth and Main, above the B/G Restaurant, a local greasy spoon catering to the courthouse breakfast- and lunch-time crowd. Fred’s great uncle, Pat Prendergast, had been Clerk of Courts before a clean government campaign flushed him out. There was no one in the courthouse with a dirty little secret or bad habit that Pat had not passed on to Fred and Walt. If a bond could be had, or a release contrived, Fred and Walt knew how to get it. 

After a couple of years learning the business, Tom saw a long dark future ahead, a rocky, if lucrative, road of peddling insurance policies to the fearful and cautious. He’d be writing bonds for those brushing up against the court system—criminals, and others, who couldn’t handle their problems and needed a lawyer or the courts to do it for them. He saw money dotting the trail but wondered about the psychic cost. Perhaps the law would be as lucrative as insurance but allow him to do both good and well. And so, he was considering taking the LSAT and going to law school. His good-natured wife, Laura, who sported an Ivy League law degree, was taking a break raising their two children. As she struggled to acclimate to Midwestern life, she encouraged Tom to achieve the goals she had willingly given up for the family.

Tom was reluctant to say that Fred and Walt had misused their knowledge of the dark ways of the courthouse. It was all grist for the philosophical mill they ran at The Brothers Three, a disreputable neon sewer up Court Street that they had frequented together most afternoons after work. When Fred died too young of a heart attack, Walt, a confirmed bachelor, silently but resolutely dropped Fred’s name from the masthead. He increased his hours at the “Three,” as its habitués called it, and changed no other habits. 

After Fred fled the scene, Walt became a solitary drinker, so Tom was puzzled when Walt asked him to join him at the Three one Friday afternoon in mid-December. 

“You’ve been working too hard, Tom,” said Walt. “There’s someone you ought to meet. A good lawyer. You need to see what practicing law with a good lawyer is really like. We might even sell him a bond.” 

When Tom arrived that Friday at the Three, Walt was already deep in drink and conversation with the interesting specimen/prospect. The bar fronted on the rear wall, with the usual array of quarts of brown bourbons and Scotch, greenish gin, blue vodka, and other spirits spigotted and ready to pour. On the bar itself sat jars of inedibles—pickled eggs, pigs’ feet, and garlic pickles of grayish hue. In the middle of the room were a few forlorn Formica-topped tables, and on the sides darkly-upholstered booths, the leather seats leaking poisonous fibers from incipient crevasses. In a corner booth sat Walt in his threadbare but serviceable Harris-tweed sport coat and horn-rimmed specs. On the table lay a scattered assortment of Walt’s Manhattan glasses, peanut shells, and the visitor’s beer steins. Across from Walt, sat a handsome, slightly paunchy lawyer, glistening black hair brushed straight back from a high forehead, a red and blue repp necktie accenting his sharp pinstripe navy blue three-piece suit, much in need of dry cleaning, and scuffed, dirty Bass Weejuns. He ushered Tom a space next to him on the banquette.

This was Paul Martino, a barrister of some repute with a catch-as-catch-can practice. Tom had noticed that Paul occasionally made the inside pages of the local papers. He had a penchant for the notorious. Tom recalled that Paul had used his legal acumen to get a local lady-of-the-night off a prostitution charge. When the undercover cop posing as a john solicited the girl’s services and arrested her for prostitution, she retained the services of the Law Offices of Paul Martino, as had many of her sisters before. When the case came to trial, the cop forthrightly and truthfully testified that the enterprising miss had asked him if he wanted a “three-way.” A local jury was sure to know that Cincinnati chili is served five ways—plain, with spaghetti, with spaghetti and cheese, with all that and beans, and finally, all topped with chopped onions. Paul created reasonable doubt by getting the cop to admit that she might well have been inviting him to share a late-night snack at a nearby Cincinnati chili parlor. The jury bought the theory and the girl walked. 

Tom was not surprised to see that Martino was down at heel and handling some rough-and-tumble civil litigation, as such celebrated matters as the Cincinnati Chili case are not only not especially profitable, but also rare. This time Paul was moving for a temporary restraining order in a civil suit and so would need a bond to secure any order he obtained. As Paul told his story, Tom sensed that the stars were not in perfect alignment. Paul’s client was a working man, an enterprising fellow who labored for a major tree-trimming service. The client had his own black-market tree-trimming business, shunting what business he could from his national employer to his own local concern, run under the euphonious name, Van the Tree Man. 

Van’s plans for the spring cutting season centered on upgrading his rolling stock. Needing cash to make the down payment on a truck more reliable than the 1950s Dodge he was driving, Van had sold the Dodge to George Childress, a small-time contractor who remodeled kitchens, bathrooms, and anything else he could put a claw hammer and crowbar to in the poorer suburbs. Childress was an African American who would later make his fortune fronting for larger concerns on minority set-aside projects. Childress died a gentleman farmer years later on a sprawling, hilly spread south of Georgetown, Ohio. There he raised prize show cattle—fat, glossy, curried-and-combed Black Angus and Scottish Belted Galloways. At the time of our story, however, the playing field was all too level, and Childress would pick up anything that was, as Shakespeare said, neither too hot nor too heavy to carry away. Like many small contractors, he was perpetually short of cash, using funds from one job to pay off overdue obligations on jobs two or three back. 

As Paul explained in detail, Van was a bluff country boy from the Eastern Kentucky hills, not nearly so sophisticated as City Boy George. Van the Tree Man had foolishly exchanged a perfectly good title to his truck for a perfectly bad check from Childress Construction. George had the truck, and title to it. Van had neither truck nor any money to show for his pains. With motor vehicles in our state, title is everything. Van wanted no further part of business with Childress. He just wanted his truck back. 

~

Laura and Tom liked to talk at the dinner table, linger there if the kids were quiet, or come back if the kids were fractious and needed bedding down. It was a chance for Laura to instruct Tom in the finer points of the law. That night Van the Tree Man was the subject matter. As Laura explained to Tom, unwinding the truck “sale” would be a major undertaking, involving suit, for George was not about to simply surrender the title. Lawsuits can take a long time. Van could not afford to be off the black-market tree-trimming business for two or more years.

Problems. Yet another: George was unreachable. His office had neither answering machine nor occupant. Correspondence elicited no response. It looked to be a bleak Christmas indeed for Van the Tree Man. But as Tom related to Laura, Paul had a plan to short-circuit the system. As MacArthur had promised that the boys would be home from Korea by Christmas 1950, Paul stated flatly that the truck would be back under Van the Tree Man’s Christmas tree, figuratively speaking. Paul would seek a temporary restraining order to force Childress to give the truck back immediately. 

Laura noticed a sizable flaw in Paul’s plan. As she explained to Tom, a TRO is a time-honored procedure, designed to maintain the status quo by order of court on an emergency basis, without taking testimony or receiving other evidence. Even Tom understood “status quo”: George Childress had the truck. Without a trial or full-fledged hearing, no reasonable judge would enter an order unscrambling the sales contract into which Van the Tree Man had freely, if not brightly, entered. 

Laura also wondered how The Walt Blake Agency would find Martino the bond needed to secure the TRO. Getting the bond would not be easy. Van would not have a strong balance sheet. However, as Laura reminded him, Tom had been working at the Agency long enough to know that things there did not always go by the book. He knew that Martino and Uncle Walt had ways into the Courthouse other than the front door. Genial Uncle Walt had promised that the bond would be forthcoming. 

A few days later, Tom saw Martino hustling out of Walt’s musty office, a sheaf of creased and rumpled papers under his arm. Vaulting down the stairs, Paul headed for the courthouse. Tom stuck his head into Walt’s office, files piled on every flat surface. That day, like all days, the aroma of cooking bacon and stale grease from the deep fryer wafted up through the porous floor from the B/G below. 

Walt told him the chase was on. Paul was off to file for his TRO against Childress Construction and George Childress personally. By a stroke of good fortune, the strait-laced, not overly receptive jurist who was that month’s equity judge was off to Florida for the holidays. Coming off the bench on to the bench was veteran Judge Eugene “Clean Gene” Weskamper, a brawny former footballer who had played pulling guard on the star-laden high school teams on which Walt himself had been a plucky, quick, if undersized, halfback. Had it not been for beefy Weskamper, Walt Blake might well have spent his adult life in a wheelchair. 

“I would love to see how Weskamper got this assignment,” Laura said sarcastically to Tom that night. “Does Walt have an open line to Clean Gene’s office?” She had long sensed that Uncle Walt’s perfunctory attendance at church on Easter and some Christmases was not enough to earn the divine intervention by which so many of Walt’s clients drew Weskamper as their judge. 

Business was slow. There was snow and more snow and then a hard freeze the week before Christmas. Tom accompanied Walt to The Three for a slight libation that Monday. The day of days was the following Sunday. As the two Blakes silently sipped their drinks, downcast counselor Martino entered, somberly kicking slush and snow off his sodden Weejuns. Things were not going well. Van the Tree Man was turning ugly. While Van’s meager retainer had long since been exhausted, this didn’t keep Van from querulously demanding results. 

