481

Chuck

As a child of eight or nine, Chuck began fantasizing about being the only person left on Earth. He didn’t think loneliness would be a problem, because he was awfully good at not having friends. Nor did he think he’d miss anyone in particular—least of all his mom, because he did not believe she truly loved him.

Chuck relished the idea of unrestricted access to anything and everything, especially to all the toys he’d coveted that were beyond his family’s means, and all the candies, cakes, donuts, and ice-cream sundaes he did not get to eat on account of Mean Old Mister Tooth Decay. In other words, it wasn’t omnipotence per se that rang Chuck’s chimes within his childish world of make-believe. It was license. And shortly after the onset of puberty, he discovered that the license his reveries found most appealing had become decidedly licentious; which is to say Chuck had evolved from being the only person left on Earth into being the only male person left on Earth, and ooo-la-la, la-laaa.

But not to worry. Chuck rarely ventured beyond First Base in flexing licentious license with the women of his dreams—not even after reaching manhood. In fact, another kind of fantasy had taken root in Chuck’s brain by then and was demanding more than equal time.

In this other more compelling, albeit ultimately distressing, fantasy, Chuck imagined reliving a week or two of his childhood with the discerning mind of an adult at play in his brain pan. He imagined scrutinizing everything and anything—especially the grownups who’d populated his world back then, and extra-especially his mother. 

Did she really not love him? Had he been misreading the signs?

In looking back on those times from the vantage point of his twenties and thirties Chuck never found convincing evidence that his mother’s routine professions of maternal affection had been anything more than spun sugar. He saw himself as the bitterly inconvenient truth of her existence—the avatar of her thwarted ambitions.

And so Chuck found himself fantasizing about again being eight or nine but with his adult powers of observation and evaluation fully operational. He imagined playing under the dining-room table while his mother and her best friend, Mrs. McCann, shared secrets over coffee in the living room; he imagined catching, this time, all the words that had flown over his head. And he imagined studying his mother’s features more closely and peering deeper into her eyes to locate true tenderness when she greeted him after school.

But the distressing part for Chuck was, he knew he hadn’t missed or misinterpreted anything as a child of eight or nine, or six or seven, or four or five. Because love is like a vibrating string that induces vibration in a string close by, and the strings in Chuck’s heart had never known inductive motion.

# # #

886

Hope

“Who is it?” David bellows into the intercom. He stresses the who instead of the is, making the statement more like a warning or a scolding than an inquiry—an oral BEWARE OF DOG sign in all caps with triple exclamation points.

“It’s Vincent,” Vincent responds coolly, attempting to deflect this unanticipated animosity with contrapuntal amiability. “I’m here about the fountain pens?”

Vincent waits in the rain for what seems like forever, and is about to press 4A again when David ends his signature pregnant pause with something unintelligible and buzzes Vincent in.

The vestibule smells like a mixture of damp dog and cooked cabbage, and the stairway’s right there, as impatient and in-your-face as the bellicose voice on the intercom. Vincent hears a salvo of deadbolts unlatching in the vertical distance and starts taking the steps two at a time. It’s like him to meet every challenge with a headlong rush, but in this instance it’s more like getting the blood flowing to offset the chill. By the fourth floor he’s winded and trudging, and has to lean over the railing with his forehead on his forearm while his heart-rate reluctantly stabilizes.

David’s left the door ajar, but Vincent knocks just the same. Lightly. The door swings a few more degrees and Vincent can see David slouching on the sofa, staring at the TV with his open pie-hole verging on drool.

Vincent steps in and stands there, waiting for David to acknowledge his presence or at least exhibit one or more signs of life. He’s like Silas Marner in full-on catatonia, Vincent thinks, David’s Kim Jong-il sweatshirt notwithstanding.

“It’s lucky for you I’m no ‘Dunstan Cass,’” Vincent jests in a bid to break David’s trance. “Otherwise, I’d’ve grabbed your sack of gold and been long gone by now.”

David languorously turns his pallid, doughy face in Vincent’s direction and begins boring a hole through Vincent’s forehead with his eyes. He lets ten or fifteen seconds elapse before uttering, “Huh?”

It comes as no surprise to Vincent that yet another obscure literary allusion—in this case to George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in which magnum plot twists occur during the eponymous protagonist’s random cataleptic seizures—has shot wide of the mark. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and Vincent has long since stopped giving a shit. And so, with neither amplification nor apology, he begins recapping his reason for being there.

“Okay ... well ... I’m the one Marjorie from the resale shop called you about—about your late mother’s fountain pens. You told her I could come by any time as long as I brought plenty of cash, and ... well ... here I am.” Vincent downplays the cash stipulation by chuckling as he says this, but David’s deadpan expression does not change. Nor do David’s eyes stray from Vincent’s forehead, which Vincent endures without discomfiture, having been forewarned of the young man’s idiosyncratic forehead-gazing by Marjorie when he was purchasing Hope’s dishcloths.

