

### Crouton: A Love Story

### and other tales

by T. Alex Miller

Smashwords Edition

***

Published by T. Alex Miller on Smashwords

Crouton: A Love Story

Copyright © 2011 by T. Alex Miller

Read the author's novel "Ohiowa" on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/504

Plus his latest nove: "Zombie Road Trip" at

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/61085

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

### Crouton

### And Other Stories

By T. Alex Miller

Copyright 2011

### Soporific

Jeff had been writing theatre and film reviews for the newspaper in his small town for — what was it? — five or six years now. He was driven by what he told himself was a true love of theatre, but there were other reasons. At $35 a pop for a ticket, being on the press list was a real savings – especially if he brought a date, which he nearly always did. He'd lost track of how many different women he'd surprised by asking them to "the theatre," the phrase rolling off his tongue with the suggestion not of one particular venue, but of a magical place where everyone is smart, dressed nicely and somehow more polished than those attending the tractor pulls, the bingo tournaments, the drown nights at the local bars.

It took about 90 minutes to drive from his mountain town to most of the Denver theatres; more if it was snowing. That gave him plenty of time to acquaint his new date with his vast experience with the theatre. He never laid it on too thick; just enough background to fill in the picture for them. Implied beneath it all was the fact that, not only was he taking her to the theatre while other local suitors were plying their dates with Jell-O shots, he was then going to write about it, critique the show, and the review would appear in the local paper. And not to mention that, when they arrived at the theatre, the PR person would treat him and his date like royalty. He'd get the folder with the tickets, the press release, the CD full of production photos. They'd be given excellent seats, and the flak would seek him out after for a quick reaction: _How did you like the show?_ Sometimes, wise theatres even gave him drink tickets. But not always. You couldn't count on it, so he always had to bring some cash for drinks and, at the bigger venues, parking. He chafed at the expense, but smiled to himself when he watched all the other schmucks paying top-dollar for tickets. Even if the show sucked, which it seemed to do about half the time, he was only out 10, maybe 15 bucks.

His current theatre date was a leggy waitress new to Elmo's Brewery. Jeff was in there at least once a week after work, so he noticed her immediately. Usually he sat at the bar and had the beer-and-burger special ($5 on Tuesday nights), but when he spotted her, he asked Rick at the host stand to seat him in her section.

"Good luck," Rick said, leading him to his table through a spring-break crowd of college kids powering down pints and burgers. "She's kind of a cold fish."

_No problemo_ thought Jeff, warming up his spiel in his head. He was a master at effecting transitions between unrelated topics and the theatre. He could move from a question about fries or slaw to the new Stoppard at the Denver Center with practiced ease; effortlessly make the leap from a comment about the Broncos latest losing season to the Gurney revival at the Curious. And he'd done it with how many waitresses from Elmo's? He did a quick calculation as he sat down: It must be at least five, maybe six. He'd literally never been turned down.

Her nametag said "Kathy," her manner said don't even think about asking me out. Jeff skipped the transitional phase and jumped right in. Track records don't lie, so why wait?

"I'll have the beer-and-burger special please, medium-well with Swiss and a pint of the wheat," he said. "And I'd like to know if you'd accompany me to the theatre Thursday night. In Denver."

She stopped scribbling and looked down at him. "What?"

He smiled up at her, very much the rake in form.

"The theatre. In Denver. I'm the entertainment editor for the _Journal_ and I have to go review a play at the Arvada Center. I'd like you to come with me."

She wrinkled her nose, narrowed her eyes and flipped to a new page in her book.

"Here," she said, dropping a page on the table. "Call me tomorrow."

When she delivered his meal, she made it clear that there would be no further discussion on the matter, and Jeff went along with it. After all, why mess with success? All he need do is utter that magic phrase, "the theatre" and they dropped their guard — and often their pants — like autumn leaves. It was pretty rare to bed his theatre dates on the first try – after all, it was usually a weeknight, they'd get back to the mountains pretty late and the drinking was confined to a glass of red at intermission – but it usually happened pretty soon after. He figured Kathy was the second-best-looking woman he'd ever gone out with (after Jennifer, of course, his junior-year prom date who, he'd found out later, had gone with him on a dare). Kathy had reddish-blonde hair, a slightly upturned button nose and a light spray of freckles visible from just below her neck and descending down her blouse. He imagined following that trail – maybe in a week or two? – and seeing where it led. He smiled at the thought, sipping at his pint and watching her move around her tables with the grace of a veteran stage actress.

On Thursday, Jeff filed a profile about some other no-name jam band playing at the Bighorn Bistro and left the newsroom early. He was already concerned about the evening for a number of reasons. For one, Kathy had been less-than-warm on the phone when he'd called to make the arrangements. "Please don't think of this as a date," she'd said. "I have a boyfriend back in Minnesota and... I just don't know where that's going." But she had said she was "happy to accompany him," adding that she had a BFA in Theatre from NYU.

That was bad enough: who knew what kind of theatre knowledge – or lack thereof – she would call him on during the course of the night? He also hated to think he was wasting an evening of theatre with a woman who had no intention of sleeping with him (he'd felt similar misgivings when he'd taken his cousin, visiting from out of town, to a plum freebie: _Phantom of the Opera_ at the Buell). And then there was the added problem he was having these days: theatrical somnolence. For some reason, he just couldn't keep his eyes open more than halfway through the first act.

It was a relatively new phenomenon, occurring (he thought) for the first time the previous summer during a production of _Lear_ in Boulder. It was outdoors in the Mary Rippon Theatre, and he was in the third row with a hardware store clerk named Alice (he'd impressed her with the theatre as well as his knowledge of dowel rods). She poked fun at him on the way home, then admitted that she'd "maybe dozed off a little too," which made him feel a little better at the same time he was near-despondent at his lapse. When it happened again (at the Bas Bleu in Fort Collins, a physical therapist from Avon, during a production of _Krapp's Last Tape_ ), he explained it away as what most modern theatre-goers do during Beckett. Indeed, he had identified one other man nodding off and at least three others in the audience with very heavy-looking eyes.

But when he told the short brunette (she did something in planning at the Town of Vail) that his favorite comedic playwright was Larry Shue, then slept through almost the entire first act of a Rattlebrain Theatre production of _The Foreigner_ , he determined drastic action was needed. The woman had actually laughed half of the way home, recalling how she'd had to poke him several times to keep him from snoring so loud as to distract the players.

"And that was a pretty funny play," she said. "I don't know _how_ you could have fallen asleep during it."

It wasn't for lack of trying. He'd feel like he was being drawn inexorably off the side of a cliff, try though he may to dig in his heels and stay in the light. But there was this gray area between sleep and awake he could no longer effectively negotiate. Helpless, he was drawn into it as if by tractor beam, and it mattered not how good or bad the show was. Lively, modern musicals and comedies were just as likely to put him under as Ibsen or Shakespeare. Million-dollar extravaganzas in big halls were just as effective at knocking him out as bare-bones productions in 50-seat venues.

So Jeff amazed the theatre flaks by showing up at the next several press nights sans date. Until he could get the problem corrected, he couldn't bear to suffer any more slings and arrows about "conking out" from these women on the way up the hill; didn't want to be laughed at, or asked if he was "OK" to drive.

He called it his "testing period." For starters, he left work early and tried and failed to take a nap. He tried No-Doz, Red Bull, triple shots of espresso from the theatre bar. He would sit ramrod straight in his seat, pinching himself in the thigh repeatedly and holding his eyes open as wide as he could as the house lights went down.

For his efforts, he was rewarded over the course of three months' worth of theatre with twice being awakened by the applause at the end of the act; another couple of times by ushers alarmed by the volume of his snoring; and once by a blue-haired old woman who actually poked at him with her umbrella from two seats over. The rest of the time, his efforts to stay conscious took up so much of his attention that he could barely focus on the play itself. Moving in and out of sleep during performances, he was left with huge gaps in his understanding of the material – like someone trying to follow a complex movie plot while supervising a roomful of preschoolers.

And he still had to write about them. While the simple fact of his physical presence at a play gave him some idea of the overall vibe, he was nonetheless compelled to include details about the plot that gave readers some indication of what the play was actually _about_. For this, he turned to the press releases and program descriptions, as well as to reading other reviews of the same works he found online. It worked well enough, he told himself, to get by with, but he felt like a dork turning in such warmed-over reviews.

Kathy was to be the first date he had after enjoying a modest success during a Boulder Dinner Theatre revival of _The Scarlet Pimpernel_. He'd chased some diet pills with four cans of Red Bull and managed to sit through the entire show with only one episode of sleepiness toward the end of the first act. But he'd fought through it and won, clapping like a madman at the curtain not so much for the performers but for himself. _Yeah baby, I'm back!_

Now he was ready for Kathy, the BFA. He popped the pills and downed three of the Red Bulls before he picked her up; he figured he'd chug the fourth and swallow two more pills in the men's room just before the show. No reason to tip his hand or invite inquiries from the cold fish, he figured. Besides, what man could fall asleep in the presence of such a hot babe, unless it was a post-coital bliss kind of thing?

When she got in his Subaru, she seemed to cower against the door, staying as far from him as possible. He tried to ask her a little about her theatre background, but got responses so perfunctory that he gave up and turned up the radio. They were past Idaho Springs before she offered anything by way of conversation.

"I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't even be here."

"Huh?" He reached over and turned the music down. The signal was fading in and out anyway, like his brain at the theatre.

"It's not fair to you, I mean, to let you take me out when I'm not, you know, really available."

"S'okay. Let's just have fun, enjoy the show. It's no big deal."

He could feel her twisting there in the seat, wanting to say something more, but she remained silent. Probably trying to figure out if she wanted to continue dating this guy she mentioned, when a thousand miles separated them. Maybe she'd moved here to get away from him, then was tortured by his absence. Jeff was the first guy she'd gone out with after however many years with what's-his-name, and it was hard, blah blah blah.

He wasn't the most patient suitor, considering that six weeks was the usual timeline between first date and "the talk," or the dreaded text, but for this one he could devote a couple of months. She was a hottie, there was no doubt about it. For the theatre, she'd put on all kinds of makeup, done up her hair and worn a clinging black dress that showed beautifully sculpted legs that went right up to a perfect ass. He couldn't wait to see the look on the Arvada Center flak's face when he walked in with Kathy; they were often the only people who ever met his girlfriends, and he'd sometimes e-mail them the next day to get their reaction on some of his hotter dates.

They arrived a bit early, and she lightened up once they were in the lobby outside the theatre. There was some kind of art exhibit, halfway decent stuff, and they had fun walking around commenting on the pieces before entering the theatre. She'd let him buy her a Diet Coke, then excused herself to go to the ladies' room while Jeff found a stall in the men's to slam his energy drink with a couple more diet pills.

The show was _Master Class_ , something about an old opera star who was nuts – nuts but really talented. The stimulants got him about halfway through the first act, but then he felt it coming: the pull toward the cliff, the tractor beam to the Land of Nod. He fought it with everything he had, did the super-erect posture thing, the eyeballs wide open trick, the thigh pinches. When the house lights came up for intermission, he thought maybe he'd pulled it off without doing anything too obvious – like snoring, or, god forbid, drooling ( _Twelfth Night_ , Denver Civic Theatre). But he couldn't be sure.

At intermission, Kathy accepted a glass of insipid merlot (drink tickets!) and bubbled about the play. She was a mezzo-soprano herself, loved the opera and fairly worshipped Maria Callas. Grabbing Jeff by the arm, she looked him in the eye and thanked him for taking her. She'd never be able to afford theatre on the pay she received at Elmo's.

"You're welcome," he said, wondering if some kind of comment about his falling asleep would come next. But she moved on.

"I had teachers at NYU who told me I was good enough to pursue opera, but god, I don't know," she said. "It's a hard life, practically impossible. But theatre's not much easier, I mean. Look at me, waiting tables in a ski town when I should be... elsewhere."

Not a word about me!

He felt he should make a comment about pursuing her dream, how this was just a parenthesis in her theatre career – but he just smiled and took a sip of his wine.

Maybe he hadn't fallen, visibly, asleep. He'd been drowsy, sure, but had he kept it together? It was hard to be sure, although he seemed to recall little of the play itself.

He usually didn't have trouble with the second act. Somehow, intermission seemed to perk him up, or maybe he'd just gotten his nap in during Act I. Back in the car on the way up the hill, it was as if he'd exchanged the terse, nervous woman he drove down with for a chatty, hyper chick on the verge of going home with him. Ah, the theatre! It was like Viagra for women, powdered black rhino horn in two acts (or maybe that was just musicals).

At her condo complex, she thanked him again and made to get out, then turned back and planted one on his cheek. He was pretty sure she had "why don't you come in?" in her eyes, on her lips, but she let it hang there, backed out and closed the door with celibate finality.

Still, this was progress.

When he called her two days later with an invite to see a staged reading at The Bug, she was back to cool Kathy. But she said OK. It was in the car on the way down that she dropped the bomb.

"So, think you can stay awake for this one, Jeff?"

He continued to drive while his brain simply froze. Different answers rose to his lips, ranging from "I'm not sure what you're talking about" to "Ya caught me, huh?" In the vacuum, she continued.

"Because I'm pretty serious about theatre, and it's kind of embarrassing when the guy you're with starts to snore."

They were passing Georgetown, and it occurred to him to pull off, turn around and take her home if she was that "friggin' embarrassed." Instead, he gripped the wheel more firmly and said quietly: "Kathy, can you help me?"

And he told her, told her everything. From the first time at _Lear_ to the half-plagiarized reviews to the old lady with the umbrella. They had a laugh over that, but he shifted back to the problem.

"This is killing me, Kathy. I've tried everything and still I can't keep it together. And part of, maybe the worst part, is trying to hide it from the friends I take with me."

She laughed. "You mean all the different girls you take to the theatre?"

How did she know about that?

"It's a small town, Jeff. It's not like it's a secret. But I am flattered that I got to go twice. I understand that's not generally the case?"

He didn't answer, thinking that the only thing worse than a girl with your number was a smart girl with your number. He could feel her looking at him. Was she really expecting an answer? Really expecting him to give up secrets about his gig, his modus operandi, completely justifiable in a county with a 5-1 male-female ratio?

"Look," she continued, now staring straight ahead. "I guess all guys have some line of bullshit they use to get laid. And I'm not putting the spotlight on yours to make you feel bad..."

"Really," he said. "I couldn't tell."

"No, Jeff, I'm not. But I need you to know that I'm different. I mean, Tom and I have broken up and so I don't feel like I'm cheating on him anymore if I go out with another guy. And I'm not saying you and I are, like, going out or anything but, I dunno, it's possible. So let's do it on the same level, OK? Eyes wide open. No bullshit."

He lightened, hands relaxed on the wheel. Maybe this wasn't a simple trip to the relationship pillory after all. _It's possible_ she said.

"So what, in your opinion, have I been bullshitting you about?"

Encouraged by her latest words, he was still deeply troubled by the implication that he was some kind of a fraud. "I really have gone to a ton of theatre and written lots of reviews. I studied some theatre in college, even acted in a few plays. Not well, I admit, but I know what it's like to be on stage."

She leaned over to touch his arm. "I know Jeff. I'm not talking about that. It's just the, you know, the whole 'I'm the big theatre critic, aren't you lucky to be with me' gig. I'm just saying you can drop that with me; I don't need it, not impressed."

"Oh."

"And I know I'm a total bitch for saying it like that, but you have to understand, this thing I just got out of with Tom, the guy in Minnesota? It was built on bullshit like that. He was like the son of the mayor in this little town, and whenever I went there it was all this 'look at me, my family runs this town, you're so lucky to be with me, I know everybody' yadda yadda yadda."

She sat back heavily in her seat. "God, it made me fucking sick, being in the shadow of that ego."

He nodded. "Right. So no bullshit, no ego. OK. Got it."

The voice of the pulverized male plucked her Nightingale chord, and she put her hand on his thigh.

"And I'm sorry, I really am. It's not your fault. I just wanted you to know where I'm coming from. And to know that, even if I'm not even close to wanting to jump into a relationship with another guy, I could use a friend. I like you, and I'd love to go to some more shows with you. Let's learn from each other, have fun with it. I know a lot about theatre, you know. Maybe even more than you."

She gave his leg a little squeeze. "And I think I know a way to help you stay awake during that deadly first act."

Staged readings were usually death to Jeff. The seriousness of it all, the utter lack of movement, the shuffling pages – it all acted on him like a powerful narcotic. He generally preferred to sit in the back in the likely event he dozed off, but this time they were in the second row. It was local playwrights, and the theme was "social justice." They might as well have put out a cot for him.

But Kathy was there this time, there with some kind of a cure she wouldn't tell him about. "The surprise of it is part of my treatment," she said with a wicked grin.

Still determined to do it on his own, Jeff employed all his useless methods and lost consciousness in the first 10 pages of a mind-numbing drama about police brutality. He drifted out during some kind of disciplinary hearing, and the next thing he knew he was sitting bolt upright in pain.

Watching out of the corner of his eye in the seat to the right, Kathy timed the moment perfectly, employing her "treatment" in the space of about three seconds. She put her left arm around Jeff's neck and covered his mouth tightly while her right hand sought and found her funny little theatre critic's closest testicle. While the sergeant was raising his voice to the beat cop about improper baton usage, she performed a sharp pincer maneuver with thumb and forefinger, waited half a beat, then did it again.

She felt his body come alive, like a cardiac arrest victim responding to the defibrillator. His eyes fluttered open while his hands automatically flew to his crotch – but her hand was already gone. It had moved north to his chin, which she grabbed and turned to face her. Her lips she placed on his, gave him the briefest dart of tongue then moved her mouth close to his ear.

"You're back, baby. You're back."

###

### Free Bird

"OK," said Bernard, with a big Pall Mall exhale, "we can get moving now."

He looked as if he'd just had sex; I almost felt I could smell the musky aftermath, feeling under my skirt along my thigh in the dazed expectation that I'd find some unwelcome slick. Hauling him in, DNA tests, him saying, "But I never touched her!" And he'd be right. He never touched me. But those 11 minutes and 30 seconds on the side of the road waiting for his song to end... Now I laugh at the remembrance with a mixture of knowledge and the kind of lingering longing you almost always associate with a pleasing sexual encounter.