When Paul had ticked off all he was doing to run Childress to ground, Van had testily told him, “Paul, you just forgot one thing.” 

“What?” 

“He’s got my truck.” 

Van could be marginally good humored, but Paul could barely stomach the irate phone calls he was getting at odd hours from Van’s hard-bitten, humorless, more than a little bit country wife. Paul had not reckoned on one other crucial item: He still couldn’t find Childress. This was a shame, for, to Tom’s surprise, Clean Gene Weskamper had granted Paul’s TRO prohibiting further transfer of the truck. 

 Laura was not so surprised. In those days many TROs were granted ex parte, that is, with only one side, the party asking for the order, appearing before the court. The lawyer’s custom then was to either neglect to inform the other party at all of this application or have his secretary call opposing counsel fifteen minutes after he had hot-footed out the door, relating that the boss was on his way to the courthouse. Of course, such quasi-unethical customs no longer obtain in our perfect world, 

Like many judges then and now, Weskamper had come up through the system, first serving as a prosecutor and then moving on to the bench when there was an opening. These judges were adept at criminal practice, but as former prosecutors, they found civil practice like this foreign, and paid little attention to it, or did it badly. Martino knew that while he could not get even the pliant Weskamper to order return of the truck on the facts before him, he could easily convince the old prosecutor, who knew a criminal even before he saw him, that sneaky Childress could well sell the truck and abscond with the proceeds. And so, he would need an interim order banning sale of the truck by Childress. And this, on the basis of no testimony, other evidence whatsoever, and preferably without hearing from Childress or his counsel. As Laura remarked, “If Weskamper believes that, he probably believes in Santa Claus too.” 

But who did know where the truck might be? How could Martino get George Childress’s attention? Paul had one last arrow in his quiver. He knew that Weskamper loved to have impromptu hearings, and Paul intended to schedule one, ordering Childress to appear with the title of the truck the following morning to demonstrate that the status was still quo. If he didn’t show, and he wouldn’t, gullible Weskamper would almost certainly find Childress in contempt and issue a bench warrant for his arrest. If Paul could find him, he could start to turn the screws by serving the bench warrant, providing for his immediate arrest.

Laura had heard enough. “Tom, these guys are playing with a marked deck. No judge anywhere would find a litigant in contempt on such a trumped-up charge. Who are these people?”

Wednesday about eleven, Martino appeared in the agency office. Could he use the phone? The pipes had burst at his place overnight, and his office was subzero. He had just been to see the initially-miffed Duke Carver, Childress’s attorney, who wouldn’t help him find George, but somehow knew about the suit papers. Duke did let it slip that George might be temporarily holed up at the shop of a suburban electrician with whom he sometimes worked—Junior Miracle. When Tom registered disbelief in the existence of such a person, Paul observed laconically that you couldn’t make up names like that. At any rate, Paul was serving papers, he hoped, on Childress and Miracle. 

Childress had not shown up at court, and Weskamper was now more than ready to jail Childress for contempt, and his henchman Miracle for good measure. Paul was trying to reach the sheriff’s deputy who had the papers and tip him off about Miracle Electronics. He asked Tom to call Miracle’s shop and ask for George Childress. Paul was delicate about it, because he didn’t want to have to be a witness himself. Against his better judgment, Tom called. 

“Hello? Miracle ’Lectric, Junior speakin’.” 

“May I speak to George Childress?” 

“Fuck you.” Click. 

“Paul, he’s there.” 

With that, Paul phoned the sheriff. After the deputy’s initial lament over the Christmas carolers lilting in the background that they couldn’t find Childress and Miracle anywhere and Paul’s explaining very patiently just where Miracle Electronics was and who was there, he heard a final slurp of coffee, and the enlightened deputy was on the case. That afternoon at the Three, Uncle Walt gave Tom a progress report. Childress was in jail, with a hearing scheduled for Friday morning, December 23, before Weskamper. What about the not so aptly named Junior Miracle? The sheriff’s department was only willing to do so much, the deadpanned deputy had explained. Black Childress could spend a couple of nights in jail, but white Junior was properly released on his own recognizance. 

Why wait until Friday? Tom wanted to know. Walt explained. On Thursday, Paul would let Duke Carver know that if Childress didn’t produce the truck keys and title at the Friday morning hearing, he would spend Christmas weekend in the County Jail, and maybe even New Year’s Eve and Day. Childress liked the good life. He would see no merit in spending his holidays with the sheriff. 

“So,” said Laura that night after dinner. “We’ve got a racist sheriff’s department and a judge willing to extort the truck title from Childress in exchange for letting him out of jail on a very questionable contempt charge. Uncle Walt and his pals are playing fast and loose.”

Tom agreed that this was rough justice. Wanting to see it played out, he determined to attend the hearing in Weskamper’s room Friday at eleven. Late as always, he got there about quarter past, running down the echoing marble hallways of the empty courthouse. This close to the holiday the wheels of justice had ground to a halt, except in Clean Gene’s room. 

The cavernous room with twenty-five-foot ceilings contained only the Tree Man v. Childress players. He could see Weskamper through the open door of his office, judiciously reading the sports pages, spit-polished brogans up on his desk. His bailiff was slowly searching the drawers of his desk, one after the other, looking for some untold but assuredly essential article, not finding it and periodically slamming the offending drawer shut. The constable was quietly doing her nails, resolutely ignoring the citizens present. Childress’s counsel, Carver, was planted at one attorney desk, Martino at the other. Carver had just delivered the punch line of a private joke that had Martino guffawing like a hysterical hyena. 

Perched nervously in the back row was the only civilian spectator besides Tom. She was a magnificent physical specimen, apparently in her early twenties, her pert bottom on the edge of one of the hideously uncomfortable pews that served as seating for taxpayers unfortunate enough to need the justice system. Below a gracefully oval face with bright brown eyes and full lips, her ample breasts blossomed like Christmas roses straining against the sheer crimson blouse covering but not hiding them. Her miniskirt was sure to give her pneumonia in such weather, despite a very tight three-quarter-length leather jacket, flared open at the top, that did nothing to hide long slender legs below. What was a looker like this doing here instead of at the bar at the local casino? 

Tom realized, as the girl nervously twirled a set of keys around her lacquered purple and gold nails that she was delivering the keys to Childress for turnover. A few minutes passed. A pudgy Sheriff’s deputy emerged from a door in the back wall. Hobbling after him in shackles was Childress. To Tom’s surprise, Childress was a wizened little man with sparse receding hair, graying at the temples, probably in his mid-sixties. With a cry of pain, the girl jumped up and clattered on her spike heels to console him. It being Christmas week, the Deputy did little to cool the tropical reunion. 

The tawdry drama played out. After Weskamper took the bench and called the case, the keys, like a relay race baton, passed from the girl to Childress, to Duke, to the court’s bailiff, to Paul. With that, Weskamper sonorously told Mr. Childress that he was purged of contempt. Eyeing the girl, he wished him a very Merry Christmas. The charming young lady—what did you say her name was, Duke?—could wait for Mr. Childress in the lobby of the Courthouse. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or so for Mr. Childress’s release papers to be processed. 

Tom walked out with Martino and Carver, who were off to the Three to discuss finer points of practice over holiday lunch. Carver gave Paul the truck title, told Paul where the truck was located and promised that Van would be greeted with no more than small arms fire when he went to retrieve it—during daylight hours, of course. As Tom peeled off to get back to the Agency, he heard the two barristers chuckling about Childress’s ability to attract good-looking women. Duke opined that he had never seen him with other than a prime specimen on his arm. The lawyers agreed that this was an admirable aspect of Childress’s character. 

That afternoon, Tom and Uncle Walt held a postmortem on the year at The Three before Tom went home to Laura and the kids and Walt repaired to his solitary apartment at a downtown high-rise condominium.

 Tom: “I never thought it would work out this way. How—”

 Walt: “Creative lawyering, Tommy. Martino knows his way around the block. It didn’t surprise me a bit.” 

Tom had a more proprietary question: ”How did Van the Tree Man come up with financials strong enough for us to approve the bond?”

 Uncle Walt shook his head, looked incredibly apologetic, and with a hint of a sly smile, confessed, “Tom, can you believe it, I promised Gene that I would look over the financials and walk over to the courthouse to sign the bond book if everything was in shape. I was so busy with Christmas preparations that I never got around to it. Gene must have figured everything had worked out …” 

~

Tom knows that Walt expected more approval of his memory lapse and Paul’s grand strategy than Tom gave him. Local-college grad Walt took great pride in being sharper than most of us, Ivy League lawyers like Laura included. Tom admits that this is when he decided law school was not for him and began to develop the disenchantment that led him to abandon both the insurance business and Cincinnati, the home of his forefathers. Then too, when Tom reported Walt’s memory lapse to Laura, she declared with unwonted vehemence that she was spending her last Christmas in Cincinnati and would not speak to Walt at family Christmas dinner. It was and she didn’t. 

Laura and Tom are happy out west. Santa Fe. Tom is house-husbanding and Laura is back practicing law. Somewhere it says that we are a nation of laws and not of men. Laura says that this just isn’t true.