At length, which is to say absurd length, David lowers his eyes and says, “You’re the guy who bought Hope’s dishcloths, yeah?”

“Right. Yes. That’s me,” Vincent replies, nodding.

“Why?”

“Why? Oh ... well ... I do some photography and I found them at the resale shop and I thought they might make a charming still-life arrangement.”

“Charming?” David repeats, finding Vincent’s forehead again. “Yeah, I guess Hope had a knack for ‘charming.’ You could even say ‘charming’ was Hope’s métier.”

Vincent isn’t sure if David is being sarcastic with this reference. Moreover, he wonders if it’s a subtle payback in kind for his errant invocation of a George Eliot novel. He hasn’t heard or seen the word “métier” since Jack Nicholson, as sardonic gumshoe Jake Gittes, used it in the 1974 motion picture Chinatown. He dismisses this conclusion out of hand, however, as giving a douchebag too much credit. “Métier,” he says, smiling crisply. “Haven’t heard that word since Jack Nicholson used it in Chinatown.”

“Bingo,” David answers. He counts to twelve in his head, rises, and says, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Vincent follows David into the kitchen, where David motions for him to take a seat at the table—at the table, Vincent realizes: the round, chrome-trimmed, 1950s-era Formica table where poor Hope had keeled over into a plate of chicken-fried steak.

The table has what’s called a boomerang pattern, featuring overlapping stylized boomerang outlines in light, medium, dark, and bluish gray tones against a soft gray background. Stimulated by the acuteness of this detail, Vincent’s imagination goes hyperactive and his skin into gooseflesh-mode as he envisions Hope slumping there so pitiably. An undignified, unworthy way for someone so sweet and gentle to leave this world he thinks, and the thought pierces his heart like a poison dart.

Because, Vincent just knows Hope had to have been sweet and gentle; because only a sweet and gentle soul could have knit exquisite dishcloth after exquisite dishcloth. And pondering her breathtaking handiwork and undeserved tragicomic demise has imbued Hope in Vincent’s mind with an almost unbearable poignancy. He has become as obsessed with her as Dana Andrews was with the presumably murdered Gene Tierney in the quintessential film noir Laura. Only in this film there’s no hope of Hope coming back from the dead to find true love.

# # #

731

Queenie

“No, I’m dead serious, man,” Barry insists. “Sell me what you’re wearing.”

“You need to seriously go fuck yourself, man,” the man answers, shoving Barry aside with sufficient force to make him stumble backwards and collide with a bike rack.

“I need your damn clothes!” Barry bellows at the man’s rapidly receding, FUBU-clad figure.

Barry hasn’t exactly fallen to the ground, but almost. He’s awkwardly commingling with the bike rack and has to wrench himself upright. In doing so, he snags his pants on a sharp burr protruding from a protuberant galvanized bolt.

“Shit!” he exclaims on discovering the resulting rip in his brand new Gap 1969 Limited Edition Premium Jeans (rigid rinse, with selvage trim on the coin pocket). They and his brand new Gap (PRODUCT) RED™ cotton T—in soft black with the word “HAMME(RED)” raggedly silk-screened to simulate a cracked and faded, dozens-of-washings look—had been purposely selected from an official Gap window manikin to impress Queenie, the object of Barry’s ardor, with (a) Barry’s Zeitgeist-synchronized sense of style and (b) Barry’s deeply ingrained social awareness.

If the jeans by themselves don’t get the job done, Barry had reasoned, then surely the fact that half the profits from his T-shirt had gone or would eventually be going to a global fund to fight AIDS, will.

In other words, mission accomplished.

Or so Barry had believed while brandishing cash at the Gap. He’d even embellished the ad hoc ensemble with a military-inspired wool jacket featuring four extra-generous flap pockets, shoulder epaulettes with button closures, strapped cuffs, and a concealed nylon hood.

It was all over but the waiting, Barry was certain—meaning, the waiting outside the bodega where Queenie had been shopping the day she saved his sorry ass (as Queenie had put it) when his Harley had fallen on top of him, and she had lifted it from his sprawling person with the apparent ease of a mommy freeing a traumatized two-year-old from a toppled trike.

Four days he had waited. Four days! And then, on the fifth day, there she comes, glowing and gliding towards him like an ethereal form, moving as if in slow-motion through a throng of faceless pedestrians paralyzed in their tracks by her grandeur.

The world becomes a blur for Barry as Queenie floats past him and into the store. He stands there shivering in the sweltering heat, waiting for her to emerge, his heart marking the minutes at two beats per second.