"So, you a college girl or something?" he'd said, the trucker whose name was Bernard.

The retort, "Woman!" rose to my lips and died before it reached my Midnight Ochre lips. Seated with my knees super-glued together as far away from Bernard as I could possibly be without actually exiting the truck. A mini, a chenille top showing off my black, thirty-dollar bra. All of me, perched atop a pile of ripped atlas pages and Jack-in-the-Box tray liners (Bernard's suggestion, "to keep the cooties off.") I was trying to imagine what sort of things I'd have stuck to my ass by the time Bernard let me off.

If he let me off.

He'd let me off.

Technically, I cannot operate a motor vehicle because my license is suspended, my 1983 AMC Eagle is uninsured and unregistered, and I have this unfortunate habit of bumping into things when I drive. I really shouldn't drive, it overly complicates my life. I shouldn't have driven tonight, except that Sherry's beater Honda wouldn't start, which meant that I'd either drive or we'd both sit out this black-and-blue party. This "theme" party. But it would take some doing. The Eagle needed a jump start, gas, oil, you name it.

Sherry lived 20 miles from me off the Interstate; the party was another 10 from me, in the opposite direction. Fifty miles to drive to get to some stupid party in some ranch house in a suburb in a part of the country people in planes fly over remarking, "boy, can you imagine living _there_?"

I could see everything so clearly, as clearly as the people flying over Ohiowa could see the roads and farms laid out like some kind of monstrous board game. Go around the squares long enough and you'll find some guy with a pickup or a hopped-up F-250 to marry you. You can get drunk together and smoke menthol cigarettes and watch bad television. You can try to look small on the soiled couch while the cops question your husband about the noise, the broken lamp, the bong on the coffee table... and your black eye. I'm the protagonist in a country song, you see; all of this will happen. Especially showing up at parties dressed like this, like the kind of chick who wants a ride in a huge F-250.

I'd been in an 18-wheeler before, so when Bernard pulled up in his Freightliner, all hissing and popping hydraulic sounds, I wasn't that impressed. Bernard thought my flaming Eagle was the best thing he'd ever seen; he wanted to stick around to watch the whole show. Listen, I told him, I've got no insurance, no license, no insurance and this car is a complete piece of shit that's probably worth about a hundred bucks. I found the plates in someone's trash and the only thing of value in there is probably a hair brush and a half-pack of Juicy Fruit. So if you want to give me a ride, let's get the hell out of here NOW!

I said it with a vaguely disguised hint that, were he to get me out of there, he might get a piece of this fancy brassiere. Bernard was quiet as we pulled away from the Eagle, which by this time had vast plumes of black smoke pouring out of its windows.

Ever seen a vinyl fire? I once burned a section of a naugahyde couch with an unplanned union between a Marlboro and a shooter of Jack Daniels. Later, mom kept whipping away the towel I'd put over the burn to exclaim, "I can't _believe_ you did this! _How_ did you do this again?" Dad's only comment was to put his arm over my shoulder and say solemnly, "You know, Shandra, they killed a lot of naugas to make that couch."

Looking at the Eagle out of Bernard's right-side mirror, I was kind of hoping it would explode, but I knew it probably wouldn't. We all know where cars really explode, and it's not in Ohiowa. My car would just be this stinking, moldering hunk of junk some poor highway department guys would have to haul away. Dripping wet from when the fire guys hosed it down. I know some of those guys. They have not-so-great jobs, and the last thing they need... well, it couldn't be helped. Like I said, I shouldn't be driving anyway. Being relieved of the Eagle was like having a bottle of booze taken away from you when you know you shouldn't be drinking. Plus, its demise gave me a good story to tell. I started forming some of the sentences in my mind in preparation for the party — if I ever got there.

"And THEN, the DAMNED thing BURST into FLAMES, and me sitting there in my goddamned MINI wondering what the HELL I was going to do when this TRUCKER pulls up and..."

This is what I was thinking about — the silver lining of my experience — when Bernard suddenly hit the brakes and pulled over to the shoulder. "Free Bird!" he yelled, turning up the radio.

"What?!" I said.

"Free Bird!" he said, gesturing at the radio. "It's Free Bird!"

"I _know_ it's Free Bird," I said, "but why are we stopping?"

"I always pull over for Free Bird," Bernard told me. "It's eleven minutes and thirty seconds in heaven!"

I just looked at him. Not mean, but sort of questioning.

"That's the live version, of course. The studio version is only about eight minutes or so."

I knew this and, soon, much more about the song, because Bernard would yell another piece of Free Bird trivia at me every 30 seconds or so. He didn't seem to be listening to the song at all, occupied as he was with coming up with new factoids for me to think about.

"THE LIVE VERSION WAS RECORDED AT THE FOX THEATRE IN ATLANTA IN 1976," Bernard yelled to me."

"OH!" I said back. Then he'd lean back in his seat and close his eyes, occasionally taking long drags from a Pall Mall before he'd suddenly open his eyes, pop upright and deliver another.

"DID YOU KNOW THAT RONNIE VAN ZANDT PERFORMED BARE FOOT?"

"NO, I DIDN'T" I screamed back. "CAN WE GO NOW?"

"HE SAID HE WANTED TO FEEL THAT STAGE BURN!"

I also found out through Bernard that when Lynyrd Skynyrd first started playing Free Bird in bars, they were booed because people wanted music they could dance to, not protracted guitar anthems.

Even if you couldn't dance to it, I felt that it was certainly music you could _drive_ to. I thought about yelling this observation over to Bernard, but he was out of factoids and leaning back with his eyes closed. Pure pleasure, I thought. Why bother him? One thing I surely wasn't going to tell him was how I felt about Free Bird. I used to like Free Bird as much as the next girl. At least enough to tolerate it when, occasionally during high school some boys would put it on the stereo in their basement, smoke some bongs and turn out the lights to listen. They'd act like they were all into it for about 30 seconds, then you'd feel that hand snaking around your waist and that breath on your ear. Clocking in at nearly 12 minutes, Free Bird was THE makeout song for guys, although my friends and I were more into whole sides of Pink Floyd. It was mellower.

One year I visited a friend in New York City. She knew some guys who were piano students at some fancy school, and I wound up sort of half hooking-up with one of them. He wore a scarf and a blazer, kind of just like I pictured a music student looking, and he kept looking me in the eyes and saying, "I canNOT _believe_ I'm kissing a girl from Ohiowa!" Maybe he was smart, but he smelled like Drum tobacco and this strong coffee he got from some Egyptian deli, and he wouldn't eat hot dogs. He made fun of them. Prime rib, too. I told him I grew up on a pig farm, and he added that information to his kissing exclamation. I can't even remember his name, or his friend's name, but I do remember sitting around their apartment playing cribbage (yes, cribbage) with the radio on. The friend started flipping the dial and he landed on Free Bird, which was in mid-jam. And an amazing thing happened:

They mocked Free Bird.

They stood up and air-guitared the riffs, pointing out to me by making noises with their tongues that the Free Bird riffs, those sacred riffs, were simple and repetitive. In the space of about 20 seconds, they reduced Free Bird from an anthem to a laughing stock, an object of ridicule. A little while later, they did the same for the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," laughing hysterically as they mocked the fiddle playing. Then they told me about some famous pianist named Glenn Gould and played some of his records. And they theorized what Glenn Gould might do with a song like Free Bird. They called it "The Skynyrd Variations" and thought that was pretty damn funny.

So I sat in Bernard's truck listening to Free Bird that night, my Eagle probably still in flames just a few miles back, and I thought about those Juilliard students. The one I was with couldn't get it up, and it's just as well. The two of them standing there in that room yukking it up at the expense of Southern rock. Looking over at Bernard and the grin of pleasure imprinted on his face, I felt a stab of pain for him as I thought of the Juilliard boys. I laughed a little: Bernard would kill those two guys if they mocked Free Bird in his presence. He would drive his Freightliner over their pianos. He would tie them to chairs and make them listen to Free Bird for 36 hours. He would read aloud to them the liner notes from the live double album.

Free Bird, as you may know, takes a long time to wind down. With each false ending, I'd wiggle in my seat a bit more, thinking about Sherry waiting for me (this was the days before cellphones). I sat there wondering if we would have to hear the very last note and the sound of the crowd before he'd say "OK" and we'd get going again.

"You know, it seems kinda silly, but it just gives me an excuse to take an unexpected, unscheduled break once in a while," Bernard told me after we'd gotten underway again. He'd been shifting about a little and acting like he wanted to say something. He wasn't a bad guy; he cared whether I thought he was a nut or not. I tried to think of something to say.

"We've all got our little pet songs we love to hear," I told him. "I stop whatever I'm doing whenever I hear that Foreigner song Cold as Ice."

"REALLY?" said Bernard, shooting me a pleased look. "Cold as Ice?" I like Cold as Ice. I don't know if I'd pull over for it, but..." he paused for a moment. "If you were in the truck, I'd pull over for you if it came on."

I felt my face go up a few degrees and a little tremor run up my back. Who is this nice man that I'm sitting so far away from? I scooted over on the seat a little — thank god he couldn't see my tears in the dark — and said, "Thank you very much, Bernard. If I were driving and Free Bird came on, I'd stop for you."

The lie was worth it to see the look on his face, half-illuminated by a Village Inn sign off the highway. I thought he was going to propose to me right then and there. He tried to say something, but he just smiled.

Bernard let me off right in front of Sherry's house. She came out in time to watch in wonder as I climbed up next to his door and kissed him on the cheek. As the Freightliner moved jerkily up the street, Sherry demanded 17 different answers. She bitched about the time, she wanted to know where my car was, who the guy in the truck was, why I was kissing him, why I'd worn Midnight Ochre instead of the Red Satin lipstick she wanted me to try.

"Sherry, we're not going to any party," I told her. "You got any Jack Daniels? Let's go crank up your stereo... I think I'm in the mood for a little Skynyrd."

###

### Seltenberger's Syndrome

I don't remember exactly when it was that I first experience drifting, nor do I recall whether it came on suddenly or gradually grew until it became this regular thing in my life.

I finally went to someone about it, expecting full well that they'd shrug their shoulders, ask a lot of questions about my life like depression or drug use or whatever, then maybe suggest I go to some kind of real doctor and get an MRI, or a CAT scan.

While that's more or less what happened, the person, a Roberta Someone-or-Other, did do one good thing: She asked me to write down what drifting felt like. It read as such:

"Have you ever heard the expression about whether someone is comfortable or not in their own skin? It's obvious when someone isn't, isn't it? Or when you look at someone on stage, a veteran performer, and that person is so at ease up there, they could be in front of thousands of people and they are just completely on, totally themselves. Or at least seem to be.

So, in drifting, I'm like the opposite of that. And mostly it happens when facing a group or I'm with someone senior to me either at work or just in age or status. I suddenly feel very self-conscious about what I'm saying, and the more I think about it, the worse it gets. And that's just dumb anxiety, or insecurity, right? Everyone, or at least most people, know what that feels like. But the drifting is something beyond that. So I'll be sitting there, say, in the publisher's office (I work at a magazine as an editor), and I get highly, acutely aware of the fact that I should be speaking intelligently or creatively about something, and the self-consciousness starts and then... I drift.

It feels like an out-of-body experience, like maybe a little one. Not an epiphany, a big journey to some metaphysical place, but maybe just a short trip. And I have to reel myself back in. But that's not always easy, and sometimes it's impossible. A drift can last for hours, sometimes days, I'm not even always sure when it begins, or ends.

I know at this point I'm supposed to offer some caveat that I know this sounds nuts or I don't believe in out-of-body experiences or something, but since you're a shrink, I imagine you can handle that. Plus, I read a New York Times story not too long ago where they figured out some of the physiology to the out-of-body experience, and also how there's a brain explanation for how people lose themselves and speak in tongues. I imagine it's something like that, this drifting. But more low-key. I mean, I don't speak in tongues.

Another way to describe it is this: Have you ever seen like in a film or a commercial where they use a special effect to make a person appear as if he or she is splitting into two people? And then one of them, usually a little on the diaphanous side, drifts away from the other, and then the two mirror images sort of regard each other with this curious expression? That's also kind of what drifting feels like, although I don't really see that mirror image so much as feel it. I could be sitting still, but it feels like my body has shifted an inch to the left. Or maybe it's just part of my consciousness that's shifted.

So that's drifting. There's some other elements to it, like visual weirdness sometimes, but those are the basics."

I emailed this to the shrink before my second and final visit. I'd spent a fair amount of time on it, trying to describe it, so I was anticipating that she would have spent a commensurate amount of time studying it, perhaps doing some research to see if my description matched anything anyone else knew about. The way I see it, people may all be different, but we're made out of the same stuff and go through a lot of the same experiences, so it stood to reason that someone had identified drifting before. It probably had some other name, like Seltenberger's Syndrome or something. I don't know; I just made that up.

But it seemed apparent to me that Roberta had hastily read the note just after her last appointment left, and she didn't have any insight or information. She asked me more questions about it, like how drifting made me feel, how long it lasted, things like that. I was keenly aware that she was trying to be all professional and smart, but that it wasn't going to help. When I left, I resolved not to return. If she couldn't be bothered to read my assignment more thoroughly and follow up in some way... that's not going to work for me.

The reality is, I think I know where my Seltenberger's Syndrome comes from. I'm recently divorced, separated from my three kids except for two weekends a month, broke from all the lawyers and child support payments, and I typically sleep only four or five hours a night, if I'm lucky. Am I depressed? Of course I'm depressed, who wouldn't be? But I've pored over pages and pages of information online about depression, and drifting, or anything like SS, is not implied anywhere that I could find. I have a new symptom of depression, one might be led to believe, but as I've already said, I doubt that's the case. I wanted to find a chat room or a support group filled with other drifters, maybe get some tips on how to cope.

But I never found one, although I continue to look. Instead, I started making up chat room chatter, featuring drifters who wanted to find ways to return to what they call "Real Space" — or "RS." (I was quite proud of creating my own imaginary piece of jargon.) A typical exchange would look like this:

"Ted123 writes: Whenever I'm in church, sitting there in the pew, I start to drift. It's not simple inattention, because I can feel myself shifting somewhat corporeally. And no, it's not religious fervor or anything. Anyone have any suggs on how to deal, get back to RS?"

"Gina456 responds: I have the same problem in this reading group I'm in. When I feel myself start 2 drift, I find it's helpful to move. I'll stand up, tell the other folks my leg is cramping or something, and I'll stand behind the couch a few minutes. That really helps put me back in Real Space."

I liked Gina456's advice so much that I tried it at our last staff meeting. It was about 15 minutes into it, and I started to feel like my brain was moving outside my skull, like a lump of dough sitting in a bowl on a space ship, floating away in zero gravity. It was when I was in this place that I dreaded questions or any attention directed at me. I'd be afraid I would open my mouth and nothing would come out; or what would come out might be a high-pitched wail, or an animal sound – like that of a whale , or a marmot. And drifting is often paired with a stiff neck, like my head is stuck atop a steel pole that can't move. So if the person talking to me is in a place that required me to turn my head to face them, I had to sort of move my whole upper body, which had the effect (I imagined) of making me look like a guy in a neck brace.

I should point out that, so far as I can tell, my Seltenberger's Syndrome is not noticeable to others. No one has ever said anything to me about what seems to me like aberrant behavior. But, then, the strange behavior of many people is probably not described back to them; they never know. Or maybe they do, but they can't stop it and figure people will get used to it.

The publisher is the kind of woman who hates anything interrupting our meetings, cellphone calls or bathroom breaks and the like. So I tried to move very slowly, thinking she wouldn't notice. My goal was to move to the corner over by the coffee machine. I could get a cup, then remain there, maybe for five minutes. If anyone asked, I'd use Gina456's cramped leg excuse. I was set.

As soon as I stood up, I felt the publisher's eyes on me. When it became clear that the coffee machine was my destination, her eyes resumed their usual course of targeting everyone in the room in a random order: questioning, seeking, accusing.

I don't typically drink coffee, so I went through the steps as casually as I could, feeling all the while as if I were performing a delicate brain operation with a dozen observers looking on. My greatest fear was making any kind of noise or otherwise drawing attention to myself, so I lifted the pot of coffee very carefully, filled a paper cup about halfway, replaced the pot, then eyed the condiments: three different types of sweetener, powdered cream, plus a small cardboard box filled with red plastic stirrers.

What kind of coffee drinker might I be if I were a coffee drinker? Not black, I decided, reaching for a packet of creamer stuff. I knew it was just some kind of powdered fat, and likely no good for you, but its presence near the coffee machine told me that others used it, and I was all about fitting in at the moment. I tore the top off and poured the powder into the coffee, expecting it to somehow dissolve. But it didn't; it just sort of sat there in a pile, not moving. I reached for a stirrer, feeling pre-guilt about the fact that I would soon use a small piece of plastic – an essentially non-renewable resource – for about five seconds before consigning it to the landfill. What a waste. But what were the options? This most definitely wasn't the time to make some kind of statement by stirring with my finger, or with a pencil.

It was at that precise moment, reaching for the stirrer, that Laura, the publisher, said my name, sharply. The steel post holding up my head swiftly descended, like a downward periscope, to the base of my spine, and the hand reaching for the stirrer stopped as if frozen. It was then that I realized that Laura had stopped speaking, perhaps some moments before, and that the room was silent.

"Ken, that coffee is from our last staff meeting a week ago. Allison's on vacation, so nobody made a new pot this morning."

At any other office, someone might at this point crack a joke at my expense, and life would go on. But the magazine I work for is an insurance trade publication, and it may well be the most humorless office I've ever worked in. We work in silence, mostly, and we hardly know each other. I'd only been there six months, but I was already looking for other jobs. I just couldn't bear continuing to work in such a joyless place, not when my own life was such an unhappy thing.

So, with Laura confronting me on the coffee and the eyes of six or seven other people on me, I had some critical decisions to make, and I needed to make them rather quickly. And you see, that's one of the other things about SS: Time slows down. The lump of dough was still floating outside the bowl, even if my coffee-procurement activities had slowed it down somewhat. A typical person in this situation would turn around, say something like "Oh, crap! I didn't notice," then dump out the coffee, throw out the cup and resume his seat.