Hard Candy

In the manuscript a middle-aged woman (single, childless)
looks after her crotchety father. He has shot someone,
but not to death, or maybe he took the buckshot to the gut.
Everything’s so Southern gothic: all the thriving plants
and humid swelter, old wooden houses with dilapidated steps

leading up to porches complete with creaking swings
and buckled plank floors that cover cool, dank spaces
where stray dogs and feral animals—opossums, say,
or raccoons—shelter from the heat or hide out overnight.
Fact is, it’s been decades, so I can’t recall the plot. What I read

was a work in progress, first third of a first draft, whose writer,
a close friend—a middle-aged woman (divorced, childless,
her parents deceased)—mailed it to me for critique. It was
good! I cared about the woman and her father and what
adventures might ensue, and the drama was dark

with humor, my favorite blend. But a doctor with a minor part
had paragraphs of detail and dialogue, a long scene better
clipped to exposition or dispensed with altogether.
Meanwhile, the father lacked dimension and description;
an ornery old cuss, he came across as plot device, not

major character. I made my critical notation and mailed
the manuscript back to my good friend. She had
the softest hands I’d ever touched, long legs, a coltish
stride, a guffaw for a laugh. We laughed a lot. I petsat
for her gray tabby tomcat—read Blood Meridian aloud,

beginning to end, while I lay back on her couch and Buster
purred and kneaded biscuits on my chest. She taped BandAids
over her nipples every day—she told me, didn’t show me.
She liked to stoke my lust. One day I climbed her ladder
to clean her gutters. Dirtied the cuffs of my bomber jacket

as I scooped mounds of leaves and cool, wet muck
and flung them to the ground. We went most everywhere
together. I always drove. When “Kashmir” came on the radio,
she cranked up the volume and grinded on the bucket seat,
that lucky thing. I wished it were me. Once at a party, she

sat wriggling in my lap and regaled my guests while I
thought about the live wires of her bare thighs touching
my own skin. She strung along three men I never met.
Nothing wrong with that. When our friend cheated
on his marriage and described the lesson he’d learned

about performing oral sex, we felt sorry for his wife—
not because he’d strayed, but because for thirty years
she’d suffered inept cunnilingus. How we laughed after.
We laughed and laughed. She cried when I confessed
my love for her. She loved me too, but not like that. Still,

I fantasized about laying her down in her sunny bedroom
and slowly peeling off the BandAids, swirling her nipples
like hard candy on my tongue, stroking her breasts
and belly with my face as I made my way down between
those long legs and proving I knew what to do. Did you see

what I did there? I gave each character the proper amount
of detail according to the size of their roles. That’s all I wanted
her to do when she revised her novel. When I fell in love
with someone else, my friend wept bitterly that I’d turned
away and everything was suddenly Melanie Melanie Melanie.

When I brought up her three paramours, she had to concede
hypocrisy. Anyway, I mailed back her manuscript with a long letter:
mostly praise, a lone suggestion for revision. If she ever finished
her novel, she never published it. I never heard from her again.
She closed the book on us, ended with a cliffhanger.

O is for Orangutan, C is for Cleopatra

In the span of fifty-five years, Grandma Clou had four or five husbands. Stories were swapped like trading cards. The plumber she married at sixteen; he was thirty-two. Then there was the second cousin she met at a BBQ. They eloped in the next state over when she found out she was pregnant. The baby never made it to term, something doctors would later attribute to genetic abnormalities. My grandfather was the most normal, which is probably why she stuck around long enough to give him two daughters. The last one we called Grandpa Charlie even though no one was ever sure if they got around to marrying.

Some she didn’t divorce. She just remarried without bothering, my Aunt Nikki confided to me. Nikki had ten years to my thirteen and wore low-cut jeans and glittery eyeshadow. She bought lacey thongs at Victoria’s Secret and promised to buy me my first when mom finally stopped buying the floral cotton multi-packs. Nikki dated a guy named Steve who drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse and once let me have a sip of his beer. I wanted to ask Nikki what Grandma Clou’s marital ambiguity made us, but I knew enough Shakespeare by then to answer my own question.

Grandma Clou lived in a foreign land where her identity as a serial bigamist was overshadowed by crumbling Dodge Darts, sun-bleached lawn gnomes, and boxes of something called Melba toast. At the Magnolia Retreat retirement home, it wasn’t out of the question to see a chihuahua clad in a Hawaiian t-shirt drag the newspaper into an apartment that exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke every time the door opened. I always felt like I was going on an expedition when I set foot on the cracked cement sidewalk and caught my first whiff of muscle rub and mothballs.

We made a game of each afternoon, Nikki and I, sitting on the red shag carpet of Grandma Clou’s apartment, flipping through thirty-year-old Encyclopedia Britannicas and stopping when we came to an entry that bore a resemblance to Grandma Clou as she sat hunched over in her upholstered rocking chair, breasts blending into her stomach and thighs. 

Nikki raised an eyebrow at me one Friday afternoon and pointed to a picture of an obese orangutan. Its torso was a boob shelf, its belly button barely visible as gravity dragged its stomach to the ground. Apparently, food was plentiful where it lived. Grandma Clou made do with the Melba toast and bowls of chicken and rice soup, but the effect was still the same. 

“At least she isn’t as hairy,” I whispered, flipping through the V volume. Vasectomy…Venice...Vulture.

“How do you know that?” Nikki asked thumbing through the O volume. Osteoporosis…Otis Redding…Ovum.

We both looked at Grandma Clou. Her rocking chair was a log upended on the jungle floor. She rocked back and forth, her balance perfect, and the log followed her movement without rebellion. Wiry hairs sprouted across her leathery skin. Like a fertile grassland, they trembled in the breeze she generated as she pitched herself forward and let the log take her back. She surveyed the field, not looking for threats so much as a stimulus great enough to tempt her from the log. A squelch broke the silence. Grandma Clou looked down toward her stomach. Bingo.

“Get your shoes on, girls,” she said, grunting her way out of the rocking chair.

We looked down at our feet, my jelly sandals, and Nikki’s skate shoes. We never took our shoes off at Grandma Clou’s owing to the high pile of her shag carpet and the fear of what we might find if the dust between fibers shifted enough to let us see.

Grandma Clou insisted she walk to the lunch counter two blocks away. Nikki groaned. Grandma Clou had a perfectly good wheelchair that a social worker had brought but refused to use it, even though I once saw a man with cerebral palsy beat her across a crosswalk. We each took a side and steered her between rusting lime-green lawn chairs and piles of dog poop. One of her neighbors, a man with a wisp of white hair underneath a brown-felt fisherman’s hat, sat on his porch, naked from the waist up. 

“What’s cookin’, Harry?” Grandma Clou shifted her weight to the right, an attempt at coquettishness that had Nikki pretending to retch on the grass.

He nodded. “Clou. Haven’t seen you around much.”

“You could see a lot more of me if you put on a shirt and joined us for lunch.”

Nikki and I groaned. The last thing we wanted to do was chaperon. 

But we needn’t have worried. Harry shook his head. “Already ate.”

“Next time then,” Grandma Clou said, as we dragged her away from Harry and his saggy chest. “I’m wearing him down,” Grandma Clou said as we helped her over a tree root that had erupted through the concrete sidewalk.

I kept my head down, afraid she’d see the incredulity written on my face. I studied her white orthopedic shoes and her brown polyester pants that hovered over the Velcro straps. Every time she lifted her leg, the hem of her pants rose just enough that I could see her sparse leg hairs, fully grown out, the skin underneath dry and cracked. She would be wearing Harry down until doomsday.

“Grandma, I don’t think Harry—”

Grandma Clou cut Nikki off. “Humph. Harry doesn’t know what he wants. Good thing he’s got me to show him.”

“Are you and Grandpa Charlie even divorced yet?”

I understood Nikki’s concern. A few months ago, we’d seen Grandpa Charlie slinking out of Grandma Clou’s apartment. He blushed when he asked us how we were doing and how school was. Nikki told him she’d graduated five years ago and informed him that his fly was undone.  Grandpa Charlie had said “Well, it was nice seeing you girls,” and hurried into his pickup truck, fumbling with the zipper on his jeans.

Grandma Clou waved Nikki’s question aside. “Who cares at my age?”

Nikki opened her mouth to protest, but Grandma Clou continued. “It’s just details, Nikki. No skin off anyone’s nose if a seventy-year-old lady needs more than one man to clean her clock. Amount of my life I’ve spent worrying about what people say is proper, what’s right and wrong. Do you know I once had a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, or Phillips, something like that—head of the PTA, led the women’s bible study, you know the type—tell me I was bringing down the tone of the neighborhood when your mother’s dad and I fought the front lawn? We didn’t even throw anything at each other; it was just words. You should have seen the look on her face when I brought home Ray, the one after your grandpa. Her bottom lip stuck out like a dead fish.” 