Barry hears her before he sees her. Hears her calling, “Yeah, man, the same to you!” And as she slides back into the sunlight, he hears himself speaking to Queenie, saying, “Hey—remember me?”

“No,” Queenie answers with a tone that’s equal parts indifference and impatience.

Barry gulps like some kind of over-the-top buffoon in some cartoonish melodrama. Like Jack Larson as “Jimmy Olsen,” for instance, in any 1950s episode of Adventures of Superman.

“I’m the guy you pulled the motorcycle off of,” he says, pointing. “Up the street? Over there?”

Queenie’s amber eyes give Barry a thorough going over, then light up with recognition. “Jesus Christ, it’s the Marlboro Man! Who you tryin’ to be now, Jack—that ‘Bono’ dude? And why you wearin’ that fuckin’ coat in this fuckin’ heat, man?”

Barry realizes he’s sweating buckets, but carries on as though he weren’t, as though he were indeed channeling Bonovian cool. “Listen,” he says, “I just have to ask you again—”

“Ask me what?”

“If you’ll go to Starbucks with me. When I asked you the last time, your exact words, as I recall them, were ‘No fuckin’ way.’”

Barry smiles at Queenie after saying this. Smiles like they’re sharing a joke or reminiscing about some distant contretemps whose memory they’ll shortly be washing away with raspberry mocha.

Queenie smiles back at Barry and keeps smiling at Barry while delivering her reply. “I’ll put it a little differently this time,” she says, giving his bulky pockets and pointless epaulettes a final, bemused inspection. “How about, ‘No fuckin’ way—José.’”

She leaves Barry standing there, slack-jawed, in a puddle of perspiration. All seems lost as he watches her walking off, swinging her bag of groceries in sublime unison with her strides.

But then Barry sees Queenie checking out a FUBU man who’s passing her on the sidewalk and coming his way, and decides all’s not lost after all.

# # #

209

Little Barry

Big Barry, to all intents and purposes, has disappeared and Little Barry wants his daddy back. Gone without a trace are Big Barry’s pirate trappings and sundry cowpoke furnishings, and with them his peerless “Big Barry” persona.

Worse still, like a self-inflicted mortal blow Big Barry has upped and sold his Harley Davidson—the thundering, fire-belching, ass-kicking “hog” against which Jimmy’s father’s lily-livered, chicken-legged Vespa motor scooter had exuded about as much machismo as an antique treadle sewing machine.

“Where’s the hog, Daddy?” Little Barry had demanded with a quivering, panic-singed voice, his horrified eyes all but sucked from their sockets by the black hole where the motorcycle had formerly held sway like a gunmetal god in Big Barry’s garage. “Where’s the hog?—”

“Sold it,” Big Barry had answered, just like that. And just like that Little Barry’s universe had collapsed to pinhead proportions.

And so, when Big Barry brings Little Barry home a little earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon, Little Barry does not emulate Big Barry’s erstwhile cocksure saunter on making his way from the curb to the porch. He runs as fast as he can, desperate to escape the stranger in his father’s car, determined to reach the haven of his bedroom before the first sob.

# # #

315

Chuck

Chuck flips the switch that puts his Kindle to sleep, then the one that shuts off the blue-white diode of his reading lamp, which he wears on his head. It is a headlight in the literal sense, complete with an adjustable elastic band, and much more convenient and effective than any clip-on reading lamp he’s ever owned. He removes that and sets it and the Kindle on the nightstand and checks that the alarm’s turned on on his digital alarm clock.

The room’s dark now, and the ceiling fan’s gently thrumming. But even under conditions so conducive, Chuck’s mind, as usual, won’t allow nodding off. It starts working, as usual, on something, and the something in this case is how wonderful is the book he’s reading—a novel from 1915 called The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford—and how much lonelier the fact of that makes him feel.

Chuck always feels lonely. But being unable to share with anyone the sumptuous perfection of Ford’s prose or the novel’s masterfully woven story-line or the powerful insights and delightful wit the book contains aggravates his isolation to the throbbing point. Chuck simply does not know anyone who would give a rat’s ass about The Good Soldier or about Ford Madox Ford.

Or about Chuck himself, come to think of it. Which Chuck does, of course, come to think of.

Why am I here? he winds up wondering, inevitably. It is his inevitable meta-theme. He means nothing to everyone, something to no one, increasingly less to himself. He thinks about all the photo albums his image must be in—an anonymous background element in thousands of keepsake snapshots snapped by untold strangers at parks, fairs, zoos, monuments, historic and scenic points of interest, and by marginal acquaintances at social gatherings whose fringes he routinely helps populate.

“Background fodder,” Chuck mumbles, rolling onto his side. “My raison d’être.”