Another option might have been to make some ridiculous, face-saving gesture like "I like my coffee old and cold," and start drinking it. Could maybe get a laugh there, too, if you played it right. That's not really me, though, if you want to know the truth.

The other thing I was thinking about was how I could have been so out of it as to not have noticed that the coffee was old, cold. Surely there would have been a little red light on to indicate something; steam would have come off the liquid sitting there in the cup and, of course, the powdered fat would have dissolved instantly, I see that now. I should have recognized it when it just sat there, that I was holding a non-viable cup of coffee.

So, while I was considering my options and chiding myself for my cluelessness and feeling as stiff as a shellacked fish hanging on a wall, I made an odd and sudden choice: I sat down, right there on the floor in front of the coffee maker. First, though, I grabbed a red stirrer stick.

More than anything, I wanted to vanish, which is an odd feeling, too, but one with which you might be familiar. Probably there was a time in your life, maybe as a kid, when you were so embarrassed or humiliated that you just wanted to either die or disappear. As we grow older, our ability to handle these moments with more grace makes the urge to die go away (unless, of course, you're suicidal, but that's another affliction altogether).

I supposed I could also have walked briskly from the room, but that would have seemed like admitting complete and utter defeat. In this instance, the reptilian part of my brain chose a course of action for me that my higher brain rejected outright – just a nanosecond or two too late. And now that I was sitting, with my higher brain ready to resume command, it seemed like it would have been worse to suddenly stand back up, admitting my faux pas, and return to my chair.

So I stayed there, facing a cabinet door that instantly assumed a preeminent place in my here-and-now. There was a handle, a simple pull knob, the door itself a dark wood. There was a horizontal scratch about two inches long just a few inches above the carpet – a wound no doubt inflicted by a vacuum cleaner at some point, I reasoned. I had the cold coffee in one hand and the stirrer stick in the other, and I was sitting cross-legged, facing away from my colleagues.

Observing people confronted with a highly unusual event or action is something that's consumed the time of a great many psychological researchers, not to mention the producers of various television shows where marks are set up to be shocked, baffled or scared for the amusement of the audience. In this case, although I couldn't see the looks on the faces of Laura and the other editors, I could tell from the silence that they, too, were now confronting some difficult choices. These might have included:

1. Laura saying "Ken, what the hell are you doing?"

2. Ignoring me and going on with the meeting as if nothing were amiss.

3. The person who felt most friendly toward me, Alan maybe, getting up, coming over to me, putting his hand on my shoulder and saying "Ken, buddy, let's go get some air" or something like that.

4. Remaining still and silent until such time as I moved, spoke or died.

In fact, they chose none of the above. It was mostly No.2, though: They acted as if nothing were amiss but still included me in the meeting. I actually answered several questions and gave a rundown of my section's content budget for the following month, all addressed to the pull knob on the cabinet. When the meeting was over, they filed out, saying nothing to me while I continued to sit there. (Although Chelsea, who handles AD&D policy topics, dropped a handout in my lap on the way out.)

As soon as I was alone, the dough returned, albeit slowly, to the bowl and I stood up. I did some of that typical soul-searching stuff, like looking out the window and contemplating all the people out there going from one place to another and wondering what the hell it was all about. Then I slipped out the back stair and walked the 17 flights down, where I grabbed a bagel from the lobby deli and headed out for what would turn out to be a four-hour walk all the way back to my apartment.

There's no better place in the world to be weird and alone than in Manhattan, and as I made my way up 10th Avenue, I imagined I felt a kinship with some of the homeless folks I came across. I wasn't too different from them, I thought, and no doubt many of these men were husbands, fathers, employees at some point; guys who'd perhaps suffered a Seltenberger's Syndrome episode of their own, and who sat down on the floor at a meeting one day and then never went back.

The disdain I used to feel for the panhandlers on the street morphed into a new-found respect when it occurred to me that I lacked the ability to pull the plug on my life like that. Yes, they're weak, awful men who left their families for a bottle or a needle or because they couldn't handle mortgages and health care co-pays. But you've got to hand it to them: They removed themselves from it, those painful situations. And now here they are, free from it all.

But I wasn't one of them. I went back to work, the next day. I needed the job and the money, for sure, but I was also intensely curious as to what kind of reaction I would get. I got some averted eyes, certainly, but mostly people acted as if nothing happened. At one point, halfway through the day, the publisher popped into my office and said this: "Let's stick to the chair for our next meeting, 'K Ted?" I nodded and she left and that was the last I ever heard about it.

Isn't that amazing? That you could pull off a completely bizarre act like that and, well, get away with it? Shouldn't I have been fired, or sent to counseling or reprimanded by some crone from HR?

And what happened was, after the coffee episode, my bouts of SS started to decline. Eventually, all the divorce stuff was behind me, the lawyers got paid off and I slipped into the unfair, unfulfilling yet inevitable routine of being with my kids every other weekend, with a week at Christmas, half the summer and alternating spring breaks and Thanksgivings. I still do feel SS sometimes, though, especially when I'm putting the kids on the No. 1 train to go back uptown to their mother. I'll be standing there on the platform, and the train slides away and the dough starts to float and it becomes impossible for me to tell whether it's the platform or the train that's doing the moving. Relativity.

But I figure that, if you're going to drift, that's the place to do it. That way, if you start acting all wiggy, you're just another freak in the subway, and people just walk around you. Chances are, though, they won't even notice.

###

In the Desert

Monday, 6:30 a.m.

The alarm clock goes off and I drag my protesting ass out of bed. Even though I've no time for coffee or shower, I still get to work 20 minutes late. The boss looks at his watch and slaps me – hard – then orders me to clean the meatloaf and gizzards room. That afternoon I get my sleeve caught in the drill press and the fire department must come rescue me. As I stand there trapped, my boss circles the drill press, yelling at me and occasionally whipping the backs of my thighs with a piece of rebar. Go home, miserable, still haven't eaten so I pawn my watch and go to the diner. Sandy flings some slop at me and slides the coffee on the counter too briskly, some splashes in my eye and I fall from the stool breaking my collarbone in the process. I drag my sorry ass home and flop onto the couch. I go to turn on the television but remote is somehow missing and the thing won't do anything without it. I open a book but all the pages have been ripped out by Gilford, my ex-girlfriend's dog. I go for a walk but it's dark and I slip in a ravine and break my legs. I crawl to the highway, pulling myself along with my hands, and try to flag down a car. One pulls over and runs over my head, squashing it like a grapefruit. The people in the car don't even know what they've done. One gets out and pisses on my head and throws a cigarette butt on my shirt which bursts into flames as they pull away. All around, a bad day. I make it home by 4 a.m. Good, I'll get 2 hours sleep.

Tuesday 6:30 a.m.

The alarm clock goes off and I drag my protesting ass out of bed. I manage to get my ass into the shower and I'm sitting there on the floor with the hair and the scum letting the water run over me as I read the instructions on the shampoo bottle: Squeeze out crap into your hand, rub it on your melon, rinse, repeat if necessary. Squeeze out crap into your hand, rub it on your melon, rinse, repeat if necessary. Squeeze out crap into your hand, rub it on your melon, rinse, repeat if necessary. After three times I figure my head is clean but I can't rise. I'm stuck in the lotus position, with the plastic drapes around me I feel like I'm safe, like nothing bad can happen. As soon as I stand up, I know, everything will turn to shit. I think about just staying there, and even though every cell in my body wants to do just that, I somehow manage to get up. I lather up my bony chest, my skinny arms, I take a dull disposable razor and shave my pointy chin and the hairy union between my beady eyes. I lather up my poor old shriveled dick, scrub my hideous feet, rinse off and open the plastic drapes to greet the day. I dry off with a piece of burlap standing in the corner and climb into my soiled clothes. I have some sort of filth for breakfast and feed my shitty old cat a piece of green bologna I find in the back of the fridge. I climb into my piece of shit AMC Matador and roll it down the hill, pop starting it because the starter shit the bed a few months ago. I drive to the 7-Eleven and get a pack of Winstons and a coffee. The sun is shining like a mother fucker and I put on my cheap, shitty shades that say "Porsche" on them and pull out of the parking lot. Some guy yells out his window at me about something I guess I did and then I'm next to him at the stoplight and he's in a bad mood, I guess, because he just keeps yelling at me as I try to torch up one of these Winstons. It's a hot day and in the parking lot it takes a bit to get my thighs unstuck from the plastic seat. I walk into work and the boss rips both my arms off and tells me I can work with my fucking feet for all he cares. Jimmy tells me a joke about Iraqi women and Gilbert tells me about how the company insurance policy doesn't cover his alcoholism treatment because they say it's a pre-existing condition. Donny chews on cloves to quit smoking, Wayne talks about his brother the F-14 pilot, Sam says his old lady threw a rod in their washing machine. Nobody mentions my broken figure, everybody has their own problems to think about. At lunch I go to the 7-Eleven for nachos and the old crone at the counter yells at me because you're only allowed two pumps of cheese shit on your chips. I buy a lottery ticket and drive to the parking lot at Sears where I eat my nachos and smoke Winstons, all the while looking at the bank clock. I can get to work in seven minutes, I know, and as I drive back I keep looking at all the bridges and cliffs and shit and how easy it would be to just jerk the wheel and be done with it. The guy on the radio keeps me going. He talks in a non-stop sort of joking kind of thing and he makes it seem like life is just kind of fun amusement park ride or something. Even the songs, the happy pop songs that he plays, don't seem too important according to him. He talks through the part of the song in the beginning where nobody's singing and then he starts talking again when the song nears the end. He just doesn't care. The weather report is always the same here in the desert so he sort of glosses over that, always making the same joke about how the weather's always the same. But he always does the joke just a little bit different, which I like. By the time I get back to work, I feel okay from having listened to him but then I get all tense when I punch in and put on my apron. The boss takes one look at me and accuses me of being drunk. I wish I was. He says I can't operate the machines and makes me clean the meatloaf and gizzards room again. As I turn, he sucker-punches me in the kidney and laughs. I laugh, too. Jimmy needs a jump start after work and I get the wires mixed up I guess and my battery explodes, acid spraying all over my eyes. I laugh and drive home blind, which is okay because I'd always said I could do this trip blindfolded so I figured this is my big chance to do something I said I could do. I put the nose of the Matador into the front of the trailer and hit the propane tanks, which blow up magnificently. As my vision comes back, I sit in my chaise lounge smoking Winstons as the fire department pours water on the smoking remains of my home. One of the cops who shows up finds a pot seed in my ashtray and hauls me off to the pokey on drug charges. I think my ex-girlfriend used to smoke pot, so I guess that's where it came from. I call up Jimmy and he says he's in bed and all but he comes down and bails me out and lets me sleep on the sofa at his trailer, which is kind of nice of him. His wife gives me a hot dog and a bowl of mac and cheese and says how it's good to see me and that she hopes I won't be staying long because she's expecting a baby and the neighbors were complaining about their dog, Hammond. I say okay and walk into the desert, never to be seen again.

Wednesday, 6:30 a.m.

But I show up at work again the next day, even though it took me forever to start my car because there's no hill to roll the Matador down and Jimmy has a baby seat in his car and there's no room for me. I point out that the baby isn't around yet but he says he's 'practicing' and he is, too, with a little doll in there just like it was his own kid. Jimmy will make a good dad, I think later, drilling holes in pieces of metal. For some reason, after six years of doing this, it suddenly occurs to me to ask the boss exactly what the hell it is I'm doing. He gets all soft on me all of the sudden and talks a lot about the important function of these pieces of metal. Then he makes me go clean the meatloaf and gizzards room. At the 7-Eleven again, I compare my lottery number to the winning numbers and discover that, had I chosen "24" and "35" for my third and fourth numbers instead of "16" and "29," I would have won $34 million. That makes me feel pretty good. I drive by the insurance place to see about my trailer and the guy tells me that the remains of my trailer have been confiscated by the police because I'd bought it with all of the money I made from selling pot. He says they won't pay for anything because of this. He says they'll confiscate my car, too, and laughs, pointing out the window at a wrecker hooking up my poor old Matador. I laugh and shake his hand and tell him I've had better days. He wishes me luck and as I shake his hand, I look at his tie and think about asking him if it's hard to tie those things, what it's like to own them, how he decides which one to wear each day, what they _mean_. He looks at me and asks if there's anything else he can help me with but I just say no and walk back to work. The boss looks at his watch and just points to the crucifix. I've been up there before and so I don't need any help getting strapped in. As I hang up there watching everyone at work, I suddenly feel all peaceful, and I realize this is the first real rest I've had in a long time. The boss visits me now and again, talking about dipping me in the acid tank, talking about getting some carrion birds in to pluck at my eyeballs. Gilbert comes by and hands me a drink of water and before you know it they're taking me down and putting him up in my place. I go back to work for about five minutes but then the whistle blows and I head out, nodding to Gilbert as I pass. I walk for about five minutes towards the trailer park and then realize I don't have anything to walk home to. I sort of stand there in the dirt as the cars whiz by, not knowing what to do, what direction to head in. I think of how it doesn't matter, I think of my parents sitting down to dinner, I think of Wanda, my ex-girlfriend and her dog, Gilford. Then my mind kind of goes blank and I close my eyes and the only thing I'm aware of is the Doppler shifts of the cars as they approach, pass me and rush on. I think about the people in the cars and wonder where they're going, how they're going home, probably. I know about Doppler shifts from an intro to astronomy class I took at the community college last year. I think how probably my boss doesn't know about Doppler shifts, how most people probably don't know about them. I try to think about other things I know that maybe nobody else does, like how our closest galaxy is Andromeda, 2.2 million light years away. How it's called M31. I start feeling all airy and light-headed. I open my eyes and I'm drifting high above the highway looking down on my body standing there next to the road. I notice I still have my apron on and ... but I can't take it off now. I keep rising, higher and higher and I see my body far below me topple over in the dirt, like its plug was pulled or something. Then whatever I am now starts kind of blending into the air around me as I go higher and higher and higher. I hear the diffused laughter of my radio DJ all around me, like the world is a big amusement park or something.

###

### Hank's Tuba

Billy Barr first meets Henry when Henry's family moves in next door. They stand at the bus stop together regarding each other but not speaking.

Billy: I'm a nerd, a woosy and a geek. I wonder what you are.

Henry: I hate moving. I hate going to new schools. My Froot of the Looms have given me a wedgie. I'm a Froot Loop. I had Froot Loops for breakfast. I'm turning into a Froot Loop, that's what mom says.

Billy: This kid is not going to believe how tough fifth grade is in this school.

The bus pulls up and the only bench left is the one nobody wants, right behind the bus driver. Billy and Henry sit down in. Billy clutches his new Space Dude lunch box (liverwurst and bologna on white with ketchup, Ziplock bag of Fritos, Ring Ding and Thermos of Kool-Aid).

Henry thinks about the money he has in his pocket — his mom can't cook.

Henry: Is making a sandwich cooking?

You just moved here, says Billy. Henry just looks at him.

You just moved here, right? Henry nods. You just moved here and this is your first day at school, right? Henry nods. Bet you're scared. Nothing from Henry. I'm Billy Barr.

They shake hands.

I'm Henry. The voice is squeaky. Henry? Henry what? Ain't you got a last name?

Billy: He's got a stupid last name. He's going to get beat up a lot. Maybe _I'll_ beat him up.

The bus pulls up in front of the school and Henry and Billy disembark. Henry leans against a wall and Billy watches, amazed, as Henry throws up. The god David Jarnowski comes up.

Gross! Who's your pal, Barr?

I don't know him, honest. He was just sitting next to me on the bus.

David's minions are in tow. Henry is too weak, too gross at the moment, so they turn to Billy. One of them takes his lunch box, opens it, and yells yuk liverwurst and bologna!

Do you know what's in this stuff Barr? David waves the sandwich in front of Billy. It's poison, Billy, poison! He throws the sandwich away and cuffs Billy in the head. Don't eat this stuff around me.

Billy: I told mom to give me veggie stuff. She wouldn't listen.

I am appalled that anyone could eat a dead animal. David.

Billy: Your mom said that. You're just saying what your mom said.

They're veggie terrorists! I'm going to call this David Jarnowski's mother and...

He's on his knees, begging mode.

No mom! Please?

He's tired of peanut butter and jelly, but it's vegetarian.

Poor Henry had a corn dog from the cafeteria and the David gang squeezes him until he throws it up.

Henry throws up a lot. Mom and dad never seem to throw up. Why do kids do it all the time?

I'm a wreck. Henry to Billy.

Another parent phrase. No kid would say that.

I can't eat meat, but my mom won't make me a veggie lunch and all's they serve at the cafeteria is sloppy joes and corn dogs and hamburgers and hot dogs and meat, meat, meat!

Now nobody will eat meat and the principal has ordered the cafeteria people to cook only veggie stuff. David has won.

The man from the music room comes today. He has a violin. He talks about music and how it was time to take lessons. He plays the violin and it looks weird how the thing scrunches against his chin. He looks at Henry.

You have thick lips. You could play tuba. Henry blinks and gulps. The music man hands out forms to take home.

$75 for music lessons! What the hell are my tax dollars paying for? Billy, let's wait until you're a little older. I think you're too young to play an instrument. God knows I've done okay without playing anything. Aint' that right dear?

Two days later, Henry is struggling onto the bus with an enormous case.

What, what's that? asks Billy

It's a tuba. I'm taking it home to practice. Mr. Fredrickson calls me Hank. I have big lips. David Jarnowski's dad plays the tuba in a polka band.

He's in, the little bastard. He's in! I'm a vegetarian and where's my tuba?

Billy Barr is still too young to play. He helps Hank carry the tuba each morning and looks with wonder at the sheets of music with the strange symbols. What does that one mean? I don't know says Hank. It means that I push this thing and blow this way. It's a note.

A note. Billy mouths the word.

David Jarnowski has not taken up an instrument because, he says he's tone deaf. But he helps Hank carry his tuba whenever possible.

My dad's tuba is 150 years old and his dad got it from his dad. It's from Poland. It's a legacy.

A legacy.

Well, a legacy is er, well, Billy, it's a thing that's been around for a while, really old. A generation thing.

Well, a generation, that's uh, well, I'm one generation and you're another. My father was a generation and your kids will be another. Ain't that right, dear?