Grandma Clou’s chuckling caused a phlegmy coughing fit, and I patted her on the back, afraid to pound and knock her off her orthopedics. She spit into a stained handkerchief that she stuffed back into her shirt pocket. The damp handkerchief was a bulge where her breasts probably hung forty years ago. 

“Men are like ice cream flavors,” Grandma Clou said, voice hoarse, “and damned if I don’t try each one before I die.” She pushed open the restaurant door with more force than I would have expected, mumbling something that sounded like “Mint chocolate chip…butter pecan…”

The three of us balanced on the chrome stools. Grandma Clou’s cheeks engulfed the stool so entirely there wasn’t a glint of chrome to be seen. Nikki ordered a chicken salad and diet coke. I ordered a half salad, soup, and chocolate milk because mom wouldn’t let me drink diet coke, even though Nikki always gave me a can when I was at her apartment. A frothy aspartame treat that would probably give me brain cancer one day, but it seemed too grown a treat to refuse. Grandma Clou ordered a double cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. She was supposed to be watching her cholesterol, but it was like she was in a private contest with herself, seeing how high she could get her LDL before her chest seized. I watched her down the entire meal, burger grease pooling in the space between her thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips and muffled a burp with the crook of her arm. I was caught between disgust and wonderment, disgust finally winning out when the aroma of her digestion drifted over to me.  

She flagged down the waiter and he brought our bill. Grandma Clou pulled two warm twenties out of her back pocket. When the waiter reached for them, she let her fingertips linger over his hand until his face turned red, and he looked to us for help. Neither of us tried to stop her. We had full bellies and had spent the entire afternoon attempting to stem Grandma Clou’s libido. He was on his own.

When he brought back change, Grandma Clou smiled. “Keep the change, honey.” She had a speck of lettuce between her teeth and wobbled as she dismounted the stool. The waiter looked down at the $1.35 and frowned. 

When we got back to Grandma Clou’s apartment, Nikki’s boyfriend was parked on the street, leaning against the hood of his Eclipse. “It’s past two,” he said, staring at Nikki.

Nikki hurried over to him, leaving me to balance Grandma Clou as the saturated fats hit her brain. Raised voices drifted over from the Eclipse and Nikki’s boyfriend tried to grab her arm. 

Grandma Clou bit her bottom lip. “Oh girl,” she said, and I knew she didn’t mean me.“You don’t have to go, Nikki,” she said when Nikki finally extricated herself and came to tell us goodbye.

I’m not sure Nikki heard her, because she was already halfway to the car. Her boyfriend gave Grandma Clou a suspicious look before peeling away from the curb. 

Grandma Clou was slower as we navigated the cracked concrete path. Harry, still sitting in his lawn chair and cradling a bottle of beer between his legs, looked up when we passed, but Grandma Clou didn’t notice. She trudged beside me until we were in her apartment, and she was once again ensconced in her recliner.   

“Gerald was my first husband,” she said when I brought her a glass of water and an aspirin. The orthopedics helped her balance, but they didn’t stop the gout flare-ups.

I sat down on the carpet, feeling exposed without Nikki there to act as a buffer. 

“Now I know what everyone says, but I was eighteen, not sixteen when we got married in the courthouse. He was older than me, but he had a good job and had managed to avoid the draft, which was more than could be said for all the boys my age who had signed up to be killed on some desert island in the middle of God-knows-where. It seemed a good idea at the time; I even convinced myself I loved him. But after the war, when his government contracts ended, he changed. One morning he came home reeking of beer and urine. When I asked him where he’d been all night, he grabbed me by the shoulders and started to shake me. He said he’d shake me until I stopped nagging and if that didn’t work, he’d find another way. I didn’t wait around to find out what that way would be. I took the train back to my folks. When he sobered up and came around, I was sitting on the porch with Dad’s shotgun across my lap. I’d rather kill someone than let them treat me like that.”

Grandma Clou downed the rest of her water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She began rocking with more speed than before. Soon, she was generating a breeze that was not unwelcome in the warm apartment. I regarded her sagging middle, the dimples in her knees visible through the thin fabric of her pants. I could see the little hairs on her legs again, raised static-straight from her cracked skin. The orangutan from earlier was still there in the crease between her eyebrows and the way her breasts, stomach, and thighs seamlessly blended into each other.

But there was something else there, just under the surface, competing with the orangutan, and sometimes breaking through when Grandma Clou paused in her weather generation. At that moment, I couldn’t put my finger on it, so it remained as insubstantial as the breeze mingled with the scent of Grandma Clou’s lunch. But on a later Friday afternoon, sitting by myself on her floor since Nikki’s visits had become a relic of the past, I found it.

In the C volume under Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, I read about a woman who was much like Grandma Clou. Driven and unapologetic. Uncompromising, though callous. Always approaching every situation with hard-learned tenacity. A picture of a sculpture accompanying the article showed a woman with large eyes, nose, and brows. I studied the marble likeness searching for a resemblance to the woman rocking back and forth in front of me. Maybe it was there, in the set of her lips, in the way the right side was fractionally higher than the left, appraising.

Letter from the Editor

Dear reader,

Our inaugural issue, “The Journey,” sought to illuminate our path as we embarked on a new chapter of The Headlight Review. We started out as a class project, and after many years of groundwork and a much-needed rebranding, we published our first issue in December of 2022. Subsequently, much of our staff graduated or moved on, and The Headlight Review was left in new hands. We began the journey all over again, but this time the destination, though obscured by quite a few roadblocks, was in sight.

As I’ve wrapped up my first issue with The Headlight Review, I am feeling mostly gratitude. I would like to thank our staff for their work on this issue and our faculty advisors, Andrew Plattner and Kurt Milberger, for their guidance. But most of all I would like to thank our writers, who have stuck with us through our staff changes, publication delays, and many, many email exchanges. To our writers, I am so grateful for your trust in us to handle your stories with care and for your faith in our up-and-coming publication. I would also like to thank the writers whose pieces were not chosen for this issue. As a writer, I know all too well how difficult it is to surrender your work to the publishing industry, which can be cruel much more often than it is rewarding. Thank you for considering us to publish your work. 

I am so proud to present our new issue, the culmination of six months of hard work and so many talented writers. We have some wonderful pieces in this issue, crafted by writers from all over the world. While Volume I, Issue I highlighted our journey, Volume I, Issue II celebrates the destination itself, that moment when you round that last corner and put your car in park. When you can finally let out that breath you’ve been holding for the duration of the drive because, finally, you’re here. To our readers, I hope you find something you love at this spot where we’ve completed our ride and that you’ll consider joining us on our next expedition.

Sincerely,

Brittany Files, Managing Editor

Editor’s Note

This inaugural issue comes a full five years after The Headlight Review was first created in 2017 by Dr. Loverde-Dropp and her students in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing program at Kennesaw State University. The students opted for a hands-on approach to learning the ins and outs of literary publishing rather than navigating a traditional seminar-style course. Since then, the hard work that many staff members, directors, and others involved have contributed towards reaching the goals of uplifting emerging artists, establishing an internationally recognized literary journal, and pursuing knowledge outside of the constraints of a classroom setting have paid off. In those five years, THR editors, KSU community members, readers, and contributors around the world have traversed what, for many of us, felt like lightyears—through political and social turmoil in our homes and communities; through viruses that invaded our lives and took the lives of many; and through a rapidly changing publishing landscape that continues to ask us to navigate the uncertainty that comes with new technology. We as artists and consumers of art have often been left grappling with questions about the future of our industry and what we should do next.

Though the journey has often felt as if there are monsters waiting around every turn, potentially threatening our very life or livelihood, the light that illuminates the journey for manyof us—those of us for whom art is not a choice, but a reflex much like breathing—has continued to guide us on this path, becoming brighter with each turn, as it brings us closer to each other. By continuing to create and share with each other, we have combined our light to forge a beacon that leads us back to one another, as well as back to the tools that we may have at one point thought we didn’t have the strength to use.

Just as each of us has a journey we must follow, we also have a collective journey as artists, writers, and human beings that requires us to turn to each other again and again. Just as one may interpret upon viewing Issue One’s cover art, titled, “Journey,” by acrylic painter Marvin Hollman, we may find ourselves tossed about in the currents that push us, unconscious to the many obstacles and rewards that lie ahead, struggling to remember the parts of the past that can sustain us and motivate us to action, rather than tell us lies about ourselves and hold us back—much like that which these lines from “Map of Matter” by featured poet Joanna Sitt remind us of: “Those were not the days and I didn’t live / through them as much as I slewed / across the surface of their rotten skin / because the decayed hand of the past reaches / for everyone not one finger of truth.”

Luckily, we’re not riding this wave alone, and our community of artists, writers, and readers has taught us that as submissions from around the world continue to draw us into conversation, reflection, and inspiration. For this issue, we received 120 fiction stories, 273 poems, 39 creative nonfiction stories, and 23 art pieces from an amazing list of creatives and storytellers. THR would like to thank everyone who considered our journal for publication, as well as our amazing group of contributors who unveiled themselves and asked us to come along on their journey. We would also like to thank Chioma Urama (our featured interviewee) forspeaking with us about her poetry collection, A Body of Water, her process as a writer, and why we must hold tight to the ties that bond us together, throughout this great journey.

