156. Fried Chicken, Octopus, and Pineapple Pizza
September 2, 2008
I heard this story from the valedictorian of my high school class. I’ve never met a more upstanding or trustworthy guy. In high school, he never drank or did any drugs, he never seemed competitive but he was good at everything he tried, and he did a lot of volunteer work. Our senior year, he even starred in the school musical. I thought he was cute and funny, but I never had romantic feelings about him, and at lunchtime I would ask him for advice about guys. After high school, he did very well in political science at a state university, and then he did some entry-level politcal work, eventually making his way to the city council. He’s been on the city council ever since, although sometimes he also teaches history as a substitute.
All in all, he’s not the type to make up stories just to mess with people. He’s well-informed and rarely wrong. There aren’t very many people that I will just believe, hands-down, on any subject, but he’s one person who just exudes truthfulness and accuracy. Read the rest of this entry »
131. Maggie
August 8, 2008
Maggie had come to the concert alone. It was some local, Trail-of-Dead-inspired, spacey rock band. The venue’s poor acoustics turned the reverberating guitar notes into oatmeal. She toed and heeled in her eighteen-hole boots. A boy with shaggy, flyaway hair and a hoody, some emo band’s patches on the sleeves, started to dance next to her, and then soon enough with her. She let him.
Then the boy reached out and touched her hand, and they both shrank. They got smaller and smaller, until they were the size of two tubes of Chapstick. Read the rest of this entry »
122. Writing Assignment
July 30, 2008
1.
So then we agree that we are too egotistical? Fine. This is most likely a function of our very genetics. It is also social. Whatever the cause, we are too self-absorbed, and this makes us unhappy.
Wonderful. That acknowledgment is an excellent first step.
I would like you to take out paper and pen. Yes, Jonathan, you may use your computer instead.
Now, I would like you to write a thorough description of the way you react to situations. Here is a hint: some of you will want to write, “When I hear my friends talking in low tones, I assume they are talking about me. Then I find an excuse to get near enough to hear them.” Don’t lie about this if it is true for you; I’ve seen some of you do it.
Your papers will be anonymous. Do not be embarrassed. Read the rest of this entry »
120. The Autumn of One-Way Postcards
July 28, 2008
There are a lot of websites for anonymously sharing your secrets. The most famous example is probably PostSecret. That’s the website where a guy puts up scans of postcards with anonymous secrets on them. The postcards reach his mailbox from all over the world. Many of the postcard secrets are sexual, like a fetish or fantasy. Some are family confessions; a mother will admit her child was adopted, or a boy will wish his brother had never been born. And others are more lighthearted, like the note from a Starbucks employee who covertly pours decaf for rude customers. You’ve probably seen the cards, or at least heard of them.
For the past year, I’ve been creating fake secrets and sending them in. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a steamy summer day. The humidity was so thick that you’d swear the air was ten percent banana pudding. And another five percent might have been cigarette ash, judging from the layer of grit that dusted our sweaty skin. By the time we had locked up the apartment and set foot on the street, we already felt like we had been camping for days without showers.
I had finished a raspberry Tootsie Roll Pop a few minutes earlier, and the aftertaste of seemingly real raspberries coated the inside of my mouth. It tasted like I was returning from picking fresh berries in a green, leafy patch. Like I had stood there in the sun for hours, sneaking every fifth berry in my mouth and carting the rest of the fragrant, bleeding fruits homeward in a heavy, shallow cardboard box. I could make pie with them, or scones. Instead, I was just heading out into the city on a humid day, a few minutes after finishing a sucker.
As our four slick arms collected their layer of city grime, I rolled my tongue in the berry taste on the roof of my mouth. It’s strange that the raspberry Tootsie Roll Pops taste like real fruit, while the cherry and grape and orange and chocolate always taste like chemical facsimiles. Somehow, Tootsie only got raspberry right.
We left my apartment, which was on the second floor of a building that held three other apartments. The building was made with bluish-green bricks. It had been built before 1900, and now some of the bricks had a tendency to crumble apart. When they crumbled, they looked just like soft, blue tofu.
Sometimes the building had strange problems. Like the doors wouldn’t shut in hot weather because they swelled. There was a leak in the ceiling over the toilet, so sometimes when I was sitting on the can I would feel a drop of rainwater in the part of my hair. Read the rest of this entry »
109. Lightning Bugs
July 17, 2008
1.
Kelly stood on a subway platform in New York. It was March, but unreasonably warm. An actual rat scurried across the grimy tracks. Kelly shuddered. Maybe it was her shuddering that made him notice her, or maybe he only felt right approaching her when to do so would distract her from vermin.
Sometimes, later, as she packed the children’s lunches or baked her hundredth cake, she would wish he had never approached her. Usually, though, she wished for other things.
“Kelly,” he said softly. She turned around. She looked up. His eyes looked kind, but hungry, she thought. It was true that he was thin. Read the rest of this entry »
107. Turning Back
July 15, 2008
She dove down deeper into the ocean. Even though her lungs were already almost bursting, she wriggled her whole body to propel herself down even deeper. Then she went deeper still. The sea was black and impossibly cold. She came to a fissure in the sea’s floor.
Don’t go in, a voice told her. Or do, but first go up and get some air. Maybe it was the voice of her mother, still offering sensible advice even after her daughter was grown up. Maybe it was the voice of her lover, who she’d always assumed was telepathic but just keeping it from her, contacting her from the surface, anxiously waiting in some skiff or cruise liner, wringing his hands, finally choosing this moment to share his gift, regretting holding back for so long.
She decided not to listen. She swam to the opening in the seafloor. This wasn’t because of the witch’s advice, although it was compliant.