Legacies in our family, eh? Well, uh, no. I can't think of anything off hand but... hey, you know the way when you blow your nose it sounds just like when I blow my nose? Yeah?

Well, that's a legacy. It's in the genes, b'god. That's what it is. My daddy made the same goddamned noise when he blew his beak, b'god.

It's gym class. Dodgeball. Billy has been duly pummeled and is sitting on the bleachers.

David Jarnowski is next to him. It's one of those rare occasions when he's gotten out, too.

I want you to make sure that Hen... Hank plays that tuba. I want you to make sure he don't quit. My dad says that people are always taking up instruments when they're kids and then giving up. He looks around and talks quiet. Don't let him stop. If you do that, I'll be your friend. He slaps Billy lightly on the cheek and walks away, calmly surveying the game in progress, the gym: his domain.

He's out of the game, but he's still in it somehow.

Billy watches Hank lugging the tuba up the block. It's Saturday, not a tuba-lugging day.

We had a concert. I forgot some of my parts. I screwed up. I forgot the notes. Hank is crying. Billy has opened the case like he often does. He's pushing the levers, looking at the music on the pages, wondering about the mystery of this big brass thing.

Billy: Don't cry. You're a musician. Don't cry, Hank. You're a musician. You're a great musician. David Jarnowski says...

To hell with David Jarnowski. Sniffles. I'm tired of lugging this stupid tuba around. The girls think I'm a fag or something.

Billy: Do they?

No, they don't Hank. I wish, I wish _I_ could play the tuba.

Silence. Snifflings. A minute or two, maybe less. Really? Yes, really. My dad says I'm too young. He won't let me play.

Sniffles.

But you can play, Hank. You can play for both of us. You have to. Hank and his tuba, you'll be famous!

It's dodgeball and David Jarnowski is picking off members of the other team with killer precision. How does he throw the ball that fast?

Their team is taking it hard and only he and David are left.

How does he catch those fast balls like that?

Billy runs up to grab a ball near the middle line and trips. Fatty Tendralillo has a small punisher ball and winds up to deliver the killing blow. David has no more balls left but with a yell he tackles Fatty. The gym teacher comes over.

That's a foul, Jarnowski. Thinks a bit. But Fatty deserved it.

The gym teacher loves David. The gym teacher hates every one of us. The gym teacher loves David. I love David. Who said that?

David says, unexpectedly, dodge ball should be banned.

It's too vicious. It brings out the worst in us. It brings out the hunter. Billy Barr, I'm worried about Hank. I don't think he likes his tuba anymore.

I've tried.

I don't think he wants to play anymore and, pat on shoulder, I know it's not your fault. I know you've tried. But I have a plan.

Oktoberfest? You want to go to Oktoberfest? That's for grownups, Billy. That's beer and more beer. You uh, you wouldn't fit in. I uh, I forbid it.

So your dad wouldn't let you go? You snuck out the window? Good man, Billy, good man. Don't worry, I told Hank to be here or else I'd tell everyone he's a fag.

Hank is waiting, jittering, by the beer tent. He doesn't know what the hell he's supposed to do.

You see that Hank, old sport? That's the band. You see that guy with the tuba? That's my dad.

The band starts to play. David's dad blows tuba and cavorts. The band goes through a string of favorites, the crowd is moving in unison, holding up beer steins, singing along.

The band takes a break and David squirms through the crowd up to his dad with Billy and Hank in tow.

Look says David. People are around Mr. Jarnowski, offering him beers, slapping him on the back. Look, they love him because he can do something they can't. He can play tuba,

Hank. Hank?

The polka band gets up on the stage for another set. David has maneuvered Hank up to the stage and David's father is announcing the young newcomer on the scene. Hank has already thrown up twice and had a sip of beer. He'll be okay.

The crowd stands around, looking expectantly at Hank, who they can hardly see behind the tuba. All eyes on Hank, smiling.

They want him to do well. The band begins to play and Hank starts blowing and moving levers like he really knows what he's doing. David's dad stands right next to Hank, tuba poised near his lips to cover in case Hank screws up.

But he doesn't.

The song ends and the crowd goes wild. Hank feels the applause ripple through his body.

David feels the applause, Billy feels the applause. David hugs Billy.

Hank, David and Billy walk from the Oktoberfest and David is telling Hank what a hit he made. He's telling Billy he should be Hank's agent.

Hank stops to throw up only once and they part with high-fives. Billy climbs in his window and falls asleep, wondering if he could handle an accordion.

###

### Flipper's Funn Hutt

Reel and jump, move about performing gesticulative non-sequiturs, yell to Flipper for more Quik. Turn up the Brady Bunch, more Mrs. Paul's fishticks, _s'il vous plait_ , more Doritos, more Kraft Mac & Cheese, more Park's Sausages, yes, more.

Bongo crosses the room and surveys the kids, doing his job, taking in the scene. All eyes follow him, adoringly, as he moves from table to table: A bon mot here, a one-liner there. The kids chortle with glee and look after him longingly as he moves on, ever-moving, ceaselessly entertaining.

Vinny is in town, he's a big man now with cable TV. He's hosting a reception at Flipper's to promote the new cable station, WTBS, the Who's the Boss? Station, which runs episodes of our favorite show non-stop 24 hours a day. Is it our favorite show? It must be. Turn it up Vinny, this riotous and zany dialogue has us peeing in our jumpsuits.

I'm standing outside Flipper's later, next to the enormous satellite dish smoking cigarettes and talking to Bongo, the bar fool Flipper pays to dress up like a Sunoco attendant and hand out steak knives. I ask Bongo how tricks are, I ask Bongo how he likes his job, I ask Bongo how much he gets paid. Bongo says tricks are okay, he says he loves his job, he says he gets paid well, he says he gets 401k from Flipper.

What's 401k? I ask.

Bongo says he doesn't know. I say I have 401k also at my job, Bongo asks me how I like it. I say I like it just fine. Bongo says it's like a conversation piece. I say I wish I could wear a zip-up one-piece suit all the time, like Bongo does. Bongo says it makes dressing "a breeze." Bongo asks me how to tie a tie. I say I don't know. I ask him if he knows how he breathes. He says he doesn't know. I say that tying a tie is kinda like that.

He nods, pinches the cherry off of his Salem and puts the butt in his pocket. We like Bongo because he is an environmentally conscious bar fool. I'm at my desk, I'm in my office, I have my little fan blowing in my face. Everybody here has little fans at their work stations because the vent system sucks. And I'm working on a speech for a client, I'm writing it in between interruptions from my assistant, my numerous bosses, the office manager, the FedEx guy coming in the door, the phone, the email alerts. I'm wearing a wool suit, I'm wearing a tie. The AC is on and I'm sweating. I'm staring into my computer, writing important things for someone else to say at some meeting in a few weeks. In Baltimore.

The Beefaroni rep is in town. He's at Flipper's handing out cans of the shit and buttons to everyone as WTBS competes with the Brady Bunch channel from either end of the room. Where's the Silly String, who's got the fake blood, where's the Wowee Whistles, Frieda is blowing Super Elastic Bubble Plastic with a Newport, look, you can see the smoke inside. The Shirley Temple machine is humming, I'll take my glass rimmed with Pixie Stix, thank you. Pass the Paxil, administer that white Necco wafer to me like communion, let's get out the Big Wheels, it's snowing? Is it good for packing? It's raining? Where are the mud puddles? Who did this Hilites puzzle in pen, the answers are all wrong!

The Stairmaster in my building's health club died, can't exercise today, Billy barked his shin on the jukebox, where's the Bacitracin? All of these needs, all of these sounds and tastes swirling about. We stand there after work and fondle our neckties and pantyhose with quizzical expressions. What is this shit? Janie says she she wrote a proposal today, but that its contents were receding from her memory like a Stuckey's in her rear view mirror

There has to be a slide show to go along with the speech my company is working on, the speech I'm writing, and the slide house has gotten everything ass-backwards. Or we did. People are yelling at me. Yelling. Shoulda used Power Point. I'm looking at the strategic plan for this client, wondering if the $20,000 a month is doing what we said it would. I think about what I could do with $20,000 a month. I wouldn't write speeches and news releases about high performance synthetic fibers, that's for sure.

I'm walking over to Park Avenue, over to the slide house. I have to go "raise hell," they tell me. I have to go be an asshole. The slide woman is apologetic, although she points out that most of the errors I'm bitching about are our fault. Although I know this to be true, I go to her boss and paint for him a tale of mixed signals, uncooperative underlings and missed deadlines.

After this, things happen faster, our mistakes are fixed. Fixed quick.

The "Oh my nose!" episode comes on the Brady Bunch channel and we sit in rapt silence, drinking it in, hanging on every word, laughing uproariously as these suburban bumpkins lie and cheat and sport wimple-like lapels with naive chic.

Some guys in suits walk in and start asking for beers. Flipper just shakes his head and offers some sasparilla. They look at our little lobster bibs stained with red sauce, regard the wailing TV sets, look at the tables of Candyland players bent intently around their boards and walk out scowling.

I run into Suzie, who is vice president of corporate communications and investor relations at a company that makes asshole medicine. I ask her how tricks are. What? she says to me. She's watching Major Nelson on TV. He's dressed as a Viking or something and Colonel Bellows walks in on him. I repeat my question. What do you mean, how's tricks? she says, jamming a bunch of Cheeze Doodles past her lipstick and into her head. She doesn't like to talk about how she works for a company that makes stuff to squirt up your ass, and she thinks that I'm trying to get her to talk about it. She doesn't want to talk about anything, I see, so I wander over to the frankfurter machine and spend 20 minutes looking, transfixed, at the dogs impaled on stakes making their rounds inside their glass cage.

My performance at the slide house, although it didn't endear me to the folks there, makes a hit at the agency. I get an attaboy from my boss. He says I've got executive fiber in me. Wee. We get the presentation ready in time for the client's trip to the city and he liked it, he did. We were at the office until midnight the night before getting it all ready. The client had no idea.

I got Spaghettios juice on my Mr. Bubble T-shirt, mom will get it out with Fab, which can take an oil slick out of a wedding dress in a regular load with hardly any scrubbing. Spaghettios are great for hangovers with a glass of Strawberry Quik and a grilled cheese sandwich slimed in butter, but since Flipper's opened, I hardly know hangovers.

The dogs are sweating under the light and I'm always fascinated to see kids buy these things. When they order one, I like to watch their faces as Flipper plucks one off its skewer and slams it into a bun with practiced ease. The buyers, I notice, always watch every move Flipper makes. They tell him what they want on it and watch intently, licking their lips with concerned anticipation as he prepares their meat treat. I watch their eyes, you see, which never leave the dog. I wonder, but I don't eat meat anymore, although I don't know why.

Smoking isn't allowed in Flipper's, so I go out to the satellite dish again and join the other kids out there smoking like fiends. I light a Parliament and listen in. Most of the kids smoke Parliaments because they have the funnest filters, more fun even than Vantages, some say. Bongo is out there again, and so is Tex, the other bar fool. Tex has sheepskin chaps and a 40 gallon Stetson hat and big fake guns and spurs and a saddle that Flipper makes him tote around. Tex calls the saddle his cross. If you ask him about the saddle, he'll hold out his palms and say See my stigmata? which tickles him because nobody knows what the hell he's talking about. Tex is talking about his Ford Falcon that he drives. He says it has a bad water pump and that he'll have to spend his day off replacing it. Everybody is amazed to hear Tex talk about this, and nobody interrupts him whenever he talks about his car. Not only is he the only person we know who owns a car in the city, but he even knows how to fix it.

Problem is, says Tex, with the loping conversational tone of someone who knows he has the floor, is thet I have to drain th' radiator. Then I haff to take off'n the fan belt and remove the waddah pump.

I'd heard Tex talk about replacing his muffler last week and, even though the conversation was good, I felt queasy, had to go.

I get back to my building. I get in the elevator and nearly keel over from the smells of Indian food coming up from the super's kitchen in the basement. I get into my apartment and thank god there's a Chuck Norris film on Channel 11. I've missed Star Trek, I rue, but it was the OK Corral episode and I always thought that was kind of a dumb one. I have my Victoria's Secret catalogue, I have my Molson Golden Ales, my Parliaments, I have my television; my spear, my loincloth. I watch Chuck kick people in the head and I think a little about my working week. I have to go to Baltimore tomorrow for the big presentation. Can't sleep, nervous,

So I'm in this room, right, and all of these guys in suits are standing around and I'm flipping the slides as the client reads my speech. I keep thinking, you know, while I'm flipping the slides and listening to how my words sound as the client reads them, I keep thinking about Bongo at the Fun Hutt, how this means nothing to him. But his profession, what _he_ does, means a lot to me.

It was last Thursday night when I talked to Bongo last, and he asked me about my job. I got all tongue-tied trying to explain to him what we did, and why we did it. I wound up out there at the satellite dish telling Bongo all about this marketing initiative and all of the strategies and planning and media blitzes and everything. The more I said about one thing, the more I had to explain about another. My job suddenly seemed all convoluted and hopelessly byzantine and ...

When I finished my explanation, Bongo poked a smoke into his mouth and said, "Hmm, sounds like a lot of bullshit to me."

I was thinking of this when my boss came up to me, grabbed the slide flipper out of my hand, and advanced the carousel. I had to stand there like, like ... I didn't know whether to sit down or try to take the flipper back or what, while my boss gave me a quick scowl and kept the thing moving, the client up there at the podium all tense, looking at us.

It was okay though, I still did okay. And I got to ride the Metroliner back by myself. I was so overwhelmed by the fact that I was on a train and alone and free and unsupervised that I went to the bar car and got two beers and a tuna sandwich on a Kaiser roll, whatever a Kaiser roll is. I had five different flavors of newspaper and I was in the smoking car so I could smoke like a fiend and I watched Delaware move past in the waning hours of the day, as they say. I think it was Delaware. I was almost delirious. No, I _was_ delirious. I finished the beers and the sandwich and three of the papers and went back for more beers. I came back and smiled a lot even though there was nobody to know or care that I was smiling. I finished the papers and started on the Amtrak magazine.

Back in the city, as I carried all my shit to a cab outside Penn Station, I was kinda drunk and I was thinking about all this crap I had to carry around. The cabby, wearing an enormous turban, was loading it into the trunk and I said to him in a lighthearted fashion, I said "Look at all of this shit I have to carry around! I bet you, as a cabby, don't have to carry around this much kinda shit!"

He says nothing. Going up the West Side Highway, I said to the cabby, I said "You know, time was all fellas like us would need was a loincloth and a spear and we'd be okay. He turns his head about 10 degrees in my direction but doesn't say anything.

Maybe he has more shit than I thought. Maybe he _likes_ having lots of shit. Maybe he doesn't have _any_ shit. I don't know. I worry that he thinks because I'm wearing a tie that I'm rich and he hates me. Later I think that the man's actions were probably indicative of someone who doesn't speak English, and I feel better.

Saturday night at Flipper's is popping! It's Appliance Night, which means that all of us urban dwellers who don't have things like dishwashers and microwave ovens and washing machines and blenders and that sort of thing get to use them all we want. I was loading my underwear into the washing machine and blending a banana smoothie at the same time, eagerly anticipating both the drink and the fact that I'd get to load the glass into the dishwasher afterwards when Bongo came up to me.

Flipper canned me said Bongo. I laughed. Flipper canned me he repeated. I looked over at Flipper and he saw me and looked away. It's the economy said Bongo. He says the recession ...

So what does this mean? I say to Bongo. I mean, what are you going to _starve_ or something? I laughed. It's not like he's going to starve or something, he's Bongo. Bongo says he occupies a highly specialized niche in society, a niche that has few opportunities, I try to keep thinking that it doesn't matter. That if it was like the Pleistocene age, you could just _be_ , and go around and eat tubers and kill mastodons or something. Spears and jockstraps. It, I can't get used to the fact of money. I tell Bongo that things have gotten too complicated. I tell him he shouldn't have to worry about where his next Salem comes from.

He laughs, I laugh. We both laugh. Laff. Laffing's fine, says Bongo at the satellite dish. He's changed out of his Sunoco outfit and now he's wearing a 1976 Sear's leisure suit — forest green with lime green piping with a clip-on tie and a huge belt buckle that says "BONGO."

Bongo is really _into_ being Bongo. Bongo says he feels like he should be depressed that he hasn't created a huge furniture chain like his grandfather did. He doesn't, he can't take lessons from his ancestors because he doesn't know them. He knows what they did a little, but he sure doesn't know how they did it. Like me, Bongo doesn't know his ethnic makeup or where his grandfather came from. Bongo doesn't know why he has to be Bongo.

We're jelly fish says Bongo, lighting a Salem with his Zippo (funnest lighter name) that has "Bongo" engraved in it. I'm Bongo, goddammit, he says to me down at the railroad tracks, the ones under the thing at Riverside Park, later on. Bongo holds forth. Bongo swims in the Hudson River. I look at Bongo like Napoleon Chagall looking at a Yanomomi Indian. I scribble notes on a napkin I will later discover are illegible. I hold my digital recorder up to his mouth and keep his words until I need the space for something at work and delete them.

What is this Bongo, this good Bongo? I thought as I helped him up to his TriBeCa flat and put him to bed. I went home and I wanted a nightcap so I went down to the bodega wearing a motorcycle helmet and funky shades because I wanted to be noticed. Nobody blinked and I went home, anonymous as ever. I stopped going to Flipper's. Partly, I thought, because I wished to protest Bongo's firing. I would go instead to the bar around the corner from my office, where everyone else hung out. I'd stand around and drink boring yuppie Amstel Lights and smoke non-fun Marlboros and we'd all talk about work or sex or sports and all that. The only other diversion was a jukebox, and I noticed that the men and women in suits thought it somewhat daring to go and select five songs. Like they were being really adventurous, imposing their choices on the crowd. The ones who considered themselves "fun" did this, and they, in turn, were considered "fun" by the others. Well, I can be adventurous and fun, too, and I went to the jukebox and flipped through the things and saw no Abba, no They Might Be Giants, no old Banana Splits theme, no Partridge Family — all the stuff Flipper has on his jukebox. A woman I knew from accounting came up and suggested Eric Clapton and R.E.M. And I looked at her, but I didn't see her; I looked right through her — but not in the metaphorical sense. I mean, I didn't _see_ her, if you know what I mean. I could only see the door,

Excuse me, I said. I left the lights on on my snowmobile (there are no snowmobiles in the city, so I was being "fun," but she looked right through _me_ , ogling the credits I'd left on the jukebox.)