Special thanks to our amazing editorial team who worked tirelessly to finish this issue and to ensure the journal’s success in so many ways this past year. We couldn’t have done this without all of you and your contributions are what make The Headlight Review such a joy to continue creating.

We hope you all enjoy the issue as much as we enjoyed curating it. Happy reading!

Warmly,

Sam Casto and Tyra Douyon
Co-Editorial Directors

decant desperation

there are no words for
a mother in mourning
her cries are
swans’ calls
seeking swift shelter
no bonfire can warm her
she floats,
aimlessly
as wayward winds transpire
to annex all that is stainless,
and wide-eyed
and safe
we sully each strand of sureness
delegating those who wish
to wield walls
of lax laws
as paragons of purview
whilst those who hold tender
the prospects of purpose
the benign benefactors
vying for vicious venom
of the ravenous rabble
are swayed into
submission
as if one could
defeat despair
why must we wield wounds
as weapons?

The Boys of Kenneth Street

We played mumbletypeg with jackknives.
We stole Playboys from the first 7/11.
We played corkball and kickball
and football in the street. Cars
interrupting a game were given a
raspberry. We weren’t really hoodlums—
we were too timorous—but we liked
the new rock music and, given the chance,
we snarled like Mick Jagger. Kenneth
Street was base and our peregrinations
took us to the drugstore or the woods.
We strutted and talked about girls as if
we knew the secret thing. Our world
spun only one way. The 60s passed and
we moved around more. The connection
remained. I still count on these boys,
who taught me nascent masculinity,
and what the world was like beyond our
neighborhood. Those times we ran
together, so long ago now, took place in
an America that is gone. Gone too
our innocence. And the need, which burned in
us like holy fire, to be more than what we were.

EXCEPT YOU

What gets archived
a song in November
a psalm in the fields
chants around a fire?

Wearing their good shoes
huddled up the earth is heated
and scraped off the next morning.

Nobody will remember
except you
who swept the floor
and kept love.

Randy’s Class

14 . . . 33 . . . 22 . . . 14 . . . 33 . . . 22 . . .

I recite the combination of my new lock as I walk from the Y locker room to the spin studio, picking my way between treadmills and weight machines. I must burn these numbers into my brain. My street clothes, car keys, phone, and wallet are locked away and I can’t get them back if I forget the number.

I’m surprised how crowded the gym is at 5:30 a.m. Women in baseball caps, hair gathered in ponytails, and men in gym shorts and t-shirts stride on treadmills as if they really are going somewhere. A woman wearing a weight vest walks through the gym carrying large weight plates in each hand. A blocky man on the stair-climber doggedly ascends a never-ending mountain. A gray-haired grandmother patiently cycles. A young girl does crunches and leg lifts under the tutelage of whatever speaks in her ear pods. A twenty-something ex-football player curls dumbbells I’d need two hands to pick up. It’s a zoo, but it’s also church. All of them are serious. I’m going to be serious, too, because aging and an office job has made my muscles atrophy, ballooned my belly fat. The mitochondria in my cells are shuttered factories. Exercise is will be my self-imposed intervention.

When I open the door to the spin studio, it’s as if I’m entering a night club. The room is a square with bikes bolted to the floor in concentric semicircles facing the instructor’s bike like disciples around a guru or tables around a stripper’s stage. The lights are dimmed, with windows behind the back row of bikes allowing some additional light from the gym proper. Fans suspended from the ceiling blow air that eddies in mini weather patterns. Class hasn’t started but everyone’s already cycling. Last time I tried to take this class, I came five minutes early but that hadn’t been early enough – all bikes were taken. Because this isn’t just any spin class. This is Randy’s class. Today I get lucky. There’s one bike left in the middle row. I claim it quickly.

I pull the knob behind the seat to adjust the height so my legs will circle smoothly through the nadir of the peddling, neither reaching nor cramped. I put my weight on the bike to steady myself as I mount the bike, and find the handlebars wobble badly as if about to fall off.

“You got the broken bike,” the guy on the bike next to me says. He’s smooth-shaven, both face and scalp, with a big chest and a friendly smile. “They’re coming to fix it this afternoon.”

I sense this is common knowledge among the regulars. And why no one had claimed this bike.

“Yeah, it’s the only one left. I think it’s just the handlebars.”

“I’d be happy to trade bikes with you.” I’m touched by his generosity – he’s protecting a newbie.

“That’s okay, I’ll be careful. Thanks.”

I start peddling. Suddenly, Randy himself is standing in front of me. The Randy, whose classes summon reverent tones when they came up in conversation. I feel an involuntary thrill.

“This bike is broken,” His expression is friendly, protective. “You got it just before they came to fix it. The handlebars won’t support you.”

Randy has brown eyes and close-cropped brown hair. He’s middle-aged, his body saying late 30s, the lines in his face saying Medicare-eligible, the truth probably somewhere in between.

“I’ll put my weight in the middle,” I promise, looking down at the handlebars as if I’m afraid he’ll take the bike away. When I look back up, Randy is gone.

I lean forward, putting my left hand where the handlebar attaches to the frame, and slowly pedal as I program the bike’s monitor. I enter my age, weight, gender. The monitor asks me to rate my general physical condition. I choose medium, the way patients lie to doctors about smoking or drinking. The menu requires me to choose a “level.” I pick one just below the 50th percentile. Once I answer all the questions, the monitor’s sensors spring to life, telling me my revolutions per minute, my heartrate, the calories I’m burning, and my color-coded performance “zone.”

Each bike’s headlight broadcasts the color of the rider’s zone. Soothing pink is the lowest zone. I pedal faster and my light changes to a smooth blue. I push the lever that increases flywheel resistance and the light changes to an energetic green. I looked at bikes around me and see two higher colors – a bright yellow, like warning signals at a railroad track, and an alarming red. At the front of the studio, Randy adjusts the PA system, then climbs on his own bike. Led Zeppelin fills the room, an aroma from Randy’s secret recipe.

“Okay, we’re on flat road.” Randy is conjuring an imaginary ride we will take together. Everyone’s pace increases in response to Randy’s voice.

“I’m brainwashing my kids,” Randy says. “I told them Led Zeppelin is the best rock band of all time.” Randy looks too old to have young kids. It must be a second marriage, I think, a new family late in life.

“Brainwashing is good,” someone calls out. Encouraged, Randy responds.

“My 11-year old and my eight-year-old – if you ask them who the lead singer is for Led Zeppelin, they can tell you.” Randy is home-schooling his children on the holy truths of rock-and-roll. We pedal in silence for a few minutes and then Randy says “Okay, let’s raise it. About 6.5.”

Years ago, before the Y had bikes with fancy monitors, imagination was the monitor and bikers would adjust resistance of the flywheel and pedaling speed based upon a subjective scale of 1 to 10 in difficulty. Randy is old-school. Monitors and zones on the new bikes are just bells and whistles. In Randy’s class, what needs measuring is something inside each rider.

“Who did this song?” Randy calls out, as a new tune begins. Randy’s playlist is legendary, one reason some of the older regulars are devoted to the class. People have told me Randy creates a new playlist every week, but it’s always from the sixties and seventies. Randy always quizzes the class on each song. This time, no one knows the answer, so Randy tells us.

“Strawberry Alarm Clock. 1967. By the way, today is Jimmy Page’s birthday. January 9. I should’ve mentioned that when Led Zeppelin was playing.”

As I pedal, I compare my color to those of the men and women around me and feel zone-shamed. I struggle to make blue but the guy beside me pedals effortlessly in green. Another pedals yellow as if it’s coasting pink, and an Asian lady is deep in ambulance red and staying there. But then I realize it doesn’t matter. Each rider is focused on his or her own path with no ill-will toward anyone. Yet something unites us all. I can’t put my finger on what it is.

“Out of the saddle. We have hills to climb,” Randy rises from his seat to pedal while standing. “Increase resistance.”

We all stand and pedal up the imaginary hill, an array of colors, an array of hills, ascending together, the colored lights of our bike monitors like a string of Christmas headlights on a fleet of starships in the dark. Suddenly, the guy beside me who’d offered to take my damaged bike jumps off his own bike and runs out of the studio. Moments later, another fellow follows behind him. I wonder what’s going on. Someone says something I can’t hear and Randy responds, “I think he wants to help.”

None of it makes sense, so I put it out of my mind and focus on riding. The others are pedaling steadily, no slackers, and I won’t be one either. We continue climbing hills together. When I cycle into the yellow zone, even though I can’t stay long, I mentally pat myself on the back. But after a bit, I see Randy looking past me through the windows in back of the studio. I twist around to look, too, continuing to pedal. From where I sit, the wall blocks any view of the right side of the gym, but through windows on the left I see people outside the studio have stopped exercising and gathered together, watching something on the ground in the area I can’t see. From looks of concern on their faces, it isn’t something they’re watching, but someone. “If you’re the praying type,” Randy says as we continue riding, “right now might be a good time to send a prayer.”

