December 15, 2010
"Sherman Zahd" published in Pulse
My antiwar satire "Sherman Zahd," previously published in two print mags, has recently gone live in the online Pulse Literary Journal, published by Liz Pinto. Check out Liz's pub -- and if you write fiction or know someone who does, polish it nicely and send it on to her.
"Rear View"
This is the story of a refugee from the burbs who seeks to reconnect with his 17 year-old son. I heartily encourage you to comment. Can you relate? Do you recognize any of the characters? Does it remind you of any other fictional or real-life scenarios you’ve encountered? Any moments/descriptions that you particularly like? Stylistic comments? Thanks for reading.
Rear View
The afternoon he left home for good, Stephen Greenwood knelt on the carpet, clutched his seven year-old’s arms, drilled into his gaze with eyes serious as steel. Max dropped his head and lolled it as a narcoleptic might, then lifted his face as if drawn by the sun. “Nothing’s changing,” Stephen exhorted with a fervor that encouraged and alarmed.
Three years later, when Stephen was still making his twice-monthly trips of three hours round from San Francisco to Novato, the hot-weather, green-lawn burb he had fled, he learned from his ex that Max–scrawny, enticingly vulnerable, prone to tears--was being bullied in school. Overwhelmed by the Superman urge to protect, Stephen taught the boy boxing. “Balance,” he said in the seclusion of a stand of trees in the park, punctuating the point with an evangelical thrust of his finger. He bounced about like a bantam rooster, his now-long hair brushing bony shoulders. “You look like a Spartan,” said Max, his smiling eyes aimed at his father’s chin, his lips strangely twisted. Stephen raised the edges of his downward plunging moustache and cuffed his son’s head affectionately; but Max swatted his father’s hand away and smirked over fists pressed tight to his face like an elf either magically lethal or powerless and bluffing.
When Max was seventeen, six-two, rubbery thin, with hair dyed coal-black and nails to match, he began to see his father again at the urging of others and the prompting of a heart stirred by San Francisco stories. Forgetting balance, Stephen jabbered “check this out” and thrust a richly gleaming lacquered dark wood plaque to the boy. Max’s arms remained limp at his side. “Check it out,” Stephen said with a casual air undermined by a desperate note. His moustache drooped and a smile rose in synch on Max’s lips.
Max enfolded the plaque in long slender fingers.
“It’s shiny.”
Stephen nodded; friends had warned him; seventeen. “Shiny, yes ... and it has an inscription.” He reclaimed the plaque and gazed down as if at a hymnal.
“To Dr. G,” he read, “our favorite optometrist, for helping us “see”
the beauty of song. Love, the kids of Ms. Clausen’s class.”
A smile bloomed. “I had them all singing Beatles songs, Maxim. Fifth graders. Imagine.”
“Imagine all the people,” Max slurred like Neil Young.
“Lennon reference, that’s my boy ... man.” Stephen wheeled neatly and sat down at the compact computer workstation crammed between the small couch and the free-standing bookcase that divided his apartment into living and sleeping areas. “Look at this, Max-A-Million Bucks.”
Max looked at the computer screen as directed, but his gaze apprehended with longing and distance the years when he was fresh out of the box and his dad had showered him with plays on his name like confetti strewn on a conquering hero.
Stephen looked up and back at his son like a ten year-old in a go-cart shining up at his dad. “It’s a YouTube channel, Circus Maximus. For my songs.”
“It would seem to be.”
Without reproach, Stephen observed, “You’ve still got that–what, sardonic?”
“Ironic.”
“Bionic! Attitude. Eh?”
“B.”
“Har. Maxim, look, sixty-seven subscribers.”
“Har, look: Some graying hippie wannabe has your guitar.”
Stephen jerked his head back but let the jibe go. “This guy’s from Australia.”
“He looks twelve. You sure it’s legal to talk with him?”
Stephen wearied of looking at Max’s face and spoke to the computer screen instead. “This girl–young woman–is from England.”
“They’ve got Internet there?”
“Audible sigh. Listen, you ready to roll?”
“Sure, if it’s French.”
“You can’t stop that, can you?”
“You can’t top that, Shamu.”
“Hey, I’m not even five pounds overweight.” Stephen patted a very slight paunch. “Let’s head to my gig.”
“Where I’ll dance a jig,” the merry message belied by a self-mocking grin and mumbled intonation.