I thought about hunting up Bongo, but it was Tex I really needed to see, so I made my way to Flipper's. My cabbie was a Sikh who nonetheless let me smoke in the cab, and I hung my head out the window like a Labrador retriever. Hey! I said to the cabbie, poking my head back inside, I'm a Labrador retriever! He inclined his head slightly and I thought I saw the slightest sliver of teeth through his dark lips. I couldn't wait to tell the kids at Flipper's I made a Sikh cabbie smile.

At Flipper's things were in full swing, and I hit the locker room to change into the Tyvek jumpsuit that had become de rigeur at Flipper's in my absence.

Yell to Flipper for more Ovaltine, more Campbell's tomato soup and add milk instead of water so it'll be cream of tomato, would it be too much to ask to get some Spaghettios mixed in there or will the shit explode? My cousin Boffo once ate five cans of Beefaroni on a dare, a week later he ate a whole sleeve of saltines with no provocation,

As eight o'clock nears, we all gather round for the weekly drawing to see who gets to smash an old TV set. Gavin wins and we angle for position as he takes up a Louisville Slugger and has at it. We cheer every hit, every smash, and offer advice: "Smash the tube ... mangle the antenna ... bust the dials!!" we yell, we hoot, we stamp. Gavin has a special place in the bar because he works at Mattel. It's good to see him win the drawing, we say afterwards. He really seemed to enjoy it, we say,

I find Tex out at the satellite dish, he's smoking a cheroot he says is the same kind Clint Eastwood smoked in A Fistful of Dollars, which we all take as gospel. Where ya been, pardner? Tex asks me, wrapping his big arm around me and squeezing me tight. His gun digs into my thigh, and I pretend not to notice. I tell Tex I've been drinking Amstel Lights over on the East Side and he clucks his tongue. I tell Tex I heard he had some trouble with his differential, and I listened intently as he went on a 15-minute discourse about something called spider gears and 80-weight oil. When he was finished, I asked him if he'd changed his air filter lately, but he didn't hear me, drifting off to do the nine o'clock toast. I smashed out my cigarette and followed him in.

The Candyland tables grew quiet, Flipper switched off all the TVs and the hot dog machine, the lights grew dim as Tex took the microphone and did his nightly toast, stolen from his days as an Elk in Carson City:

Friends, Tex said, wherever you may roam, whatever your lot in life, you will never be forgotten here. Be it dee-vorce, involuntary separation from your present gig, or the woe-begotten circumstances bee-yond yer control that take you from our warm brother- and sister-hood, you weel always have a place here at Flipper's Fun Hutt. And fer all you who may never ree-turn, Ah lift mah glass and say: (and here everyone chimes in) To our absent cowpokes!

And the light come up, the music starts and everyone cheers and looks happy for a minute afore they git back to their activities. I'm all choked up hearing this, and as I head to the bar to get a Slush Puppy to wash away the bitterness of the Amstel Light, an arm lands on my shoulder, and it's Bongo dressed in his Sunoco outfit!

Reel and jump, move about performing gesticulative non-sequiturs, yell to Flipper for more Quik. Turn up the Brady Bunch, more Mrs. Paul's fishticks, s'il vous plait, more Doritos, more Kraft Mac & Cheese, more Park's Sausages, yes, more.

Hey kid! Bongo says to me, handing me a steak knife and hugging me around the shoulder like it was old times. He thanks me for getting him home that night and then, before we can talk, ol' Tex wheels up and says to Bongo: He tell you about his Amstel Light episode on the East Side? And Bongo just laughs. O, good Bongo! He knows, and he knows that (and I found this out later) that I was one of the absent reasons Flipper begged him back. And we laugh, Bongo laughs, Tex laffs, we all laff, laff, laff. And Flippers, this night, is peeling out. Collectively, the place is popping a wheelie. Every appliance is on, every Candyland board is full up with players, everyone has chocolate milk mustaches as Tony Danza shrieks at Florence Henderson from across the room.

MTV is here, as are the Starburst and Butterfinger reps, who are suspended from the ceiling by bungee cords. As they jerk and hover in their harnesses, handing out buttons, hats and samples of candy to the kids, I find Suzie, who is vice president of corporate communications and investor relations at a company that makes asshole medicine. She's just come off a victorious round of Monopoly, I know from talk, and she's got a treat in front of her.

Well Suzie I say, putting on a bib and joining her over a Flippers ante pasto of warm mac & cheese, Skittles and Funyons, how'd the game go? And she smiles a little and is nice to me for a while. She then tells me, politely, to go away.

###

### Memorial Day

From his perch atop the mailbox, Bledsoe could more or less see just about everything that was happening. It was one of those holidays, he knew, where floats and bands gave way to barbecues and volleyball games. So it was like either Labor Day or Memorial Day or, perhaps, The Fourth. But there were no fireworks, he noticed.

The kid with the cotton candy all over his young mug squinted through the sunshine up at Bledsoe and wondered aloud if there was extra room on the mailbox. Bledsoe looked at his own clean jeans and tried to imagine what they would look like with pink crap allover them. Bledsoe hoisted the boy up.

"Thanks mister," said the kid, now offering a grimy bag of peanuts Bledsoe's way.

"No thanks there, Buster," said Bledsoe. 'Buster' — where the hell did that come from?

"You new in town?" asked the kid.

"They call those 'Sousaphones,'" said Bledsoe, pointing at the marching band. "And they are named after John Philip Sousa who, don't you know, was called 'The March King' and who invented those portable tubas for occasions such as these."

A blank look greeted this statement of fact.

"It's Memorial Day, who cares about tubas?" said the kid, squirming on the mailbox for a more comfortable position.

"Just don't eat wieners for god's sake," said Bledsoe. "You never know what's in them things."

"You mean hot dogs?" said the kid. "I _like_ hot dogs."

Bledsoe gave him a look and the kid slid off the mailbox saying, "You're weird, mister."

Bledsoe went and stood near his motorcycle watching the parade come to an end. A portly man with a bullhorn announced that the festivities would continue in Kennedy Park with a "full-on Dixieland band ensemble" and that "food an' drink a-plenty" could be found there. The man was wearing a shirt that said "I'm spending my children's inheritance."

Bledsoe glanced absently at his abdomen and figured he was hungry.

Over at the park, Bledsoe was amazed to see an actual pig turning on a spit. Next to this, a man stirred a huge pot of chili with an oar.

The man had cut off the sleeves of his shirt with a butcher knife, Bledsoe supposed, and he looked up at Bledsoe and he said, "Say pal, how about some fine Texas chili?"

Bledsoe sort of looked behind him to see if there was anyone else that the man might be addressing and, finding no one, turned back and asked, "Got meat in it, that chili?"

"Well hell! Of course it's got meat in it!" said the sleeveless fellow. "Wouldn't be much of a chili con carne without meat in it, would it?"

"Is that an oar you're using there?" asked Bledsoe, changing the subject.

The man laughed. "Yeah sure, an oar's the best damn stirrer for this kind of mess you've ever seen!"

"I can imagine," said Bledsoe.

"But it's _clean_ , of course," said the chili dude. "Cleanest damn oar you've ever seen!"

"I see that," said Bledsoe, admiring the oar's cleanliness. And then here's the kid again:

"Say mister," tugging at Bledsoe's leather jacket. "Lookee here!" and shoves the better part of a mustard besmeared hot dog into his face and mouth.

"Now look here Ricky..." (here's the sleeveless guy)... "You don't want to be spoiling this man's appetite for chili!"

"He don't like hot dogs!" shrieked Ricky, then in one motion dropping to the ground and wiping his face on his left sock (a maneuver Bledsoe had never before witnessed). Seeing his wonderment, Ricky supplied, "Socks are gross anyway."

Bledsoe noticed that a number of people were viewing this exchange, and then there was the sleeveless chili salesman proffering the steaming bowl. "Buck and a-half," he said. Bledsoe paid and wandered off.

He set the chili down on some raffle table, bought the prize ticket, and started towards the watermelon stand. The raffle lady calls him back:

"Say," she said, "You forgot your chili, mister!"

Bledsoe sauntered back and picked up the bowl. "Thank's ma'am, I must've lost my head."

"Say!" she said again as Bledsoe left, "You didn't leave no address on your raffle ticket, mister!"

But Bledsoe called over his shoulder, "Oh, I won't win anyway," and made it to the watermelon stand.

"May I please have a slice of watermelon?" inquired Bledsoe of the watermelon lady.

She smiled and whipped a melon up on the counter with a great thud. Bledsoe watched with interest as the watermelon woman, brandishing an enormous knife (machete?), whacked the melon in half, then in quarters, and handed him the largest of the four pieces.

"Uh, ma'am, I only wanted a slice," said Bledsoe.

"Oh, you run along," said the watermelon lady. "I've got more melons than you can shake a stick at!"

And she did, too.

So Bledsoe walked off with his melon, feeling rather conspicuous with his unwieldy slab of fruit. He began to seek-out a spot where he might sit and consume his treat without interruption when here's the kid again, struggling under the weight of his own enormous slice:

"Say mister," sitting down next to, "I can spit watermelon seeds from here to Timbuktoo!"

Bledsoe sat on the edge of a picnic bench and, breaking off a piece of the melon, contemplated it saying: "Where, do you suppose, is Timbuktu?"

"Lookee!" supplied Ricky, pursing his lips in grotesque fashion and launching a seed with a grand expulsion of breath and spit.

Bledsoe watched as the seed landed some four feet away and said, "My, nice launch! But Timbuktu is in Africa, you see, and I've the fear that you've fallen rather short of your goal."

"Whaddaya mean?! That seed took off like a rocket!"

Sustaining another "you're weird" from Ricky, Bledsoe sat alone and systematically ate the melon, now and then removing seeds from his mouth and depositing them sans flourish on the ground. He walked around with the rinds for some time before he found a suitable receptacle for them.

Bledsoe looked at the nearest star and figured it to be just after noon. He was supposed to be somewhere that would necessitate his leaving within the hour, but the time and the place wandered away and he found himself over at the chili dude's counter again.

"Good, ain't it?" said the man without sleeves. "Back for more, I reckon?"

"Is that a canoe oar?" asked Bledsoe.

The man looked at Bledsoe curiously for a moment and then, without turning his head, shouted in Bledsoe's face: "Hey Herb! What the hell kind of oar is this? Canoe or something?"

Herb, busy carving junk off of the enormous pig nearby, looked up and said, "Who wants to know?"

"This young fellow here, he wants to know what kind of damn oar you've got me stirring this here chili with."

Now interested, the man called Herb walked over and picked up the oar. He ran his hand up and down its length, he turned it over a few times in his hands while extolling its virtues to Bledsoe.

"Son," he said to Bledsoe, "This here is the finest, _cleanest_ damn oar that money can buy. You can use it for your canoe, you can use it for your sailboat. You can paddle just about anything with it."

"Like maybe for a _dinghy_ ," said Bledsoe, this being his attempt at displaying some sort of nautical knowledge.

"Hell yes!" says Herb. "Paddle your damn dinghy with it, that's the trick!"

When Bledsoe looked to the chili dude for support, the dude was offering yet another bowl of oar-stirred chili for Bledsoe, saying quietly, "This one's on the house, seein's how you liked the first bowl so much."

Standing in the middle of a field with a bowl of chili he didn't want, Bledsoe was... HEY MISTER!"

It's the kid again.

"Yes, Ricky," says Bledsoe.

"Hey! How'd you know my name!" demanded Ricky.

"Can't remember," said Bledsoe, surreptitiously sliding the chili into a trash bin.

The band, that Dixieland Band, had started playing. Some folks had even started dancing. One rather rotund fellow, Bledsoe couldn't help but notice, was prancing to the music whilst slamming a pork sandwich down his neck. Wow, thought Bledsoe.

But Ricky: "Look mister, where are you from? I ain't never seen you around before."

"Well," began Bledsoe...

"Well look, I need a partner for the sack race and my dad's busy with the horseshoe contest and..."

"Sack race?" said Bledsoe. "I'd _kill_ to be in a sack race! What must we do?"

"Well..." said Ricky, "I guess I ain't supposed to be going around with no strangers but..."

"Hey," said Bledsoe, "I'm no stranger!"

Bledsoe, never renowned for his aptitude at the sack race, did rather well with the young Ricky. Second place, a ribbon of sorts, and a Virginia-smoked canned ham.

"What's ham, anyway?" posed Bledsoe to Ricky.

"Heck, I dunno," said Ricky. "It's just the name of the stuff. It's pigs, I think."

Bledsoe gave him a blank look: "Pigs? Pigs in a can?

"Yeah sure — pigs in cans. Fruit in cans, too. Everything comes in cans nowadays."

"How..." mused Bledsoe, "How do they get big ol' pigs into l'il teeny cans like this?"

"They cut 'em up!" snarled Ricky, "They cut 'em up with giant chainsaws!"

"Yikes!" said Bledsoe.

"Yikes!" said Ricky.

Leaving Bledsoe, Ricky cruised over to the beer and pop tent. Bledsoe looked up  at the sun and figured four o'clock. He thought of his motorcycle. The Dixieland Band was winding down their set, the various booths were being taken down, and the line at the porta-potty was long. Bledsoe was about to get on his motorcycle and ride off when the sleeveless chili fellow approached him with the chili oar.

"Uh," said chili dude, "Herb says you can have this here oar if you want it."

"Gee," said Bledsoe. "Really, for me?"

Chili dude became more relaxed. "Hell, what the hell," he said. "It's just an old oar. We thought you might like it. I cleaned all the chili off of it."

"Well," said Bledsoe, taking the oar, "I'm mighty obliged, I am. Thank you very much."

"Don't mention it," said the chili guy.

"This is a good thing," said Bledsoe.

And they sort of stood there for a second, Bledsoe shuffling his boots in the dirt and looking around him and chili dude with his hands in his pockets, finally looking at Bledsoe and saying, "Uh, say fella, you seem like a decent enough fella. How about coming up to my place. We're having a little party and everyone will be there."

Bledsoe said thanks but no thanks, carefully memorized the directions to the party anyway, and went into the Biltmore Diner. After having a cup of coffee, he rode his motorcycle up the road to chili dude's house.

The kid met him at the door: "Hey mister, where have you been? I'll whup your butt in chess, I got a table all set-up over here!"'

It was like Ricky was expecting him.

Ricky had a card table set up with a sign that said "Chess Korner" over it, the spelling of which Bledsoe chided him about. Bledsoe took Ricky's queen but lost anyway.

"NEXT!" shrieked Ricky, as the defeated Bledsoe ambled over to the food table. There were people all around. Talking people. A hardware store owner, the county clerk, a guy who restored antique furniture and also repaired vacuums, a woman who sold real estate. A teenager who was in the army. A guy who plowed snow in the winter and mowed lawns in the summer and what did he do in the fall and spring Bledsoe wanted to know?

"Rake leaves an' plant bulbs an' seed. I'll leave you to figure which one I do when." Bledsoe discovered that the chili dude had a name.

"I'm Kurt," said the man. "I didn't think you were coming."

"Well..." began Bledsoe.

"Say," said Kurt, "Where's the oar?"

"In a safe place," said Bledsoe.

And it was, too.

###

### Big Iron

It was my older brother Tommy who informed me of the gun bequeathed me by my father.

"I can't fucking believe you got the ACP," he said, his voice a low snarl in lobby of the airport in Atlanta. "The Big Iron. Shit."

"What?" I said. He may as well have been speaking in Serbo-Croatian.

I was used to communication problems with Tommy, as well as with my father (whose funeral I was here to attend) and pretty much the rest of my immediate and extended family. To summarize: I'm a gay man living in San Francisco; my entire family lives in rural Georgia. To say I don't come back to visit very often would be an understatement; I seriously considered not coming at all. But that would be bad form, not to attend your own father's funeral.

I did, however, ask Anthony to stay behind.

"But I should be there with you during this... difficult time," he'd said, albeit without much conviction. I can pass for pretty straight, but Anthony would look like Ru Paul to my family. It didn't take much to convince him that it'd be best for all concerned if he stayed in the city. But, of course, his willingness to go was noted, logged and appreciated.

So it was just me, if not a stranger in a strange land then at least someone rather familiar with the land but one who sensed it as hostile territory. And it only took five minutes in the car with Tommy after he picked me up at the airport to remind me, as if I didn't know, just what an alternate universe this was.

Tommy, cigarette dangling and Big Gulp at the ready, turned to me and said:

No, wait, I'll spare you the awful comment about my gay partner masked as teasing, as well as the racist comments about the current inhabitant of the White House, the diatribe about the immigrants destroying our country and the extended encomium regarding our nephew Argus, who had recently enlisted in the Marines. Or the Navy, I can't remember which. ("Helluva fuckin' kid.") There was absolutely no topic I could think of that might be safe from setting Tommy off on another rant about... something awful. Even the cause of my visit — my father's timely, logical and highly anticipated death of lung cancer after smoking Pall Malls like a burning haystack for 70 of his 85 years — was no simple conversational turf.

"So," I'd offered, with blatant hesitancy, "Was it hard on dad, the last months?" I didn't really give a shit, but you have to say these things when relatives die.

"Fuck if I know," said Tommy, already on his second cigarette since he'd picked me up (and if you think I was going to make any comment about his chain-smoking ways and our father's demise, you'd be wrong). "Son of a bitch was in some home where they looked after him past two years. I went once, but it was too fucking depressing for me. Anyways, we were all just waiting for the son of a bitch to shit the bed so we can get on with our own lives. Sick of hearing about the old man all the time, dyin' this and dyin' that, chemo this and nausea whatever hair loss shit so'sn you couldn't keep up with it all, that hospital talk. Jeannie (our youngest sister) would go sit with him even though it probably made her gag (Daddy was not a fan of women in general and barely tolerated his daughters; Jeannie was the only one who would even talk to him) and she'd sent out some e-mail every once in a while, let us know what all's up. Fucker shoulda died years ago – can't believe he made it to 85, smoking like a goddamn Freightliner the whole time."