It’s unnerving to hear a comment like that in cycling glass, but now I understand. Someone in the gym has had a heart attack or some life-threatening injury. That’s why the two guys had dashed out of the studio. Someone just outside the door of this studio, fifteen feet away from me on the other side of the wall, is about to die. Time has passed since the two guys had hurried from the studio, so I assume paramedics have been called. I imagine them pounding the victim’s chest or loading a body on a gurney. I keep twisting around to look, but, because of the wall, all I can see is the crowd watching. There’s nothing I or anyone in the studio can add, so we keep pedaling. But even as he leads us up another hill, Randy, whose bike faces the windows, continues watching.

When class is over, I get off my bike and look out the window. The crowd is gone. I wipe down my bike with spray cleaner, then emerge from the dark studio into the blinding light of the gym proper. I don’t see blood on the floor or other physical evidence to corroborate trauma. I look in faces around me, but they’re all lost in the world of exercise.

I wander over to the free weights for wrist curls, then to the floor mats for yoga, but everything feels wrong. I feel I should call my wife, as if I just survived a plane crash she might have seen on TV. Finally, I accept that this unsettled emptiness I feel isn’t fixable. I give up on working out and head for the locker room.

As I turn the corner, I see riders from Randy’s class congregated outside the locker room door. Randy’s there, too. I sense they’re talking about the event, so I sidle up to listen. But when I get close enough to hear, they disperse. All I pick up is that “he” is at the hospital. I turn to Randy.

“Is he alright?”

Randy gives me the summary I’d been looking for. The bald guy who’d bolted out of the spin studio is a fireman. He performed CPR, but it hadn’t worked. The paramedics arrived and did CPR again, reviving the victim. “He was out for at least ten minutes,” Randy says, “but he was breathing when they took him away.”

“What happened? Did he fall? Did he have a heart attack?”

“I don’t know. He was a new guy. We hadn’t seen him before.” Randy nods at me, turns, and walks away.

I push through the locker room door, navigate to my locker, and sit on the hard wooden bench. I contemplate how, in a New York minute, everything can change with no color-coded warning. That sometimes the hill wins. That phoning my wife won’t change a thing. That street clothes, car keys, phone, and wallet don’t matter as much as I thought they did.

shyness can stop you

this little silver instamatic camera shoots panoramas.
fits in your pocket, if there's no chewing gum or keys in there. it’s no
picturesque paul simon kodachrome.
more like a drugstore analog fix, but in-disposable.
she's reliable—she's well-traveled—she's seen the empire state, all
over the east coast.
she's had redondo to san pedro in her sights, too.
no, she's not fancy, she doesn't have flash, yet she lets me see the
world through 5 x 6 matte, avec sloppy borders.
she's visited thousands of unique daffodil faces.
some in-focus, others blurry, caught in a distorted blizzard dream.

one face i wish she got a better look at:
a nameless piano player near the sunnyside playground. he was
magnificent: his own skyscraper, his own ocean: an eighth wonder.
no frills, no tourist traps, pure & free.
a spotlight shone on him and him only, casting every pair of
untrained eyes and ears into blackness.
i hoped for some discreet profile of his sweaty, barechested,
maestro frame, jerry lee lewis-ing, leon russell-ing his way into my
celluloid memories.
so humble yet so good—fingers and sensibility unencumbered. i wanted to
go up and ask him if he could be my sierra nevada, if he could be my
superstar.
instead, i took a hazy, distant snapclick from the steadfast
streetcorner.

shy, introverted, bashful cole just didn't have it in him.
though, i know she did.
there was a sentry blocking those palace gates.
a detached receiver in that telephone booth.
then: the most intimate question.
now: my devastation, my missed shot.
he might’ve even been flattered, chuffed, pleased at the proposition.
instant regret filled my fluttering, i didn’t catch the 10:05 bus,
conflicted, crushed, anxious thundercloud torso, now squeezed tight in the
station between my toes and my socks.
a falling, stillborn feeling.
a stomach dropping out of its highwire act.
above all, the real misfortune was felt by my pintsized photographe. her blank,
idle 35mm film only gets old, languishes, and expires.

Unarbitrary Definition for The New Concise Modern Dictionary of Synchromysticism

because · /bɪˈkɒz/ · conjunction. 1. Because the limited, dual nature of the human mind necessitates the illusion of cause and effect. 2. Because all things connected must be understood conjoined, conjoined and ever changing. 3. Because the wings of butterflies cause hurricanes. 4. Because A must equal B, & B must equal C; A must also equal C; so you were wrong, Siddhartha: to eliminate desire is to eliminate all life. 5. Because I need you like the island needs the ocean, deluded in the isolated joys of boundary. 6. Because Time is Space & Space is Time, and both constructions of the bodies (see also: celestial, solar, heavenly, physical, and divine). 7. Because we conceive of Incarnations, conceived in concepts from the moment of conception. 8. Because we ask the question, “Why?” 9. Because the Postmodern has fallen upon us; and the Continental Philosophers all were French; and the French have always had it written in their language: the answer to pourquoi? is just pourquoi. 10. Because we always need a reason. 11. Because explanations make us feel profound. 12. Because I held you, I will someday lose you. 13. Because we love, we all will suffer. 14. Because we all do suffer, we must love.

Blood Money

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything so desperate for eight dollars. Then I again, in grade school I delivered newspapers in raging snow storms at 4:30 in the morning...for the princely sum of two cents a paper.

It’s 1982 and I’m in my first quarter as a freshman at the University of Georgia located in the college town of Athens. I don’t have a work-study job yet, or any other job...so I decide to sell my blood plasma.

The Plasma Donation Center is about a mile off the UGA campus, straight down Baxter Street. I can walk there. On the way I pass high-rise dormitories like Russell Hall, the all-girls dorm called Brumby and the grocery store where I buy cheap food.

As I get further away from campus the buildings and people seem to become more run down. I don’t see many other students wandering this far away from campus. There are men, mostly older, both black and white, smoking, hanging out by a liquor store and loitering on the sidewalk in the hot Georgia morning sun. I find it interesting to see these down-on-their-luck fellows so close to the university, so close to bright young people with futures. They seem to have been abandoned as if the world packed up, left, and forgot to tell them.

It is here way off campus that I find The Plasma Center, a small one-story building with the blinds down on the windows and a glass front door. It’s nondescript looking — as if it’s trying to hide in plain sight. I peer in the glass door, squinting until my eyes adjust from the bright morning sun. I see a young woman in a nurse’s uniform sitting at the front desk. She looks nice enough, but sort of out of place in this part of town. I’ve never given blood before in my life and I’m kind of worried. Will I be okay after they’ve taken my plasma out? How do they get the plasma out of my blood? Will it take so long that I’ll miss my 11:30 AM art history class? I’ve heard that people who give blood sometimes get a cookie, maybe even orange juice. Will I get a cookie too? My stomach rumbles. The generic crackers and banana I had for breakfast a few hours ago are already digested. I need more money to buy food because I’m always hungry.

I’ve been at the University of Georgia for a couple of weeks and have used up the one hundred-sixty-five dollars I brought with me for books, essentials, and my Greyhound bus ticket to get here. Now that I’m eighteen, and according to my parents an adult, I’m paying for everything, including college. Luckily I’ve picked a college in the south. It’s a lot cheaper down here than in Massachusetts where I grew up. My dad always reminds me he put himself through college, saying it made him a better person. He also claims our family is poor, so he can’t give me or my two sisters a red cent towards college. My parents do send a care package of food to me my first week here. After noticing cobwebs in a box of spaghetti and eating stale Ritz Crackers I realize they must’ve cleaned out their kitchen cabinets and sent all their expired food to me.

I’m too proud to call and beg my folks for cash...not if I have a pint of blood plasma left in me to sell. I pull open the Plasma Center door and go inside.

The young woman smiles and says, “Good morning! I haven’t seen you before.”

“No, I’ve never been here. I’ve never even donated blood. It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Don’t worry, it’s a piece of cake,” she assures me, then gives me forms to fill out.

I take a seat in the shaded front room. There are a few men in here also filling out papers. None of them look like students. They look like the guys on the sidewalk outside, in grungy overalls, dungarees and t-shirts with sweat stains. Stale cigarette odor is coming from the sunburnt man next to me. He looks at me with bloodshot eyes like, why are you here? My nose twitches. There’s another odor coming from the man, but I’m not sure what it is.

I fill out my name, phone number and address in Creswell Hall on campus and blood type — O positive. I find out about this “job” in The Red and Black, our university newspaper. There’s a small ad in the back offering cash to students willing to sell their blood plasma for eight dollars. There’s also an ad for male students willing to sell their sperm for twenty dollars. I’m actually upset I can’t sell sperm. How come men get twenty dollars for sperm? And I only get eight dollars for a whole pint of blood plasma? What do people want with some man’s sperm? Meanwhile, my plasma could save someone’s life!