The café in the foggy Richmond, just blocks from the sea, was deep and narrow and brightly lit. The roomy front had thick hardwood tables, the slender midsection had an upright piano and a scaled-down drum kit and a cushy worn love seat and a white upholstered hardback chair; in the nook in back sat ascetic scholars ignoring the noise. The walls were adorned with black-and-white neighborhood photos and neighborhood kids’ watercolors, and the bookcase lodged relaxed piles of paperbacks and well-used board games. The kitchen effused the oppressive odor of cheap cooking oil. Stephen held the door and beamed within. “Cool, is it not?”
“Is it naught?”
“Dude, you are something.”
“Then I am aught.”
“And you are caught!”
Max pursed his lips at the pointlessness of the rhyme and stared straight ahead.
“Let’s eat,” said Stephen. Max slouched like a question mark but was half a head taller than his dad even so, and he studied the menu board over his head. “Ummm ... ummmm ...” The pause lingered, and the counter girl smiled at Max’s inane schtick and his father’s discomfort. “A bowl of Our Famous Onion Soup and a cuppa joe.”
“You drink coffee?” Stephen queried with paternal concern.
“Extra large,” Max told the girl, who wore the accouterments of the mild youthful rebellion of the day–nose ring, tattoo of rich green vines climbing up her throat–and was cool with dinos such as Stephen. Stephen wondered whether his son liked her, or girls like her, or girls at all, his black nail polish and languid demeanor suggesting gayness, though Stephen was unsure of the code even after ten years in town.
“And a glass of red,” Max slurred into the brown hair brightened by snowy strands that thatched his dad’s ear.
Stephen turned to smile at the jest but Max stared seriously into his eyes. With a confidential hush Stephen said, “I’ll let you sip mine; a sip couldn’t hurt.”
“Not at all, old pal.”
As soon as they sat Stephen raised his wineglass to his son to toast him, but Max curled long fingers around his dad’s hand in the manner of a Golden Age film star cupping a leading man’s hand for a light and drank long and hard, his gulp-gulp, gulp-gulp proclaiming an experienced drinker. Stephen widened his eyes and Max laughed huskily. “You’re blowing your image, man–for more Repub from the burbs than big city rocker.” A baritone had emerged, and he liked showing it off.
“Raising your son right, I see!” rasped Ruddy Rod. He was adrift in the mist of a
six-week drug binge and had let himself go, and his uncut hair of cocaine-white reached like weeds from beneath his black bowler. He had quit the last of the scores of short-term gigs (never “jobs,” a word for squares) that had comprised his working life, and lived on the payments from a crafty disability claim and the profits from selling grass out of his apartment around the corner.
“No,” said Stephen, “I mean yes, he’s my son. As for the raising him right–”
“Horseshit, man, you’re raising me fine.” The toss of the boy’s head and the unconcealed mockery in his smile reeked of inebriation.
Rod’s protuberant eyebrows, twin snowbanks with antennae, quivered at the discord between father and son. He lowered his roasted face to Max and fixed shining eyes on him as if to imply a bond more potent than father-and-son.“You’re father talks a lot about you,” he suggested with a provocative grin.
Max lowered his eyes like a poker player and smiled demurely.
“And I’ve written about him, too,” Stephen hastened, “in my songs you’re gonna hear tonight.”
Rod leaned in on Max like a barfly imparting wisdom via gravity of manner, force of will, and the subtle suggestion of physical force. “And they’re good,” he intoned, pressing Max’s slender forearm to the table and squeezing as if to test Max’s life force.
“I can’t wait to hear `em,” Max told the table pleasantly. “He sang me to sleep in the old days. Solid gold days.” When Max was seven, and Mona would press the back of her hand to her furrowed forehead and hawk at Stephen for his impractical talk about moving to San Francisco to plug into music, meet colorful people, discover himself, Max would gaze dewy-eyed at his dad to show his support. Stephen believed he discerned the same tender expression on his son’s face now but wasn’t quite sure, for he had removed his glasses in anticipation of the show; before he could make sure, Rod leaned heavily in between the two.
“Man, your kid looks like Tim Lincecum, ain’t you noticed? With that long hair and that smart-kid grin, like he knows something we’re too old or screwed up, or old and screwed up to get? Didja get him his Let Timmy Smoke t-shirt yet, or are you gonna plead poverty again?”