He turned to me, gesturing with his smoldering cigarette: "An' don't you say shit to me about this, OK? I know, I know. Don't think I don't hear it every fucking single goddamned day from Janet (Tommy's wife) and the girls. Least I smoke filtered cigarettes like a white man, not those goddamned coffin nails the old man smoked three fucking packs a day of them anyways. Here's our exit."

The funeral was mercifully brief, sparsely attended and largely devoid of emotion. The real action was to be at the after-party at the big house. When we pulled up in front of my father's house, Tommy turned to me as he killed the engine.

"So, Thearn, still gay, huh?"

"Yes Tommy, still gay."

Tossing caution in Tommy's capacious ashtray, I tried for levity.

"Always gay. Gay forever. Mmmm... I love the cock."

He sighed and shook his head.

"Man, I don't know how you go through life without no pussy never; just some asshole's asshole. Blowin' each other an' shit..."

I couldn't resist.

"How much action do _you_ get nowadays Tommy?"

Tommy was a good 300 pounds, and Janet was, if the last Christmas card photo was accurate, even bigger. I had no idea if a man and a woman that size could still copulate, but my guess was it wasn't going to be easy — or a nightly occurrence. Maybe a once-a-year kind of thing, using some kind of system of winches and pulleys.

He laughed and punched me — hard — in the arm.

"You got me dead to rights there, brother. Shit, you probably get more pussy than I do, if you can call some guy's asshole pussy. You know what's even worse? I don't even care anymore. 'Bout sex. I don't even bother jerking off hardly ever. All these years back against the wall, dead fuckin' broke all the fuckin' time, that takes it's toll on a man. An' his dick, I guess. Sex — s'for younger guys mostly, I reckon. An' old horndogs like Bill Clinton. Plus, course, I'm fatter'n fuckin' Jabba the Hutt."

We sat in silence for a moment until he opened the door.

"Well shit, let's go see what the damage is."

My father owned several hundred acres of land there in Georgia. That may sound impressive, but it wasn't, really. It's not like the acres were worth much, filled as they were with scrub oak, snake-filled swamps and god knows what else. Most everything was concentrated on the family compound — five acres or so along a small lake where daddy's house formed the nucleus of a dozen or so different double-wide mobile homes occupied by Tommy and my three sisters — plus various in-laws, boyfriends and girlfriends, cousins, nieces, nephews and assorted hangers-on.

Tommy, as the oldest, had his eye on the big house Daddy had built back in the 1950s, and he'd already arranged to sell his own mobile home ("I ain't lettin' any of these other fuckers get it; I need the money.") Our mother had died nearly 10 years earlier, and though Daddy wasn't rich, he most certainly had more socked away than any of his kids. Tommy worked in a machine shop and maybe pulled down 30 a year. Jeannie was a nurse in a rest home and did OK, I guess. The rest of them in the compound had a checkered employment picture. I'd ask Tommy about cousin Billy's occupation or what Jeannie's husband did and he'd shrug.

"Last I heard he was doing something part-time at the hospital or some shit. Jeannie's husband don't do fuck-all. Ties ties all day, although I ain't never seen him fish. Drinks PBR by the suitcase. But he don't whomp on Jeannie — leastways far's I know — which is good. Otherwise I'd have to shoot him."

Now, getting out of the car, I was about to go into the belly of the beast: My family, gathered together for the first time, Tommy told me, in many years. Despite their proximity to one another in the compound, he'd told me they rarely paid much attention to one another.

"Best that way," he said. "Once in a while, someone'll ask me for help pullin' the engine out of a truck or something or to bail him outta jail on some DUI or domestic. But mostly we keep to ourselves."

Eyeing the front of my father's house and hearing the noise from inside made by a large number of people quickly getting drunk, I reckoned the odds of all this going well at roughly 10 billion to 1. I figured the best course of action for me would be to say as little as humanly possible while still being somewhat polite. That, it would turn out, was like saying you were going to lead a purple unicorn into a schoolyard and hope the kids wouldn't get too excited.

Gathered there in my father's house for the after-funeral party were a good 20 or 30 people, most of whom were relatives. (Son of a bitch like our old man didn't keep many friends, Tommy had reminded me.) Only a handful had actually been at the funeral service. There was a keg in the living room sitting on ice inside an old utility sink that had been dragged in for the event. Handles of cheap Bourbon, vodka and rum were on the breakfront I remember watching my mother polish lovingly as a kid. Bags of chips littered the dining room table, and the kitchen counter overflowed with boxes of various snack foods of the Frito-Lay and Li'l Debbie variety. (Poking through them as a means of delaying social interaction, I discovered many were already expired — some by as much as three weeks. Off my amazed face, Tommy told me funeral parties were always a good place to get rid of shit like this — "Stuff you'd be too embarrassed to leave off at the food bank for the niggers. But the drunk relatives don't notice.")

When Anthony's mother died a few years back, I endured a similar circumstance at his family's home in South Hadley, Mass. Sure, the food was a lot better, the people dressed nicer and the racial epithets were missing entirely. But the vibe was the same: Here's the gay couple, just in from San Francisco, how very interesting!

In South Hadley, the torment was what Anthony's family _didn't_ say. No one will ask a gay man how his relationship is with his partner the way you might a hetero couple. They certainly won't ask about whether we have any kids or about the schools in our area. Mostly, they just want to know about our careers, and you can see them mentally calculating if whatever job you've told them about fits in with what they might imagine is a "queer" occupation. As a graphic designer, I got the knowing nod every time. At that point, the conversation would sag like an old couch, the relative and me desperate for salvation from another passerby — or someone with a tray of appetizers.

But in Thomaston, Georgie, the direction they all had apparently agreed upon before I arrived was to be as forward as possible. And when I say "apparently agreed upon," I'm joking, because I know they didn't get together for some big family conference on how to deal with the Thearn issue. It was more like a collective consciousness — a school of fish that knew exactly when they were going to jog right.

"Shit!" said one teenaged nephew in a Caterpillar cap after I'd identified myself: "You the fag, right? I ain't never seen a fag before."

To highlight this, he screwed up his face and squinted his eyes at me, as if to discern the homo-erotic aura that must surely surround me.

His mother fetched him a sharp smack on the back of the head, but she didn't extend any apologies or attempt to discipline him further.

"He's just a little fuckin' hick," she told me as the teen slumped toward the chips table. "Don't know no better; ain't never been out of Georgia." She offered a snaggle-toothed smile: "I'm Trudy, one of your cousins somehow, I think, although I'm not quite sure how."

She set down her overflowing plastic cup of beer and shook my hand like a man. Sizing me up, I figured, to see if my fruity grip would cave underneath her country woman's strength.

"Sorry, I got beer all over my hand," she said as I reached for a napkin. "So, you're Thearn?"

"I am," I said.

"Named after your great uncle Thearn."

"So I've heard."

"I reckon you don't get down here much at all nowadays, do you?"

"Not since I left when I was 17."

"Well," she said, matter-of-factly in a slightly raised voice, like she was making a comment about seasonal weather, "God hates gays, an' I s'pose the folks around here aren't too much different."

There are times in life when you're confronted by something you knew was out there, but were somewhat unprepared for when the real thing suddenly appeared before you. I remember a few years ago when Anthony and I went to the zoo and I saw a lion up close for the first time (we didn't go for much zoos and museums and that kind of thing when I was a kid in Georgia). Sure, I'd seen lions on TV and in books, but seeing it there in the flesh was another matter entirely. I gawked at it for 20 minutes before Anthony finally pulled me away to see the otters ("The gay guy's favorite zoo animal," he'd said — "They self-fellate.")

Living among the gay and highly tolerant residents of The Castro the past 20 years had inured me somewhat to the reality of people like Trudy. Sure, we knew she was out there, but more in abstract — a quote in a Newsweek article, a wire photo of her holding an anti-gay marriage placard at some rally. Like the lion in the zoo, I supposed she'd stay put and not ever bother me.

But, of course, here I was, in her neck of the woods — in her cage. After delivering her little bomb, she primly took a sip of her beer and looked at me expectantly with a crooked half smile. A couple of other relatives who'd overheard her were waiting as well, to see how I, the gay man and object of God's hate, would respond to this assertion of how things were seen in Thomaston, Georgia.

I opened my mouth, but I had no idea what was going to come out. I thought about simply fleeing, but the house was so packed with people there was no chance I could move anywhere with the alacrity I'd really need. Fortunately, Tommy suddenly appeared, elbowing his way through the crowd with two cups of beer expertly held aloft.

"S'cuse me, comin' through. Hey, Thearn, follow me!"

Gladly, I did. Tommy blazed a path through the crowd with ease, his 300-pound frame opening up a channel before him like a turbaned Muslim passing through a Baptist pot-luck. We passed through the kitchen and into the hallway between the garage and the house. Tommy pushed the cup of beer into my hand.

"Figured an ass pirate wouldn't know how to work a keg, so I got you some," he said.

"Thanks," I said, taking a sip of the weak, fizzy beer. In all honesty, I can't be sure I'd ever had the opportunity to dispense a beer from a keg, but I wasn't going to tell Tommy that.

We were stopped in front of what we'd always known as Dad's Closet. Tommy pulled the string on the light to reveal what was to us a very familiar assortment of shit ranging from dog leashes and shelves full of canned nuts and bolts to hooks holding welding strikers and little packages of flints to go in the strikers. Dad was a welder, and a tinkerer, and the closet was just the tip of his tool iceberg; out in the enormous barn that functioned as garage and workshop, there were many more tools and machines — many of which, Tommy told me, were so rusted and/or obsolete as to be nearly useless.

"C'mon," Tommy said, leading me to the back of the wide closet. I knew where he was headed: Daddy's safe. It was an enormous Victor Dad had picked up for next to nothing before he'd even built the house; before any of us were born. One day when I was about 12, Daddy had one of those moments where he seemed to remember he should pay some attention to me, and he took me back here to tell me about it.

"This here is a vintage 1882 safe made by Victor Safe & Lock Company. I bought it over in Lincoln Park from some nigger who had it in his backyard for years. Paid him 50 bucks."

The younger me asked why it was so inexpensive. At about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, the massive black safe was a substantial and impressive thing, and even though $50 to me at the time was a fortune, I knew the safe had to be worth more than that.

"It was locked!" Daddy laughed. "Nigger didn't know how to open it, 'course. So I had Whitney Poulson come over with his crane truck and haul it over to my property, right here. An' I build the house _around_ it."

He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me.

"Thearn, ain't no one could ever get this safe outta this house, less'n they knocked the house down first. It's _part_ of the place."

"So how'd you get it open, Daddy?"

"I cut it," he said simply, describing a rectangle with his index finger just to the right of the combination dial. "Right here. Cut a hole with my torch, got in there and re-did the tumblers to a combination I could remember, then welded it back up, painted it over an' you'd never know it, would you?"

Back then, Daddy had opened up the safe to show me what was inside. There wasn't much, really. Some cash, a lot of papers, some old jewelry he said wasn't worth much, and a couple of guns. Antiques, most of them, he said.

When Tommy spun the lock and opened the door of Daddy's safe, it looked much the same inside. Tommy grabbed a stack of cash, did a quick count and said "'Bout five grand is all. Divvy that up later."

He put it back, then reached in among the various handguns on the middle shelf and pulled out a wooden box.

"Here it is," he said. "The Big Iron."

In the car, Tommy had told me about it, this gun. I'd heard Daddy speak of it before, but it never made much of an impression on me. What Tommy told me was that it was our great-grandfather's service revolver from World War I. When Tommy pulled it out of the box and held it up, he might just as well have pulled out a dinosaur egg or a dragon's scale for how alien this thing looked to me. I'd shot some .22 rifles as a kid, but Dad and Tommy never took me hunting since it'd been decided long ago I was "too delicate." This weapon looked too big for anyone to hold up and shoot straight.

"That thing is fucking huge," I said.

"Ain't it?" said Tommy with a grin. "This here is the M1911 .45ACP, which stands for automatic Colt pistol. Used by US troops from th'early 1900s all the way up until the '80s. This fucker'll knock down a horse at 50 yards, an' it killed a lotta krauts in its day. Nips too, I reckon."

He looked at me.

"Nice, isn't it?"

"I suppose so, if you're into that sort of thing."

He flipped it around and held it out to me, butt first.

"Well, it's yours now."

"Tommy..."

"Just take it, Thearn! Don't be a pussy. Just hold it, fer chrissakes."

I took it, held it for a moment and set it back in the box Tommy was holding.

"You can have it, Tommy. I know you want it more than me."

"You're damn straight I want it more than you. But I made one promise to Daddy on his deathbed, just one. And do you know what that one promise was? It was to make sure you got this gun... _and nobody else_."

"What? Why? Why the hell would Daddy want me to have this old, stupid gun?"

Tommy shrugged and closed the safe door.

"I dunno. I asked him, fuckin' _begged_ him to explain why he wouldn't give his coolest gun to his one son who actually _likes_ guns, who actually shoots the fucking things all the time. He just got all Yoda on me an' said: 'These are my wishes' or some shit."

We stood there silently for a moment among the welding supplies, spools of wire and solder and work gloves. We could hear the party outside getting louder as more people pulled up.

"Maybe he thought it'd make me less gay," I said finally.

Tommy turned to me with an odd smile on this face.

"Maybe. Would it?"

I shook my head. "Do you think putting Mom's old apron on would make you a good cook? Or make you grow a pussy and become a woman?"

"Fuck no."

"Well..." I said.

"I got it," Tommy said. "I think I got it. Leopard can't change his spots, right? So..."

We were still standing in Daddy's Closet, Tommy's tremendous girth leaving little room for personal space. We were sipping at our beers, neither of us too excited about going back out into the party.

"So what?" I said.

Tommy surprised me by giving me a hug.

"You're OK, Thearn."

"Thanks, Tommy. You too. For a fucking hick."

Suddenly, the grizzled face of Uncle Junior appeared in the doorway.

"Hey! Tommy! What, you tellin' your fruit brother about how to work a pussy or something?"

Uncle Junior threw his head back and laughed uproariously at his joke.

"How to work a pussy. That's great. Shit. Have fun in there, boys."

Tommy and I watched him go and turned back to each other.

"I don't think I can go back in there, Tommy."

"Yeah. I heard what Trudy said, too, the fucking bitch. When's your flight?"

"Five-ish. But I can go now. Got a book to read, keep me busy."

He smiled.

"OK, brother. Let's go. We can sneak out the garage."

He patted the box with the gun.

"You obviously can't bring this on the plane. I'll ship it out to you. Shit, even if you just get it mounted and hang it on the wall as a memory to the old man, I guess that'd be something."

I thought of Anthony's horror at such a decoration in our apartment and smiled.

"Yeah, it'd be something alright."

Back in town, I drove Anthony crazy by being very spare with the details of the funeral. He wanted to hear about the dirt, the slurs, the looks and all that, but I only told him it was my fervent hope never to return there again in my lifetime. In the back of my mind, I figured Tommy would drop dead from sheer obesity long before I did, and at that time I'd be faced with whether to recant on the Georgia no-fly zone policy. But I figured I had some time to think about it.

As for Anthony, I knew if I gave him some of the details — the remark from evil cousin Trudy, for example — he'd never stop talking about it. For him, the remark would be automatically assigned to all my relatives — to all residents of Georgia and the South as well. If I did ever go down there again, he'd re-hash it _ad nauseum_ in preparation for my trip, perhaps even insisting on coming along as added protection against the ignorant Southern hordes.

Yes, better for him not to know. As hurtful as it was for me, I at least understood the source and context.

After a few days, Anthony stopped pestering me for details, and life and work resumed as usual. I couldn't bring myself to explain the Big Iron to Anthony, and I was putting all my hope on Tommy not sending me the damn thing. He'd either consider it too much hassle, or he'd take me at my word — that I didn't want it — and keep it for himself. A week passed and I actually had just about forgotten about the gun when Anthony called me at work.

"FedEx came," he said.

"That's nice. But, then, they so often do."

Anthony had a mail-order book business, and he knew the FedEx guy by name.

"There's a funny little box for you from Georgia. A _heavy_ funny little box. Is it something from your dad's estate or something?"

I sighed and sat back in my chair as I anticipated his next question.

"Can I open it?"

And so I told him the whole story of Tommy, our dad and the Big Iron. There was a silence on the other end of the phone as Anthony took it all in, and I braced myself for the storm of issues and problems and suggestions he'd soon be blustering my way.

"Well," he said finally, "It seems pretty simple to me. Just send it back."

"Anthony, did you not listen to a word I just told you? I can't send it back. It's this... _thing_. This deal with my dad and Tommy and me, and he won't take it back. Dying wish and all. Whatever. Listen, just leave it in the box until I get home, and we can talk about it then."

To my vast annoyance, Anthony effected his whiny child voice, dragging out his words, freighting each one with special significance to make sure I understood each one.

"But Thearn, I am now _dying_ to open this thing! I've never seen a gun close up before, never held one."

"Anthony, no, seriously. Just leave it. You'll shoot your eye out."

The allusion to his favorite Christmas film didn't mollify him or even elicit a titter. He immediately switched gears from plaintive to petulant.

"Fine," he said in his clipped tone. "You can play with your gun when you get home. So long as I get to hold it before you send it back."

"Yes, you can hold it," I said. "Gotta run. Love you."

"Love you too."

When I arrived home, Anthony was sitting at the kitchen table with two glasses of Chablis, the FedEx box and a pair of scissors. Off his expectant look, I didn't bother to protest but simply sat down, took a sip of wine and slit open the box. There was a note from Tommy, which I read aloud for Anthony's amusement doing my best imitation of Tommy's drawl:

Thearn: Here it is. Couldn't send ammo so you'll have to get your own. The Big Iron takes regular 45 slugs. Just ask the guy at the gun shop. Take good care of it. It was good to see you. Tommy.

I chuckled holding the note, and Anthony wanted to know what was funny.

"Just the fact that he assumes the first thing I'll want is ammunition so I can go shoot this thing."

"Well..." Anthony said, eyeing the box. "Aren't you going to take it out?"

Tommy had packed the gun unceremoniously in wadded-up newspaper. The gun itself was in a simple cloth bag, and I slid it out as Anthony's jaw began to drop.

"Oh my god. Look at that thing Thearn! It's fucking _huge_!"