After handing in my papers I’m directed to go inside the donation room. I enter a large open space where along the walls are about twenty off-white barcaloungers, filled with men, most much older than me. I do spy a young college-age guy. He looks out of place but I look even more out of place. Thank goodness all five nurses are women, otherwise I’d feel like I was the entertainment hired for an Elks Club dinner. All the men are hooked up with IVs coming out of their arms. A few have Reader’s Digest magazines lying on their laps, but their eyes are shut. Others just stare out. A few glance at me in a curious manner. A young nurse directs me to sit in a barcalounger in the middle of the room. “You wanna magazine?” she asks me.

“Um, okay,” I reply. I lay back and she plops a Reader's Digest on my belly.

“Okay hon’, let me see your veins,” she asks all friendly, yet business like.

I hold out both arms and watch her press on my inner elbows.

“Hmmm, this your first time? I don’t see any scars honey.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ll try ta be real gentle then.”

This scares me more that she’s said this. Is it that she’ll be gentle for my first time, and she’ll be rough and mean the next time? I want to be brave, but even more I want the eight dollars.

“Thanks,” I tell her.

“Look away honey, cuz I’m gonna stick ya,” she says.

“Most folks don’t wanna see me put the needle in.”

“I hate surprises,” I claim as I watch her every move. Some men peer over half-interested, but a few actually turn away. Wow, if they can’t take watching what’s gonna happen, what does this mean? My body stiffens as I brace myself.

A moment later I feel a pop and some pressure when I see the needle go under my skin. Thank goodness I’m not squeamish. I loll my head to one side and watch the blood drain away from me. How odd. It was inside of me just seconds ago and now I can watch it travel through a long tube, then collect into a clear rubber bag.

“See, we take your blood out,” the young nurse explains. “And then we centrifuge it to separate the plasma from the red cells”. She points to a hulking white machine next to me and says, “That thing there separates the plasma from your blood. Then we put your red cells back in ta ya with a saline solution into your other arm. It takes about an hour-and-a-half if it all goes well.”

I’m not quite sure what she means by all this. I just know it means eight dollars for me when it’s all done — and I be out in time for my class.

I feel like an adult suddenly, like I’m making blood money just like these guys. I don’t need my parent’s money, even if they had some to give to me. I can make my own, no matter what it takes. I sneak peeks at the men filling the other seats and hooked up to machines. I wonder what they’ll use their eight dollars for? Some of these guys, if they’re lucky enough to have a rare blood type will even get thirty dollars today. I wonder if they know they can get twenty dollars for their sperm? I assume they probably don’t read The Red and Black student newspaper. Maybe they found The Plasma Center because it’s in the part of town where they hang out. I would tell them how they could make twenty more dollars, but I can’t discuss sperm donation with strangers. I couldn’t even do this with men I know. I cringe at the thought of them well, doing whatever it is they do that leads to a sperm donation. Yeesh.

The guys reclining here remind me of a few men I rode with on the Greyhound bus from Massachusetts to Georgia just a few weeks ago. These men got a one-way bus ticket and an ill-fitting new suit because they just left prison. I know this because they tell me. They also tell me they need to go to a new place and find someone willing to take a chance on hiring them for a job.

Then I think, well, no one has hired me for work-study yet. I applied for it when I got here in the first week of September. But I’ve heard nothing and it’s been over ten days.

I lean back with the Readers Digest on my belly, imagining the food I can buy with the eight dollars. I’m hungry all the time. I’m lucky that my roommate, a rich debutant from Atlanta is helping me — her poor Yankee roommate. She smuggles food for me from Bolton Dining Hall which is right across from our dorm. She’s on the meal plan so she gets a kick out of secreting bananas, dinner rolls and donuts in her Ralph Lauren blouse, or filling the pockets of her pastel pink capri pants with trail mix. I need more food but I can’t ask her to hide peanut butter sandwiches and sliced cheese in her matching Pink Bermuda bag. She’s already pushing her luck. I don’t know what’ll happen if she gets caught stealing food for me.

Unlike most freshman I’m not gaining weight. I’m losing it. During art history class my stomach growls like a trapped animal. I’ve been a vegetarian almost all my life and cheap peanut butter is about the only protein I’ve been getting lately. I have to wonder what donating blood plasma twice a week will do to me? I glance at the men around me. They look like hell. Most could use a shave and a bath. The only other person who seems to be a UGA student is studying a textbook as if he’s in the library right now with an IV needle stuck in his arm. Maybe I will bring my drawing pad next time and work on my charcoal sketches for my studio class. I’m an art major and like many a great artist I am starving. I’m a cliche like all the anguished, misery-filled artistes who came before me. Van Gogh might have cut off his ear, and Edvard Munch suffered from anxiety, but I have a suffering all my own...selling my blood plasma for cash.

About an hour-and-a-half later I’m almost done, my blood has been removed, centrifuged, and the red cells returned to me into my other arm with a cold saline solution. I can feel it slither back into my vein, marking its journey through my body with a cool snake-like feel.

One of the nurses pulls out the needle. “You’re done honey. Look at you. You survived your first plasma donation.” She has me raise my arm way up over my head, then has me use my other hand to clamp over my inner elbow. After a minute she wraps it in a stretchy bandage. I’m wondering if I’ll get a cookie now? It’s been a long time since I’ve had a cookie — not since I left Massachusetts a few weeks ago. Boy, I’d love one now...maybe an Oreo, or a Chips Ahoy, or even a boring old Fig Newton.

When I get up I’m light headed. My heart flips for a moment. I force a smile while a nurse walks me to the front desk. Both she and the nurse at the desk ask me how I am. I assure them I’m fine, struggling to seem “okay” so I can collect my payment. I try to not sound like I’m begging when I ask, “Do I get a cookie or something?”

“Nope, just the cash,” the nurse tells me. “Now you can buy yourself a cookie.”

I’m handed eight ragged one-dollar bills. While I clutch the money in one hand, I’m told I don’t need to make an appointment for my next donation. It’s by drop-in only and there must be two days between them so my body can resupply my blood plasma.

I walk out into the blinding sunshine, holding the door while two men make their way in. The acrid stench of alcohol is coming off of them. I realize that’s what I had smelled on that other man earlier. Liquor! That man I filled out forms with must have been drinking before coming to get money for his blood plasma. It’s only eleven in the morning. How can they smell like they just stepped out of a bar? There must still be alcohol circulating in their blood. I’m sure they’ll be turned away. Then again, they didn’t turn away the man I noticed earlier who smelled like this.

I use some of my blood money to buy a granola bar from a vending machine on campus before I go to my art history class. It’s not a cookie, but it almost tastes like one and is healthier. Thank goodness eight dollars goes a lot further here in Georgia. After classes I stop at the grocery store near my dorm to buy generic food. These are the no-frills grocery items packaged in plain white boxes or white labeled cans. Bold black lettering on the labels tells me what I’m buying. There is nothing extra written claiming it’s tasty or appetizing and no bright colored pictures on the packages making the food inside seem like it might be delicious. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination but the generic food doesn’t taste as good as the name-brand food. The generic peanut butter has the consistency of brown wall spackle. The phony Saltines don’t have much salt and seem less crispy. The fake Kraft macaroni and cheese is the worst. The noodles are gummy and the powdered cheese smells like feet, but at least it fills my belly for hours.

************************

One day between plasma donations I have no money and I’m hungry. I go to the supermarket across from the dorms on Baxter Street...just to window shop. I’m in the produce section when I’m tempted to swipe an apple. It’s just sitting there, all red, shiny and not wrapped in plain white paper with bold black print. My hand hovers over it. What if I just took one bite and put it back? Would that be like stealing? I pick it up. Real food, only a few inches from my mouth. I just want something that’s not fake, not powdered or gummy like the generic macaroni noodles. I breath in deep, close my eyes…and put the apple back. I just can’t steal, but now I understand why some people do. I turn my head, walk away and out the supermarket door. Outside I hold up my fist and make a silent vow. “As God is my witness I hope there comes a day when I’ll never eat generic food ever again!!”

************************

I’ve been selling my blood plasma for almost eight weeks now. I enter a whole other world when I leave campus and head to The Plasma Center for my bi-weekly donations. Having eight dollars in my pocket after all this makes a huge difference in my eating habits. I’m not so hungry now, but I’m sure bored with tasteless generic food. And worst of all, all this suffering doesn’t seem to be helping my art. My seemingly well-fed classmates are getting better grades on their charcoal sketches than I am.

One day while walking back to campus after going to The Plasma Center I notice a warm sticky feeling on my inner elbow. I glance down and notice the stretchy bandage is soaked. I’ve started bleeding again. I hold my arm up and apply direct pressure. It won’t stop. I run all the way back with my arm in the air and my other hand clamped over it. A nurse puts another gauze bandage on it, saying this happens from time-to-time, and not worry. She tells me I’m not getting enough vitamin K so my blood isn’t clotting like it should. “Remember,” she says, “you should eat more fresh spinach and broccoli.”

I tell her I will, but deep down I know I just don’t have the money for fancy fresh vegetables.