“I didn’t, and I’m not–”
“You’re not?” Rod said with fake astonishment. He tapped his nose theatrically to show Stephen that he understood the role he was to play in the charade, then straightened up and burlesqued perfect posture. “Of course you’re not. Hell no you’re not! Don’t smoke grass, Maxwell Silver Hammer. Your father is right.” To Stephen: “I’m going out back to not smoke myself.”
Stephen said softly, “I’m not even sure why I hang with him, Max. He’s a pretty good drummer, an interesting guy, a real local character. He’s not all that bad if–”
“Forget it, man. Weed’s great.”
Stephen felt impelled to protest, but was mesmerized by the subtly shifting changes he discerned in Max’s expression. “You’ll like our songs, Max. I hope that you will.”
“I’ll await a thrill,” Max said, an impish challenge gleaming in his eyes.
It was Stephen singing and playing guitar, Ruddy Rod on drums, Big Sal on bass.
Three Beatles songs and two Neil Youngs, and then, with half a dozen folks tuned in, they played Stephen’s songs, Stephen introducing each with a clear-eyed gaze and a sincere anecdote about the song’s origin or moral thrust while Rod whirled his sticks and grinned madly at the ceiling and Big Sal lifted his cartoonishly-large, black-stubbled rubbery chin in the air with the dignity of a palace guard. “This was inspired by my lost dog,” Stephen would say. “This is about my Grandma Greenbaum’s chicken soup.” “This is for my father, Major Achievement, who felt that money meant merit and told my Uncle Steven, quote, He’s not a pimple on his old man’s ass.” Stephen sang with an aching voice and a family therapy stare that clanked against the side of his texting son’s downcast head. Max texted throughout, and Stephen’s voice quivered as if in response to the buttons Max punched. Perspiration pushed its way out through the pores of his forehead, and the damp warmth flooded Stephen with the recollection of shame at 16 when–awkward, zitted, for the most part unfriended–he was forced to make a public service announcement to a class full of mocking kids. He finished the song and drank water. “Max,” he entreated the texting, smiling boy. “Maxim,” he burst. His son looked up at him with the mild curious gaze of a TV-watcher. Stephen stole a glance at the cluster of folks engaged with his music hoping that they saw, comprehended, and sympathized with him. “Maxie,” he said. “I wrote this song for you.”
Stephen had spent the last year learning to fingerpick like Neil Young over long hours of practice afforded by his part-time assistant optometrist gig. He picked the song well on the Martin he’d saved for ten years to buy. “For you,” he sang, looking down at his son, who slouched languorously on a well-cushioned chair, “to help me sing what I couldn’t say to you,” his voice pure and tender, “to find and renew you, to sing my song loud, to make my boy proud,” his ringing blue-green notes beautifying the lyric of a father-son separation and a personal quest. There was an appreciative reduction of chatter as Sal’s fat bass notes dropped emotional depth charges and Rod’s jazzy brushes softened the hue. Stephen resolved the song with a willowy, elongated “for you” as the sense of fatherhood he had once set aside surged through him again. The sweet applause of hearts in concord further lightened his spirits. “Maybe we forgot to tell y’all this is a record release party.” He brandished the CD he’d recorded over the past eight months. “So if you’re the sort of person who likes to buy this sort of music, this is the sort of music you might like to buy.”
“Or not,” crashed Rod’s cymbal.
“Buy or die,” slurred Max.
Stephen stepped to the table and made a ceremonious gift of his cd to Max as Rod passed the bowler beneath a scattering of bills which he fluffed up like a salad of greens. Max studied the cd case. “Seeking Home? You should call it My Art Lesson Money or My UC Tuition, or whatever.”
Stephen petrified with one arm frozen at a right angle to his body. A woman who had listened intently to the show clasped his wrist in her hand with its bat wing bones. She was trim with short silvery hair that spiked smartly over her forehead, and she looked into Stephen’s dazed eyes with a twinkling gaze of understanding and sympathy. “I’ll take one. That was wonderful.”
Stephen allowed her lightness to lift him. He engaged with her, and was gratified by her questions about his song ideas. He sold the disc to her, made a note to mount her twenty dollar bill on a plaque, sold a second cd to a young woman, then turned and discovered that Max had gone and had abandoned his father’s cd on the table.