"I know," I said, holding it up. "And heavy."

Anthony reached out both hands, palms up, and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Give it to me, Thearn. I want to feel its raw, manly power!"

Once in his hands, Anthony opened his eyes and regarded the weapon as if he'd just come across some sort of alien creature. He shifted quickly to his analytical mode as he hefted and eyed the Big Iron.

"It's very heavy. A concentrated heavy, really. It's both ugly and beautiful at the same time. A terrible contraption, but so precisely engineered. And it still works, right?"

I nodded.

"As far as I know."

"And if it's almost a hundred years old, that'd make it an antique, maybe worth something." A beat: "We could use new countertops."

"I'm not selling it, Anthony. At least not yet."

He placed it back in the box among the newspapers and crossed his arms.

"Well, I don't want it in the house."

"Fine. I'll put it out in the shed."

"I don't want it on our property, anywhere."

"OK, Anthony. How about I get a concealed weapons permit and I just carry it around with me?"

Anthony ignored this and began listing all the reasons for not having a gun in the house. He'd obviously been Googling since the box arrived, and he cited statistics about gun deaths in America, the number of instances where homeowners with guns mostly used the guns on themselves in some way and, most importantly, what owning a gun would say about us.

"When you tell people you have a gun in the house, they'll freak out. Period."

"We won't tell them."

I knew this was ridiculous. Anthony had probably already informed half our friends via e-mail that we had a gun in the house. But we left it at a compromise: I could keep the gun, sans ammo, for one week, after which time I would either need to sell it, send it back to Tommy or, worst-case scenario in the "highly unlikely crazy insane event" I decided to keep it "for whatever crazy fucking reason," I would find a storage place for it somewhere far from our home.

"So you don't think we should mount it and hang it on the wall? That's what Tommy thought I might do with it."

"I'd rather put up a framed portrait of George W. Bush."

Even out in the shed, the Big Iron exerted a weird power over me. I couldn't stop thinking about it. First, there was the whole gun thing. If you live in a world where guns just aren't part of your here-and-now, they seem like strange and exotic things — scary manifestations of another world. A good part of that world, I truly believe, was the one where gay men were equated with child molesters. Having a big gun in our shed was tantamount to having a jacked-up pickup truck with a rebel flag painted on the side. Trappings of the enemy — what were Thearn and Anthony doing with this thing?

But more than that, it was the whole reason for the gun's presence in my life. The extremely curious last request from my father that I should have this thing. What did it mean? Did Daddy, as I'd suggested to Tommy, somehow believe my handling a gun would de-gay me? Or was it simpler than that, just an old man's sentimental bequest of something he valued to someone he loved — or at least should have loved?

At work, the unanimous opinion of the few friends I told about the gun was that I should waste no time taking the opportunity to shoot it. One guy even knew of a shooting range over on Dubuque where he'd shot pistols with his cop brother-in-law.

"You can buy bullets there, too, I think," he said. "They have a gun shop in the front."

"I don't think so," I said, realizing I was lying. "It's really not my thing."

Although I was aware of the existence of gun shops and shooting ranges, they'd always faded into the landscape of the city like other locations I had no use for. A brassiere shop, for example, or the Christian Science Reading Room (what _are_ those places, anyway?). But hearing of the existence and rough location of an actual venue for shooting — a place filled with, I imagined, stern, crew-cutted men who'd welcome me into their fraternity — proved an irresistible temptation. The notion of joining the fact of owning a gun with the real possibility of shooting the thing became this delicious, decadent bit of naughtiness I knew I couldn't resist.

In the afternoon, I found the shooting range online and called to ask about when I could come — and if there was anyone who could help me figure out the Big Iron.

There was, the guy said, and as luck would have it they had some open range time that very afternoon.

I called Anthony and told him of my plan after dismissing the idea of not mentioning it. Anthony is the kind of partner who pretty much needs to know everything I do and where I am at all times. Taking an hour after work to shoot a gun without telling him would just about be grounds for divorce. As it turned out, Anthony saw my decision as something close to that.

"Why? he said, exercising his annoying habit of attenuating that particular word when he knew he wasn't going to like the answer. "Why would you... throw that in my face like this when you know I don't like guns?"

"I'm not throwing anything in your face, Anthony," I said, my voice level and even (or so I imagined).

"Don't get pissy with me," he said. "I'm just asking."

_You're never "just" anything_ , I thought to myself, but I didn't say it. Instead, I offered this:

"Look, Anthony, I don't understand the gun thing anymore than you do, but it was my father's dying wish that I have this stupid thing, and it just seems logical that I should try it out. I mean, if someone wills you a piano, you'd play it, wouldn't you?"

"A piano never killed anyone," he said.

"Sure they do," I said, feeling the conversation taking that hard left into inane argument territory. "They're always falling on people in those old movies."

I thought I'd have to endure more of this when I stopped home to get the Big Iron after work, but amazingly Anthony wasn't home. Probably, he went to "that odious Starbucks" around the block rather than endure another confrontation with his gun-toting husband. In Anthony's bloated imagination, I probably now appeared in his mind like some Sylvester Stallone character, a machine gun in each hand, bandoliers full of bullets across my chest.

To hell with it, to hell with him, I thought, going into the shed to retrieve the gun. I made it to the shooting range just a few minutes after "open range" time and sat outside in the car feeling, for some reason, like a man about to rob a bank — or perhaps visit a prostitute. But people shoot guns all the time, all over the place, I told myself. It's a perfectly legal activity, perfectly safe in a controlled environment. There's no reason why a grown man, blah, blah, blah.

Inside, the guy at the desk's gay-dar went off like an air-raid siren, the alarm manifesting itself in the dude's bushy monobrow — which twitched and arched like a landed mackerel when I opened my mouth and said I needed help with a .45 pistol.

"Sure," he said. "First time?"

"Ever, for a handgun."

I put the gun on the counter in its little sack and gave him the brief 411 on why I had it.

"Very cool," monobrow said, turning the Big Iron over in his hands. "Don't see many of these anymore, but it's a damn good piece. Even one this old, it'll shoot fine." He looked up at me. "Man you need is Jay."

Jay turned out to be roughly the exact opposite of the crew-cutted martinet/former drill sergeant guy I'd imagined. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail, a thin, pock-marked face and the posture of a whooping crane. As he led me back to the range after monobrow supplied me with bullets, I noticed a bulletin board with a flyer for a women's shooting class to be taught by Jay.

Ahhh, I thought. OK, whatever. Turn the gay guy over to the women's instructor — it probably made sense in some weird way to the guy at the desk. Either way, Jay turned out to be a supremely patient and kind instructor who didn't appear to mind walking me through the very basics. When it came time to step up to the shooting platform, I slapped in the clip the way he showed me and flicked off the safety. The target looked a million miles away, but Jay walked me through the proper way to hold and sight the weapon and then said, simply: "OK, let 'er rip!"

The first shot surprised me with its kick and power, but it was nothing short of intoxicating — to have that much power in one's hands. I fired the remaining six in quick succession, perhaps channeling the way I'd seen movie actors do it. When Jay reeled in the target, every shot was in the 7, 8 or 9 area, with two in the bull's eye.

Jay whistled.

"You do that again and I'm gonna call you a liar — or the most natural marksman I've ever seen."

I had nothing to say to this. I felt a swoon, as if I'd just been told I'd won the lottery or the Nobel Prize. My throat felt closed up and I couldn't speak. Jay took the gun and slapped in another clip.

"Let's see that again."

This time, I had one in the 8, two in the 9 and four bull's eyes.

Jay whistled again, and called over some guy named Bob.

"Check it out, Bob. This here's Thearn, says he's never shot a pistol before and here he is, shooting like this first time out."

Bob took the target and examined it closely, as if looking for evidence of cheating. I just stood there, surrounded by a weird glow of competence I'd never really experienced before.

I was special. I had something special going on.

"He's shooting an old M1911? What, your granddaddy leave it to you or something?

"Something like that," I said.

"Do it again," Bob said.

So I did, with similar results. By this time, a small crowd had gathered, and Jay kept loading and handing me clips and I kept turning in the kind of results, Bob told me, that usually took years to achieve. He said if I were in the Navy, where he served, it'd earn me a marksmanship ribbon — if I'd shot it with a Beretta M9.

After an hour of shooting, flushed with success and delighted with my new skill, I excused myself to take a leak. Standing there reading a flyer about all the upcoming classes and events at the range I might take, I thought of sharing all this with Anthony and then felt the whole thing deflate like a failed soufflé. All this I was experiencing would be meaningless to Anthony; offensive, even. He would not share this triumph with me. It would only be this horrible thing Thearn was doing in which he'd have no part. My shooting career, in short, was over pretty much as soon as it had begun — at least if I wanted to stay with Anthony, which I very much did.

Feeling oddly light on my feet, I went back into the range and found the guy who'd offered me $500 for the gun minutes earlier. Among protests from Jay and Bob and the other guys who'd enjoyed watching me shoot, I told them I was going to be like Muhammad Ali and go out on top. I thanked them, shook hands all around with my fleeting fraternity of shooters and went out to my car.

Back home, an icy Anthony asked me how I enjoyed my "little escapade with weapons of mass destruction."

"It's not for me," I said. "I sold it to some guy there for 500 bucks. Not enough for new countertops, but a good bump for the vacation fund."

I tried to act casual, picking up a magazine as if the matter were closed. But Anthony came over and took my hands in his and looked me in the eye and said "thank you."

"You're welcome."

Later, he asked me if I ever divined in my mind why my father had given it to me in the first place.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe he did think it would make me less gay. Maybe it was a genuine act of giving, of something he valued highly. And it might have been an attempt to teach me something, or say something to me he could never say in life."

"So, maybe you would learn something, from beyond the grave," Anthony said, with a small laugh. "And did you?"

"I did. I learned that if we're ever caught up in a firefight, I'd be a good guy to have around."

"Really?"

"Really. I'm like Dirty Harry with that motherfucker. And I guess one other thing."

"Which is?"

"Despite the history of that thing, at the end of the day it's just a piece of metal — a weapon of destruction, as you say. When I saw what it was doing to us, what it _could_ do to us, well. It wasn't worth it."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

###

### Crouton: A Love Story

The crouton appeared on Ted's white ottoman, perfectly centered on the quarter-sized leather button that formed the nexus of stitching that held it together.

The ottoman was one of four pieces of furniture in the room, a one-bedroom place right above the bagel shop on Main Street, Breckenridge. It was purchased for him by his mother, along with the matching recliner, just after his graduation from the university in Boulder nearly a decade ago.

"I think you're crazy to have all white in a mountain town," she'd told him. But she wrote the check all the same. "Price they charge for furniture these days, it's criminal. Are you sure it's that much?"

A small glass-and-aluminum end table sat next to the chair, and a similar piece, slightly larger with one white-cushioned chair, served as his dining table. The 56-inch Sony plasma hung on the wall, along with three framed exhibit prints from the Denver Art Museum.

Ted noticed the crouton immediately upon entering his apartment. Everything else was exactly as he'd left it that morning before going to his office, a small graphic arts firm within walking distance of his home. A man with, say, several children could come home and not notice an errant crouton for weeks. But for Ted, it was the same as if he'd come home and found the place ransacked, searched by thugs, infiltrated by zombies.

He froze.

It was easy enough to see that whoever had left the crouton was no longer present. The door to his bedroom was open, and there was no place to hide.

Except the closet.

Slowly, he removed his sno-mocs and jacket. The shoes went on one of three shelves dedicated to just that purpose; the jacket, a white Marmot, went on its peg. He moved quickly to the bedroom closet and flung the door open. Greeted only by his typical winter wardrobe of turtlenecks and dark cords, he took a quick peek under the single bed, then went into the other room to contemplate the crouton.

Ted was not a crouton eater. He rarely ate salads, for starters, since the bag always went brown before he got around to making a second bowl. Even then, purchasing an entire box of croutons to go with his infrequent salads would have represented something of an extravagance. A typical box of Pepperidge Farms croutons probably held several dozen croutons, and figuring only half a dozen or so, max, would go on a salad every few months, the box would go stale long before he could finish it.

Store-bought croutons were also, he suspected, pretty high in sodium. Ted had mild hypertension, and he was cautious about his salt intake.

A box of croutons was the kind of thing that would sit in his cabinet for a very long time, plaguing him with a silent insistence that he come up with some way to use it. At one point he owned a box of Rice-a-Roni, pilaf flavor, which he'd bought on a whim. After noting that the sodium content per serving was over 1,000 milligrams, the box sat accusingly on his shelf for an entire ski season before he finally donated it during a Christmas food drive.

Standing about three feet from the crouton-inhabited ottoman thinking these many thoughts about croutons, Ted felt the old pre-Lexapro ball of dread welling up in his chest. It had been a good two years since he'd felt it – about the time that had elapsed since his doctor had prescribed the little pills that took the anxiety away and flattened him into a being who counted stairs and ceiling tiles and spent an inordinate amount of time every Sunday making his sock drawer just so.

It was definitely a packaged crouton, not a restaurant-made product. It was nearly perfectly square, with tiny flecks of what was probably identified on the package as "seasoning." It might be "Italian" style, he thought, or "garlic-herb" or even "Caesar." There were no crumbs or other debris around the crouton, negating the notion that it could, somehow, have been tossed in an open window or – even more unlikely – shot out of an air vent. It looked as if it had been placed there with a pair of tongs by someone who'd taken great pains to position it symmetrically, at the precise center of the ottoman.

In the middle of the button.

In his apartment, where he lived alone and never entertained. Even his mother hadn't been to visit since October. She never drove up to the mountains when snow was a possibility.

Ted silently formed the word "why?" on his lips, then reached for his phone. He could call his mother, but the thought wearied him. Her incredulity at the presence of the crouton would lead to a paranoid rant about the derelict ski bums who inhabited Breckenridge, followed by a plea to move in with her or "find some friends, maybe a nice girl." She would quiz him again about his sexual orientation, suggesting it was OK with her if he were gay if it meant he'd have someone to talk to. She would roll the crouton into an indictment of his mental health, telling him he was going "stir crazy," getting cabin fever from the long winters.

He could call the police, but even the cops in a small town don't have much patience for something as ridiculous as this. It was even more inane than the time last summer when he heard – or at least thought he heard – his doorbell ring at 3 in the morning. When he looked through the peephole, he saw what looked like a guy wearing an astronaut's helmet, peering right back at him.

The cop who showed up actually had a shotgun in hand, and he stalked around the building and up and down the hall before asking Ted to close the door and look again through the peephole.

The astronaut was still there, apparently some optical illusion caused by the glass of the peephole with the hall light.

The cop was pretty nice. He didn't laugh but acted as if it happened all the time. Ted could imagine getting the same guy to come investigate the case of the ottoman crouton. He'd get the reputation down at the police station as some crank loner, cooking up bizarre stories to get attention.

He slipped his phone back into his pocket. He squinted at the crouton and then walked into the kitchen. He opened every cabinet, every door and rummaged through the tiny closet pantry to see if somehow he had purchased a box of croutons, forgotten about it, and, while sleepwalking, perhaps, had placed one of the damn things on his ottoman.

He took Ambien, and he'd read stories about people doing weird things in the middle of the night under the influence of the drug. It was preposterous, though, to think that he could have driven to the store, purchased a box of croutons, removed one and placed it on the ottoman and then gotten rid of the rest.

For he could find no box anywhere in the apartment.

There was the cleaning woman who came in once a week. But she was very good — a woman who removed things like errant croutons; she didn't place them there. Besides, it wasn't her day to come clean.

Ted pulled out his phone again to check the time. It was already a good 20 minutes past the time when he'd have begun his evening rituals of uncorking a bottle of wine and preparing dinner.

"Damn!" he said, slightly stamping one foot. As a dramatic gesture, it was weak. He thought about stamping again, much harder, but he now felt the moment had passed. And what about the people who lived below him?

He walked back into the living room and glared at the crouton again. There it sat, unmoving, unthreatening except for the story – the _mystery_ , he supposed – behind its arrival in his apartment. Ted started to reach for the crouton, with the idea that he would simply throw it down the sink and grind it up in the food disposal. But his hand stopped about halfway, and he looked around.

If he discounted the possibility that he had installed the crouton in his apartment on an Ambien-crazed night mission, and that it hadn't somehow arrived by accident or been placed there by some insane prankster, then he had to accept its presence and the fact that he would likely never know the answer. Its idealized location at the center of the ottoman suggested that whatever force had put it there understood Ted's need for order. Removing it could disrupt some new equilibrium that now existed in his space-time continuum.

"That's the dumbest thing you've ever thought, Ted," he said aloud. Then he laughed an artificial laugh, crossed his arms and looked down at the crouton.

It was time to make dinner.

Knowing there was little chance he'd sleep with the alien presence in the adjoining room, Ted finally took a pair of cooking tongs and removed the crouton from the ottoman around 11 p.m. For a moment, he stood in the middle of the room, holding the crouton in the tongs out in front of him like it was a chunk of nuclear waste. He considered saving the crouton as some kind of "evidence" (they could do DNA testing on it, perhaps, and identify the crouton-placer that way), but ultimately he opted for the food disposal option, allowing the water to run for an extra minute after the grinding stopped to ensure it was washed away completely.

And when he returned home from work the next day, the crouton was there again, in the exact same spot.

Ted froze, again, but his body's internal processes moved into high gear: The dormant anxiety bomb inside his chest inflated to the size of a softball – maybe even a basketball. He could feel various chemicals being released into his bloodstream: adrenaline, norepinephrine, god knew what else. Perspiration spiked all around, with a concentration around the back of his neck and collar. His mouth went immediately dry, and the phenomenon he'd always thought of as "principal's office stomach" hit him with the force of a jackhammer.

He felt his bowels twitch and hold, but his bladder let go completely. He stood there for several seconds before he even realized he'd completely wet himself. The pee was hot on his leg, and it was making an exit via his left pant leg onto his extremely clean white carpet. Moving quickly, an adrenaline-fueled antelope before the lion, he made a quantum leap into the bathroom, where he stripped off his pants and boxers in the shower, pulled his shirt over his head and turned on the water.