“Don’t look back,” the pretty witch had said, her topaz eyes and amber hair both blazing. “Just keep going forward, whether you find yourself on a mountain or under the sea. It’s the only way you’ll find your father. You do want to find him, don’t you?” Read the rest of this entry »
106. Ballet
July 14, 2008
It hurt a lot. Of course it hurt; breaking your leg always hurts. But at the moment I heard the bone snap, I was relieved. Even in my pain, I was ecstatic.
Here’s what happened. It was the middle of June, and I had a whole summer vacation stretching gloriously before me. My big sister had a summer job selling computers at the mall, and Mom and Dad were working too. I was too old for a babysitter and too young for a job, so I would spend the summer blissfully alone. I would answer to no one.
When Mom dropped the bomb, I had already blown through a week of vacation. I spent that first week reading comic books, taking long walks slathered in sunscreen, and watching DVD’s that I got at the library. When I got bored of all that, I surfed the internet, updating the Wikipedia entry on Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I spotted a mistake.
So I was a geek; so what? I was going to spend the perfect geeky summer. Read the rest of this entry »
102. Unemployment
July 10, 2008
Randall lay on the new Sleep Country double bed, lightly clutching the small plastic controller to an old 8-bit console. The TV on Margot’s dresser showed his progress through the video game. This was one of the best parts of being unemployed: he could do lame, embarrassing things like play 20-year-old video games, and no one would see. It was cathartic and nostalgic. The previous week, he had even put together a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle was a picture of kittens. He had stuck the last few pieces in the rosebud wallpaper behind the kittens just in time. By the time he had swept it all into the box and was checking his Gmail (a normal thing to be doing), Margot was home.
“How was your day?” she had asked him.
“Same old,” he had said. “Got a few applications out. How was yours, babe?”
Playing video games and doing jigsaw puzzles had this in common: Randall was normally too hip, too physically active, too social, for both of them. But oh, what guilty pleasures.
Sprawled on the bed in front of Margot’s dresser, Randall was playing a game where he had to save a princess from a castle. It was one of a long line of Mario Brothers rip-offs—jump over the holes, jump on the right platforms at the right times, jump on the bad guys, rescue the chick at the end. Randall was about halfway through the game. This game had save-files, which meant he had created a character with a name and everything. His character was RANDALL.
RANDALL ran through the castle, his leather-soled boots flapping on the cold, worn flagstones. Patches of brown moss grew improbably on the dark, damp walls. He jumped on three malevolent, tentacle-covered purple things. Their thin skins ruptured under his weight, and large air-bladders deflated within them, leaving twitching piles of tentacles on the floor. The purple things’ juicy innards squished under his feet. RANDALL’s soles were so thin, he could feel textures inside the purple things’ guts. He felt something burst wetly in one of them, some kind of organ, maybe whatever the purple things had to pass for kidneys.
Leaving the purple monsters to die, RANDALL dashed up some crumbling stairs, slipping a little on his now-slick footwear.
At the top of the stairs was a hole. Nervous about his slippery, entrails-covered shoes, unsure whether he could stick the landing, RANDALL almost psyched himself into falling. But he leapt over the hole and continued on.
Past the hole was a door. Feeling cautious, RANDALL fished a wooden flask out of his pocket. He drank a restorative beverage, which healed his nicks and scratches and even made his boots feel dry again. Then, with a deep breath, he opened the door.
That’s what RANDALL saw. Randall, however, saw something different. Cotton-batting pillows behind his neck, stocking feet lost in unmade bedclothes, stripes of sunlight from behind venetian blinds pinstriping his Hanes-sporting pudge, Randall saw something more like this: Read the rest of this entry »
101. Score
July 9, 2008
It’s true that I was jealous. The magazines had that right. And it’s true that I was humiliated. Those were their two favorite words for me; I was the jealous, humiliated husband.
But there was something in it for me, too.
Here’s how I remember that night. It was summer, and the haze hung so thick over the endless suburbs you could barely see two blocks down the street. I had an evening audition for a Skor bar commercial; I’d gotten a phone call about it that morning. I got home from the office around five. I started the hot water running for a shower. I cracked open a plastic bottle of water and started drinking. Got to coat that throat. Got to hydrate so I don’t sweat or flush.
I remember wondering what the hell a Skor bar was. While the shower ran, I typed “Skor” on Wikipedia. I learned the bar was made by Hershey. It must be their sleeper bar, I thought, because I had never seen one advertised in my life. Skor was toffee. Made to compete with Heath. Hershey owned Heath now, but kept Skor bars around anyway.
So I was auditioning to peddle Hershey’s second-fiddle butter-toffee snack food. At least I knew where I stood.
Also, I learned, skor was Swedish for “shoes.”
I hopped in the shower and washed the summertime skor-sweat off my feet. I scrubbed the smell of toner from my fingers and rubbed my face to remove the bad luck of my telephone headset. In an office with turnover like mine, the telephone headsets were like village bicycles. I always wondered who those gray splotches around the temples and mouthpiece had come from. I scrubbed and shampooed. I toweled and blow dried. I ate an apple and drank a glass of iced tea. I climbed in the car. I checked my mirrors and seatbelt.
I always did the same things before an audition, by the way. I was superstitious. You get that way, when you see success as rarely as I did. You get religious. Hence the apple, hence the iced tea.
So anyway, I got to the building. I parked on the street. A woman wearing a bored expression and curly blond pigtails took a sip of a scarlet smoothie and handed me a single laser-printed page. I sat on a hard plastic chair next to all the other 35-to-50-year-old males. One was Korean. One was black. Two were Latino. There were two white guys. The Korean guy had some salt-and-pepper, but they could be looking for that. One of the white guys had a paunch that I thought would take him out of the running. The black guy had a mustache I wasn’t sure about. The others looked more or less camera-ready. I remember wishing for a mirror. Read the rest of this entry »