Stephen walked to his car under a dark moonless sky obscured further by the sheets of fog jetting in from the ocean. He stepped into his clunker and inserted his cd, and was immediately consoled by the pleasurable sound of the music, the intelligent heartfelt lyrics, the consciousness that he had created it all and had done so with professionalism. And was he not a pro, he mused, having just drawn other peoples’ hard-earned money from a hat, having sold two cd’s? He pulled from the curb, drove to the corner, and rolled right around it. Part way down the block he checked the rearview and glimpsed Ruddy Rod, unmistakable in his bowler hat with his jaunty gait, gesturing wildly at his gangly companion, a tall, rubbery form receding in the darkness who appeared to be Stephen’s son; Stephen couldn’t say.
Rear View
The afternoon he left home for good, Stephen Greenwood knelt on the carpet, clutched his seven year-old’s arms, drilled into his gaze with eyes serious as steel. Max dropped his head and lolled it as a narcoleptic might, then lifted his face as if drawn by the sun. “Nothing’s changing,” Stephen exhorted with a fervor that encouraged and alarmed.
Three years later, when Stephen was still making his twice-monthly trips of three hours round from San Francisco to Novato, the hot-weather, green-lawn burb he had fled, he learned from his ex that Max–scrawny, enticingly vulnerable, prone to tears--was being bullied in school. Overwhelmed by the Superman urge to protect, Stephen taught the boy boxing. “Balance,” he said in the seclusion of a stand of trees in the park, punctuating the point with an evangelical thrust of his finger. He bounced about like a bantam rooster, his now-long hair brushing bony shoulders. “You look like a Spartan,” said Max, his smiling eyes aimed at his father’s chin, his lips strangely twisted. Stephen raised the edges of his downward plunging moustache and cuffed his son’s head affectionately; but Max swatted his father’s hand away and smirked over fists pressed tight to his face like an elf either magically lethal or powerless and bluffing.
When Max was seventeen, six-two, rubbery thin, with hair dyed coal-black and nails to match, he began to see his father again at the urging of others and the prompting of a heart stirred by San Francisco stories. Forgetting balance, Stephen jabbered “check this out” and thrust a richly gleaming lacquered dark wood plaque to the boy. Max’s arms remained limp at his side. “Check it out,” Stephen said with a casual air undermined by a desperate note. His moustache drooped and a smile rose in synch on Max’s lips.
Max enfolded the plaque in long slender fingers.
“It’s shiny.”
Stephen nodded; friends had warned him; seventeen. “Shiny, yes ... and it has an inscription.” He reclaimed the plaque and gazed down as if at a hymnal.
“To Dr. G,” he read, “our favorite optometrist, for helping us “see”
the beauty of song. Love, the kids of Ms. Clausen’s class.”
A smile bloomed. “I had them all singing Beatles songs, Maxim. Fifth graders. Imagine.”
“Imagine all the people,” Max slurred like Neil Young.
“Lennon reference, that’s my boy ... man.” Stephen wheeled neatly and sat down at the compact computer workstation crammed between the small couch and the free-standing bookcase that divided his apartment into living and sleeping areas. “Look at this, Max-A-Million Bucks.”
Max looked at the computer screen as directed, but his gaze apprehended with longing and distance the years when he was fresh out of the box and his dad had showered him with plays on his name like confetti strewn on a conquering hero.
Stephen looked up and back at his son like a ten year-old in a go-cart shining up at his dad. “It’s a YouTube channel, Circus Maximus. For my songs.”
“It would seem to be.”
Without reproach, Stephen observed, “You’ve still got that–what, sardonic?”
“Ironic.”
“Bionic! Attitude. Eh?”
“B.”
“Har. Maxim, look, sixty-seven subscribers.”
“Har, look: Some graying hippie wannabe has your guitar.”
Stephen jerked his head back but let the jibe go. “This guy’s from Australia.”
“He looks twelve. You sure it’s legal to talk with him?”
Stephen wearied of looking at Max’s face and spoke to the computer screen instead. “This girl–young woman–is from England.”
“They’ve got Internet there?”
“Audible sigh. Listen, you ready to roll?”
“Sure, if it’s French.”
“You can’t stop that, can you?”
“You can’t top that, Shamu.”
“Hey, I’m not even five pounds overweight.” Stephen patted a very slight paunch. “Let’s head to my gig.”
“Where I’ll dance a jig,” the merry message belied by a self-mocking grin and mumbled intonation.