# # #

183

Milena

Shortly after David dumped her for that bimbo he picked up at his mother’s funeral, Milena decided there wasn’t any point in keeping her Mirena intrauterine contraceptive “up there” any longer. She’d had the nasty little pickax-looking gadget inserted more so for David’s convenience and pleasure than her own, and apart from now being pointless it had acquired a sort of snide symbolic stature—an ever present reminder, within the most intimate region of her innermost self, of the all-encompassing sway which that motherfucking shitass (her latest appellation of choice) had held over her.

So she made an appointment and went to the doctor and had the gizmo removed as a Mother May I? giant step toward moving on.

Only, the ground had collapsed beneath her footfall, as it were, and moving on from David had proved to be outside the compass of Milena’s resolve. Lying on her back in bed at night, she found herself staring through closed eyelids for hours on end at an unfathomable, impenetrable blackness; struggling for an answer, straining to understand why:

Why? Why wasn’t I good enough for him?

# # #

675

Crystal

Queenie and Crystal are conversing over coffee at the new Starbucks on 152, across from the new Hungry Howie’s pizza franchise, adjacent to the new Hy-Vee grocery store. Crystal is vaguely sipping a venti raspberry mocha. Queenie’s draining a venti chai tea latte as though there were no tomorrow—in great, which is to say grande, cup-compressing draughts.

“Leave some for the fish,” Crystal jokes meekly. She’s been saying pretty much everything meekly since becoming tormented with the memory of the snot bubble that billowed from her nostril and embarrassed her to death in front of her fifth-grade class.

“Fuck the fuckin’ fish,” Queenie quips mid-slurp, “and the sea horses they rode in on.”

Crystal laughs. No one can make her laugh like Queenie can.

Queenie sucks the cup to the point of collapse, slams it down on the table, leans back, says “Ahhhh,” wipes her mouth with her sleeve, then says, “Jesus! That was damn good. I’m gonna go grab me another—”

Crystal smiles, nods, and begins absently tearing an unbleached-paper napkin into more or less uniform strips. Across 152, a man in a blaring pink sweatshirt emerges from Hungry Howie’s with a large pizza box in his hands. Crystal notices the steam wafting from the box, but the sweatshirt does not register. She begins twisting the napkin strips into miniature ropes.

Queenie comes back in her usual flash and drops into her chair. “Doggone, I love these things,” she says, swigging a little less vigorously now on account of the piping hotness.

“Y’coulda fooled me,” Crystal responds meekly.

“So listen, girl,” Queenie begins, ready at last to get down to bidness. “You gotta get over this snot-bubble bullshit. You’re worse than that ‘other monk.’”

“Huh? What other monk?” Crystal asks, baffled. (No one can baffle her quite like Queenie can, either.)

“Good God, Crystal, gimme a break—don’t tell me you ain’t never read no Zen koans?”

“No,” Crystal answers with a flush of unwarranted shame. “I don’t even know what they are.”

“Ach du fuckin’ lieber, liebchen!” Queenie exclaims, amazing Crystal with her unexpected use of German. “I mean, mein Gott in Himmel, they’re little stories that teach you somethin’, only not in so many words.”

“Okay, and—?”

“And you’re just like the second monk in the one about the girl and two monks.”

Queenie pauses and lets Crystal’s curiosity build through two long pulls on her latte, then picks up an untwisted napkin strip and dabs her lips and continues.

“There’s these two monks, see. And they’re walkin’ through this woods. And they come to a river and there’s this beautiful young woman standin’ there, and she don’t know what to do ‘cause she’s afraid she’ll ruin her kimono and her pretty little flip-flops and white split-toe socks if she tries crossin’ that river. And the first monk goes, ‘Hey, what’s up, girl? You afraid you gonna get all wet if you try crossin’ that river?’ And the girl’s all, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And he just picks her up and carries her across, just like that. And she’s all, ‘Hey, thanks a million, monk,’ and they all go their separate ways. “But the other monk starts stewin’ over what happened, ‘cause in their thing, you understand, monks ain’t s’posed to touch no women. And finally, after like four or five miles, or whatever, he just can’t hold it in any longer, and he goes, ‘Hey, man, what was up with carryin’ that fine young thing across the river? You wasn’t s’posed to touch her, man.’ And the first monk turns and looks the other monk straight in the eye and says, ‘Listen, Chuck, I put her down back at the river—you been carryin’ her all the way here!’”

Crystal looks up from her rope-making and Queenie leans forward till their noses nearly touch.

“Crystal,” Queenie says, letting her stentorian voice slip to a loud whisper, “It’s time to stop carryin’ your fuckass bubble around. You need to go ahead and put that bitch down, girl. Ain’t nobody else give a scheisse.”

# # #