Normally, Ted was the kind of guy who stood outside the shower, monkeying with the handle to get the water to the perfect temperature before stepping in. It always made him laugh how, in movies, people always got into the shower first and then turned the water on. That would never work in Breckenridge, where the water entered the house at, it seemed, exactly 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that's exactly what he did in this case, and the resulting blast of frigid water caused him to jump backwards, slip, fall and crack his head on the tub. He was knocked unconscious, but only briefly. The water was jetting down his throat and up his nose, activating his gag reflex and reviving him, he later imagined, just in time.

He'd been out just long enough for the hot water to have reached the showerhead, so in addition to choking on the water, he was also being scalded. With a bizarre, inhuman croak he'd recall later with equal parts wonder and horror, Ted pulled himself out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor, bringing the shower curtain with him. Bleeding profusely from his head wound, scalded about the chest and face and still barely conscious, Ted lay there for a moment wrapped in the wretched plastic shower curtain, highly cognizant of the fact that he was all alone.

There was no one to call out to, no one to help, no one to give a damn that he'd just had all this shit happen to him. He had to digest all of what had just transpired and make it right all on his own, as he always had. The temptation was to lie there on the floor for some time, but there were several factors convincing him that he needed to spring into action. These were:

1. The hot water in his apartment did not last very long, and if he wanted a warm shower to wash away the blood, urine and shower-curtain filth that now coated him, he'd need to act quickly.

2. His head was bleeding quite heavily, from somewhere around the back; his face and neck were on fire from the hot water. This was something that needed immediate attention – possibly even a trip to the hospital and/or a burn center of some sort.

3. The crouton was still out there. Ted didn't believe it was necessarily doing anything that required further action on his part, but it bore close watching.

Struggling to his feet and extricating himself from the shower curtain, Ted first pushed the shower handle to the middle. He was able to get the bloody curtain more or less in place and step under the stream of water. He watched in amazement as the water circling down the drain turned bright red, but after a moment it lightened up a bit, giving him hope that a Band-Aid would do the trick. Where the hot water had scalded him still felt unpleasant, but he soon became reasonably sure that he hadn't been horribly disfigured and wouldn't need years of painful recovery. (As an avid watcher of medical shows on the Discovery Channel, Ted was all too aware of what burn victims had to endure.)

He skipped shampoo for fear that it would irritate his wound, but his faculties had returned well enough for him to clean and dry himself off properly and get into clean clothes. His head he wrapped in turban fashioned from a large towel. Ted knew how to wrap a turban because he'd had a Sikh roommate in college at Boulder, and he'd once had Dalip show him how to do it.

It always pleased Ted to be able to deploy knowledge he'd acquired, especially when it was knowledge that initially appeared useless.

Even with the towel-turban, though, Ted could tell his head wound was still bleeding and that he'd probably need stitches. That meant a drive to the clinic, which was no doubt full of skiers getting their torn ACLs and broken legs looked after. It was Christmas week, after all, and Ted could probably look forward to a long wait – unless he could somehow contrive to start gushing blood onto the floor. The though of standing there bleeding in his makeshift turban surrounded by gaping Iowa skiers made him chuckle in anticipation: Maybe a trip to the clinic would be more fun than he thought.

Laughing made the blood flow more freely, some of it oozing from beneath the towel and onto his neck. Grabbing a box of Kleenex off the night table, he stepped into the foyer and pulled his coat on while he stuffed some tissues up the back of the turban. As he zipped, he regarded the cursed crouton sitting there on the ottoman. It was oblivious to all the pain it had caused him, and it mocked him in the highly annoying way only non-sentient things can mock. Fear of the crouton and what had caused it to be in his apartment had been replaced, at least temporarily, by anger. This little piece of dried bread and spices was really pissing him off.

Of course, it must be a different crouton, Ted reasoned. But it looked identical: the little flecks of spice, the near-perfect rectangular shape and the brittle, porous surface just waiting to play host to some sickly bottled salad dressing.

"Screw it," Ted said, grabbing his keys. He turned once more to the crouton: "And screw you! Bastard crouton!"

A sudden whim found him crossing to the ottoman, picking up the crouton and crushing it in his hand. He let the crumbs fall onto the dark spot on the carpet where he'd pissed himself, and he laughed another fake laugh, a mad scientist's giggle that pleased him immensely. He strode out the door feeling the situation was well in hand.

He'd deal with the carpet later.

"What do you mean, a crouton?"

"I mean a crouton, mom, a little piece of dried bread you put on a salad."

There was a pause on the line as his mother digested this information. Ted was back in his apartment, sporting a row of six stitches in the back of his head and an ice pack on his upper chest where he'd taken the brunt of the hot water. The doctor told him his burns were relatively minor, but that he'd probably look and feel like someone with a bad sunburn for a couple of days.

As for the skiers in the clinic, they'd barely noticed him, involved as they were in their own pain, their own forms to fill out and the unpleasant fact that their expensive ski vacation had been cut short by injury. By the time Ted got out of there, it was after 8 o'clock, so he grabbed some dinner at the soup place and was eating it on the couch while talking to his mother.

The Crouton Incident, as he was calling it now in his mind, had grown too big to keep to himself. The pain-killers the doctor had given him had deadened his senses enough that he thought he could handle his mother's 20 questions. Spooning cream of asparagus soup into his mouth, he countered her interrogation with what seemed to him Job-like patience.

"Why?"

"Why what, mom?"

"Why did you put a crouton on your ottoman?"

"I didn't put it there, mom. I told you, it just appeared. Twice. I don't know who put it there. It could have been evil snowboarders, the mob, aliens, an intelligent gas from Pluto. I don't know."

"A what?! Gas, your gas is leaking? Get out of there NOW, Ted. I mean it! Call 911!"

So much for trying a Vonnegut allusion with his mother. After reassuring her his apartment was not going to erupt in a natural-gas explosion, he asked her to hold her questions until he'd recounted the entire series of events.

There was another pause, longer this time — very unusual for his mother, who was seldom at a loss for words. Finally, she spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone:

"You have to get out of there, Ted. That's it, that's all there is to it. Come down to Denver and move in with me. We'll find you a place, another job. There's lots of girls down here, Ted, all hungry for a nice young man like you and..."

"Mom," he said, "I'm OK here, really. It's just a friggin' crouton, for god's sakes. And besides, I think I may have found somebody."

Ted was exaggerating, but there was a "somebody" of sorts. Her name was Elizaveta, and she was from Kazakhstan. In addition to the area's sizable Hispanic population, Breckenridge also had a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It wasn't unusual to find someone from Georgia behind the deli counter at the grocery store, or Polish guys doing roofing or just-off-the-boat Russians or Czechs cleaning condos. One of Ted's clients had a company that brought them over and found them service-industry jobs. It was Bricklin who'd suggested a maid after Ted mentioned he was spending his Saturday morning cleaning his condo.

"You're doing what? You're cleaning? Why?"

It was what Ted always did on Saturday in his ongoing quest to achieve spotlessness. It wasn't like he loved the process of cleaning so much, but he did like the feeling of being around clean. He didn't have that much else to do, anyway. Unlike 99 percent of the town's population, Ted did not ski or snowboard. He was drawn to the winter landscape of Summit County simply because it was so very clean. Nearly devoid of insects, covered in snow half the year or more and with crisp, high-altitude air, it was almost perfect but for May's mud season and the diesel pickups many locals seemed to favor.

"Ted, you are _not_ cleaning your own place," Bricklin said. "That's ridiculous. I'll send someone over, cost you 50 bucks a week, that's all."

He hung up before Ted could protest. But having someone come into his place and make it perfectly clean once a week? How bad could that be?

Elizaveta rang his doorbell on the very first day of September. She had a plastic carrier of cleaning supplies, and she wore faded jeans of some unknown European brand along with a stained jersey T-shirt and worn canvas shoes. She just smiled at him, and Ted felt himself literally go weak in the knees — something he'd never experienced before, so far as he could remember. She was, quite simply, the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. Her hair was raven black and tied up in a pony tail. She had deep brown eyes and the high cheekbones and pert nose he was used to seeing in Vanity Fair advertisements. She had a lovely mouth with thick lips and slightly crooked, white teeth, which she deployed in a smile that seemed to radiate a form of energy heretofore unknown to man.

In fact, Ted found he couldn't bear to look Elizaveta directly in the face after their first meeting. Despite the fact she was there to scrub his toilet and sink and vacuum his carpet, she was more goddess descending from Olympus to Ted. As a mere mortal, there was nothing he could offer her, nothing he could say, no level ground from which to approach her. She may as well have been one of the women in those magazine ads; the closest he could get to her was to sniff the page.

On that first day, he mumbled something about errands and left, returning hours later when Elizaveta was gone, leaving only cleanliness and fresh smells in her wake.

So it was just as well that he rarely saw her. She cleaned on Thursdays while he was at work. He knew it was still her cleaning the place, though, because she would occasionally leave him terse notes in her scrawling, exotic hand:

Ted, need flour. -E

That was one of her early notes, and it was set atop a fresh-baked banana bread. From the start, Elizaveta was more than your average cleaning woman. She did things like clean the silverware separator and dust the top of the refrigerator (both things Ted did, for sure, but he was under the impression he was largely alone in such endeavors). She even folded the end of the toilet paper roll in a neat triangle, a source of mild embarrassment to Ted, who was generally loathe to acknowledge the need for such.

For his part, Ted would write notes to Elizaveta before he left on Thursday mornings. At first he would ask for little things like "Please straighten up the pots & pans cabinet" or "baseboards could use a wipe." But later he went for short and cute: "Hi E! Thanks again for doing the things you do! You da bomb! —T"

He would imagine her puzzling over his Americanisms, bringing his notes to her friends to help decipher. In his imagination, she would giggle, smile and clutch the note to her breast.

On occasion, Ted would contrive to appear while Elizaveta was still in his apartment, just to catch a glimpse of her unearthly beauty. He tried to time it to when he figured she'd just be leaving (he certainly didn't want to catch her on her hands and knees in the bathroom). These meetings were brief and awkward, but Ted was convinced that, after a few years of such encounters, something might come of it.

It was Thursday now, two days after the second crouton encounter. No crouton had appeared on Wednesday — a fact that had worked to make Ted even more apprehensive had one actually appeared. Whoever it was, there was some twisted psychology involved. They were messing with him, big time.

Logically, Ted told himself, there was no reason to doubt that the crouton placer was Elizaveta. She was the only other person apart from the property manager guy who had access to his apartment. At the same time, it made absolutely no sense for someone charged with making the place spotless (which she did, with flying colors) to leave such an item on his pristine white ottoman. But what if it was some kind of Kazakhstani ritual or tradition?

It still didn't fit. Elizaveta was a perfectionist, a clean freak like him, and she knew how Ted liked things. The crouton, unlike, say, an apple or a wrapped granola bar, was a messy comestible. It shed crumbs readily, left a visible (if slight) slick of oil behind it, and was unwrapped and porous — a natural collector of microbes, dust, pollen, filth.

It had taken Ted several days to arrive at the Elizaveta theory for, although it was screechingly obvious, the pairing of The Crouton Incident and the Goddess was difficult for him to parse. After all, Elizaveta was the embodiment of something wonderful that Ted desired greatly, whereas the crouton, well, it was an unwelcome guest, a condiment non-grata, a flaking, oily intruder that had pierced his domestic tranquility with all the subtly of a Tomahawk missile. Already his mind had conjured what escalations might be forthcoming. Would he come home to find a half-eaten Pop Tart on the ottoman? A hunk of bloody whale blubber or a calf's liver? In his more elaborate flights of fancy, Ted had poked around wikipedia to identify even more objectionable foodstuffs and their ingredients or properties, just to be prepared if the worst came to pass:

> Haggis: the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep mixed with onions, spices, oatmeal and suet and boiled in the animal's stomach.

> Borewors: sheep, pig and/or cattle intestines stuffed with meat and offcuts, then barbecued.

"Offcuts," Ted said aloud to himself.

> Swedish blood dumplings: reindeer blood mixed with flour and served with bacon.

> Seal flipper pie from Newfoundland.

"Stop it Ted," he finally said, closing his laptop. "Just wait for Thursday and ask Elizaveta if she knows anything about the crouton."

And so he did.

Ted knew from past experience that Elizaveta finished his apartment sometime between 3:30 and 4 in the afternoon. Leaving work early, he found himself creeping down the hallway to his door with the air of a man intent on surprising a burglar. For a moment, he stood outside his door, listening for activity within. It was silent for a moment, and then he heard the toilet flush.

Good. That meant she was done with the bathroom, probably. He waited another minute, then made a great show of jangling keys and stomping feet as he entered. Elizaveta was bending over the couch straightening pillows, her perfect rear marred only slightly by the odd-fitting exchange-student jeans she wore.

He flashed back to a time a few months previous when he'd found her in a similar position. Her shirt had ridden up her back, exposing the top of her plain, white panties and a few inches of skin. He was certain it was the exact moment he'd fallen in love with her, because he couldn't help but notice two things in that flash of time before she stood up:

  1. The panties were dingy and ripped, the elastic band separated from the fabric. Yet she looked 10 times sexier in them than the most incendiary lingerie model, and Ted felt a twinge of something like guilt: the most beautiful woman in the world was forced to wear shabby panties.

  2. She had a tiny tattoo that appeared in the space between the elastic and the rest of her panties: Two little bumblebees – nothing more.

Ted had actually worked himself up to ask about them, aware that doing so would tip his slightly voyeuristic hand. She paused a moment at the question, considering him and his query. Then she smiled, patting her chest.

"Me," she said. "Busy bee, right? Always working." She laughed a wonderful laugh. "Yes, busy bee, but never the money to go with."

Today, though, her shirt was tucked in, and Ted had to mentally paint the bees in their proper place.

She stood up when he entered but did not turn around.

"Hi Elizaveta!" Ted said, in a stupid-sounding, faux-surprised voice that reverberated around the tiny condo as if it had been issued through a bullhorn. His eyes fell to the kitchen table where his note from that morning lay, crumpled in a ball.

He felt a sickening stab in his stomach as he recalled what he'd written.

E, had an accident in here the other night. Cleaned as best I could but ran out of time. Spot on carpet and (sorry!) blood in bathroom. Damn crouton, believe it or not! —T

He'd guessed she wouldn't even know what a crouton was – at least not in English. And when he'd written it, the suspicion that she was the bearer of the crouton was only a latent presence in his mind. He'd half-hoped the crouton mention in the note would lead to a longer note from her requesting an explanation, and maybe even expressing concern or regret for his accident.

"Elizaveta?"

She was still facing away from him, her hands at her sides. Slowly, she turned around to reveal her angelic face streaming with tears. She held her hands out to Ted, palms up, as if in supplication.

"Oh, Ted! So sorry... you fell?"

He stood frozen for a moment, not knowing whether to maintain some sort of professional distance or to step forward and embrace her, comfort her. That, of course, would entail putting his arms and hands around the most beautiful woman in the world. He settled for taking two steps toward her and extending his own palms outward.

"It's, it's OK Elizaveta. I'm OK. Just a, a bump on the head is all."

She took a step toward him, her hands now together, nervously moving against themselves as if she were applying lotion. She gave him what he interpreted as an imploring look, then cocked her head to the left and down. Her voice dropped to where he could barely hear the next thing she said.

"And... Ted?"

"Yes, Elizaveta?"

The hands moved against each other some more.

"You pee... yourself?"

He took a step back, then another as her eyes slowly came up to meet his. Part of his brain insisted he keep going until he reached the door. He still had his coat on; he could go down to Clint's for a coffee and wait a few hours to make sure she was gone. Then he'd call Bricklin the next day and tell him he needed a new cleaning woman. Man, even. A guy would be fine.

But he stood his ground, his mind quickly processing the options:

1. Deny it. Offer some story about a friend's dog, a neighbor's cat or some drunk guy who mistook Ted's apartment for his own.

2. Laugh it off. Yep, Elizaveta, that was me: pissed all over my carpet. He could mention some health problem, maybe. But, then, beautiful women didn't want to hear there was anything wrong with a guy's plumbing.

3. Tell the truth, sheepishly.

With Elizaveta's eyes on him, he turned away, his gaze resting on the carpet, the spot in question. It looked damp in a uniform circle shape, which he took to mean Elizaveta had already cleaned it. In fact, he thought he smelled some kind of masking fragrance — like Febreze. As he was settling on No. 3 and deciding how to start, he felt a light hand on his shoulder and Elizaveta's whispered "It is... OK."

Slowly, he turned, his hands finding her waist while her other hand landed softly on his cheek.

"I was scared," said Ted. "I'm all alone here and when the thing showed up the second time, I , I..."

And then her lips were on his and, for the first time since a game of spin-the-bottle 12 years before, Ted kissed a girl. She was, in fact, the only one ever after that, and when their children and grandchildren threw them a 50th anniversary party in 2060, the cake was decorated to look like a giant crouton.

"So it was you?" he asked, as they broke off that first, most extraordinary kiss of all time.

She smiled. She nodded.

"But... why?"

Elizaveta laughed — a tiny, staccato giggle Ted would soon learn to love. "Look at us, Ted. Worked, right? Like charm."

He couldn't deny it. The damn croutons had done what his mother, half a dozen shrinks and a score or two of web-hookup blind dates had failed to do: got him a girl.

Ted smiled a wide smile — so wide, in fact, that muscles in his face unused to such grinning were taxed to their limit.

"But why a crouton, Elizaveta?"

She smiled, tossed her hair a bit and shrugged.

"I poor cleaning woman, Ted. They were on sale. At store."

###
About the Author

T. Alex Miller is a graduate of the University of Colorado-Boulder creative writing program. His writing career has been spent mostly in community newspapers, although he also worked for a year in Hollywood (in development at the Sci-Fi Channel) and edited a magazine in Los Angeles (LA Family). He is currently the editor of the Summit Daily News, a newspaper in Frisco, CO.

In addition to his career in journalism, Miller has been active in theatre as an actor, director and playwright. His plays have been produced locally as well as in conjunction with the state theatre festival. They include _5 Gears in Reverse, The Adjudicators, Velociraptors_ and _Outrageous Claims._ His novels, _Ohiowa_ and _Zombie Road Trip are_ also available as ebooks.

Miller lives in Frisco, Colorado with his wife, Jen, and their children. Contact him at talex10@gmail.com.