*************************

By the middle of November I’m called by the work-study program. I will interview for a job with Miss Arbor at Bolton Dining Hall — the place where my roommate has been smuggling food for me.

I had no idea how big Bolton was on the inside. I stroll through the dining area and gape at students with plates full of delicious looking food...broccoli smothered in cheddar sauce, corn-on-the-cob with butter, giant cookies with M&M’s pressed into them and tall glasses of ice cold milk. I enter the back kitchen area to meet Miss Arbor in her small office. When I walk in an older, short-haired, worried-looking woman has a phone receiver between her cheek and her shoulder. She points to a chair. Once I’m seated she covers the mouthpiece and asks me who I am and why I’m here. I tell her, “I’m Coree Spencer and I’m here to interview for the work-study job.”

She nods and whispers to me, “Oh, yes.” Then she speaks into the receiver. “You can call me back in a few minutes.” She hangs up and eyes me suspiciously. Does she know about the purloined food I’ve been receiving from her dining hall? Or is it my Yankee accent? She looks at me sideways the whole time she asks me about my schedule and if I’ve ever worked in food service before. It’s very unnerving. I need this job. I’ve never worked in food service, but I know a lot about food — mostly how to eat it. If I get a job here I’ll be surrounded by food and I will get to eat all I want during my four-hour work-study shifts. After the short interview I thank her just as her phone rings. She gives me one more sideways glance before turning to answer her phone.

A week later I still haven’t heard back from Miss Arbor. I return to the student center to check out more jobs. I don’t think I can work these other ones and be fed at the same time. There are other work-study positions such as science lab equipment cleaner, or library assistant. I think I’ll hold out a while longer to see if I get the call to work at the dining hall. My dream is to work around food.

I continue going to The Plasma Center. I’m stuck in the arm with a needle by young nurses who seem to be starting out their medical careers. The men, few other UGA students and I are like guinea pigs they can practice their skills on. One day these nurses will be at fancy hospitals sticking people with needles like experts every time. Occasionally they miss my vein and I have deep purple bruises that eventually turn green, then yellow on my pale white skin.

One day while I’m giving blood plasma I think about drawing in my sketch book. Instead I look at the men across from me. The Plasma Center seems to turn away completely inebriated men, but even I can tell many of these guys have tippled before coming here. I wonder about the patients who might receive their blood plasma. Will they wake up from a transfusion or surgery suddenly craving cigarettes and cheap Ripple wine? These men seem like they gave up years ago. Wild Irish Rose, Thunderbird and Colt 45 have given them a reason to go on one more day. I never really talk to these men, other than saying; good morning, good afternoon, or thank you for holding the door. They all seem polite. A few pass the time by flirting with the nurses. I listen to them make remarks like; “you sure is too pretty to be sticking needles into people’s arms” or, “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this”, and “how can you be single with a figure like that”. The nurses laugh it off. These attempts at flirting are so ridiculous that it’s obviously one big joke. I think some of these sad sack guys might really mean it, but mostly they seem to be going through the motions.

I feel an odd kinship with these men. All of us are desperate for money. Sometimes I feel closer to them than my fellow UGA students. I have more in common with them even though I’m an eighteen-year-old girl from the North, and they’re older fellas from the Deep South. I’m addicted to filling my belly with macaroni and fake cheese and they’re addicted to liver damaging liquor.

I confess to only a few college friends that I get my grocery money by selling my plasma. I tell my roommate and a girl from Queens, New York who lives across the hall from me. I can’t imagine sharing this with all the southern belles on my dorm floor. Most of them have never had to work. I spent the last couple of summers working in a greeting card factory back in Massachusetts. I also babysat, cleaned a neighbor lady’s house and had two paper routes. Most of these girls have everything paid for by their parents, including receiving weekly checks for “mad money”. I wonder if these girls would understand my spending time with alcoholic men, hooked up to machines, centrifuging our blood to extract the plasma for cash. These girls spend eight dollars like it’s nothing at all. These girls write checks at the small dormitory convenience store for gum and Diet Coke. Once my roommate even bounces a check at this convenience store after purchasing two packs of Bubble-Yum grape bubble gum. When she gives me a piece of her ill-gotten Bubble-Yum I savor it like I’m a death row prisoner and this juicy piece of gum is my last meal.

Now that I go to The Plasma Center I count every penny I make because it’s literally blood money. I wonder how long I can do this? I wonder how long the men have been doing this? If I do get a work study job I will actually miss seeing these guys, these misfits, and I will miss the nurses who call me honey like they’re waitresses at The Waffle House and I’m a regular customer.

************************

On December 2nd, the day before the University of Georgia closes for Christmas break I head off to The Plasma Center. I will be leaving on a Greyhound bus back to Massachusetts in two days. I’ll need eight dollars for some cheese crackers and soda I’ll buy at bus stations on the 36 hour journey. I know I’ll eat real good when I get home to Massachusetts. I didn’t think I’d ever miss my mom’s cooking, but eating generic food for three months has driven me to miss her BisQuick pizza, powdered mashed potatoes and boiled spinach with vinegar and margarine. I have tried to make my parents feel guilty by telling them I’m forced to sell my blood plasma for grocery money. But they think it’s great, especially my dad. He would probably have had my two sisters and I selling our blood plasma years ago if it was legal.

At The Plasma Center the donation room is decorated for Christmas and the nurses have Santa Claus buttons pinned to their uniforms. It’s festive and I’m in a warm, generous mood as I look at the men here. With a needle stuck in my arm I imagine being back in the bosom of my family in about four days. I wonder, what will these men do to celebrate the season? Will they purchase better booze? Will they buy a Slim Jim to eat along with their fortified wine called Night Train? I’m smiling while I ponder these lovely holiday thoughts.

Suddenly all the nurses move with great purpose. They start unhooking everyone methodically. A few appear teary-eyed.

“What’s going on?” I ask as they pull my needle out. “I’m not done yet.”

“Everyone is done,” the young nurse explains as she bandages my arm.

“Wait, what?” I ask. The men around me are asking the same thing. They are even more frantic.

“Everyone has to leave,” another nurse announces. She’s from the front desk. She has a clip board and her face trembles.

Something is very wrong.

A couple of men don’t even get up after they’ve been unhooked. They remain reclined and want the needle put right back in. I gather my knapsack and head to the front desk with some of the men.

“Are we still getting our eight bucks? Even if we didn’t finish?” one of the men asks. I’m glad he did and so are the others as we gather like a small mob in front of the desk where we get our payment.

A young nurse, her face bubbling with tears, opens the old strongbox then starts handing us our cash while telling us, “This is your last eight dollars. You can’t come back. We’re closing after today.”

“Why, ma’am?” another man asks.

“Yeah, why, please,” I repeat.

“Can I come back in a couple days?” Asks a man who smells like he hasn’t bathed in some time.

“You don’t understand,” she explains, choking back tears. “No one can come back. We’re closing for good.”

“But where’ll we get our cash from now on?” I hear some man behind me.

“I don’t know. I’m so sorry. Now please go, we have to close up,” she begs us.

We start to leave, all of us a bit stunned until a man breaks the silent shuffle out and says, “I’d really like to know why, ma’am?”

The young nurse comes from behind the desk and starts to herd us all out, stammering when she says, “Ahhh…there’s this thing called AIDS. They say it might be gotten from needles and maybe through blood. We can’t let y’all do this anymore. Now y’all please have a Merry Christmas.”

After we get outside I hear the glass door shut. I turn back and see her locking up while a few men head towards the liquor store. Some men loiter outside The Plasma Center. They seem in palpable pain at the loss of their income and are unable to say goodbye to their money source. All I can think is thank goodness I’ve got enough generic Saltines and peanut butter to last me until I leave for home.

I take one last look at the men, with their heads down as if the answer to their problems is hidden in the cracks of the sidewalk. I say goodbye, but it comes out as a faint whisper. Only a few men hear. They lift their heads and nod at me.

I start walking, stunned. What is AIDS? And why does it mean I can’t give blood plasma for money anymore? I get back to campus knowing I likely will never see these men again now that The Plasma Center is closed. I’ll never have any reason to walk back to that part of town.

I enter my art class thinking, “Dear God, I sure hope I get a real job and never have to sell my plasma or any other part of my body for money ever again.”

The day before I get on the Greyhound bus bound for Massachusetts I receive a phone call telling me I can start working at Bolton dining hall when I return to UGA in January. Maybe God was listening to me. Now instead of giving up my blood plasma twice a week for cash I will be paid to come in five days a week to eat all the most delicious food I can during my work-study shift.

On the bus ride home a middle-aged man nods before slumping into the aisle seat next to me. The faint scent of beer and cigarettes wafts off his damp winter coat. I smile at him before turning and leaning my forehead on the dirty bus window. I’m waiting to catch my first glimpse of snow while heading back north. Passing billboard after billboard hawking refreshing Coca-Cola, Cracker Barrel Restaurants and Camel cigarettes I mull over one thing — I wonder what the men from The Plasma Center will do from now on to get their liquor and cigarette money?