The café in the foggy Richmond, just blocks from the sea, was deep and narrow and brightly lit. The roomy front had thick hardwood tables, the slender midsection had an upright piano and a scaled-down drum kit and a cushy worn love seat and a white upholstered hardback chair; in the nook in back sat ascetic scholars ignoring the noise. The walls were adorned with black-and-white neighborhood photos and neighborhood kids’ watercolors, and the bookcase lodged relaxed piles of paperbacks and well-used board games. The kitchen effused the oppressive odor of cheap cooking oil. Stephen held the door and beamed within. “Cool, is it not?”
“Is it naught?”
“Dude, you are something.”
“Then I am aught.”
“And you are caught!”
Max pursed his lips at the pointlessness of the rhyme and stared straight ahead.
“Let’s eat,” said Stephen. Max slouched like a question mark but was half a head taller than his dad even so, and he studied the menu board over his head. “Ummm ... ummmm ...” The pause lingered, and the counter girl smiled at Max’s inane schtick and his father’s discomfort. “A bowl of Our Famous Onion Soup and a cuppa joe.”
“You drink coffee?” Stephen queried with paternal concern.
“Extra large,” Max told the girl, who wore the accouterments of the mild youthful rebellion of the day–nose ring, tattoo of rich green vines climbing up her throat–and was cool with dinos such as Stephen. Stephen wondered whether his son liked her, or girls like her, or girls at all, his black nail polish and languid demeanor suggesting gayness, though Stephen was unsure of the code even after ten years in town.
“And a glass of red,” Max slurred into the brown hair brightened by snowy strands that thatched his dad’s ear.
Stephen turned to smile at the jest but Max stared seriously into his eyes. With a confidential hush Stephen said, “I’ll let you sip mine; a sip couldn’t hurt.”
“Not at all, old pal.”
As soon as they sat Stephen raised his wineglass to his son to toast him, but Max curled long fingers around his dad’s hand in the manner of a Golden Age film star cupping a leading man’s hand for a light and drank long and hard, his gulp-gulp, gulp-gulp proclaiming an experienced drinker. Stephen widened his eyes and Max laughed huskily. “You’re blowing your image, man–for more Repub from the burbs than big city rocker.” A baritone had emerged, and he liked showing it off.
“Raising your son right, I see!” rasped Ruddy Rod. He was adrift in the mist of a
six-week drug binge and had let himself go, and his uncut hair of cocaine-white reached like weeds from beneath his black bowler. He had quit the last of the scores of short-term gigs (never “jobs,” a word for squares) that had comprised his working life, and lived on the payments from a crafty disability claim and the profits from selling grass out of his apartment around the corner.
“No,” said Stephen, “I mean yes, he’s my son. As for the raising him right–”
“Horseshit, man, you’re raising me fine.” The toss of the boy’s head and the unconcealed mockery in his smile reeked of inebriation.
Rod’s protuberant eyebrows, twin snowbanks with antennae, quivered at the discord between father and son. He lowered his roasted face to Max and fixed shining eyes on him as if to imply a bond more potent than father-and-son.“You’re father talks a lot about you,” he suggested with a provocative grin.
Max lowered his eyes like a poker player and smiled demurely.
“And I’ve written about him, too,” Stephen hastened, “in my songs you’re gonna hear tonight.”
Rod leaned in on Max like a barfly imparting wisdom via gravity of manner, force of will, and the subtle suggestion of physical force. “And they’re good,” he intoned, pressing Max’s slender forearm to the table and squeezing as if to test Max’s life force.
“I can’t wait to hear `em,” Max told the table pleasantly. “He sang me to sleep in the old days. Solid gold days.” When Max was seven, and Mona would press the back of her hand to her furrowed forehead and hawk at Stephen for his impractical talk about moving to San Francisco to plug into music, meet colorful people, discover himself, Max would gaze dewy-eyed at his dad to show his support. Stephen believed he discerned the same tender expression on his son’s face now but wasn’t quite sure, for he had removed his glasses in anticipation of the show; before he could make sure, Rod leaned heavily in between the two.
“Man, your kid looks like Tim Lincecum, ain’t you noticed? With that long hair and that smart-kid grin, like he knows something we’re too old or screwed up, or old and screwed up to get? Didja get him his Let Timmy Smoke t-shirt yet, or are you gonna plead poverty again?”
“I didn’t, and I’m not–”
“You’re not?” Rod said with fake astonishment. He tapped his nose theatrically to show Stephen that he understood the role he was to play in the charade, then straightened up and burlesqued perfect posture. “Of course you’re not. Hell no you’re not! Don’t smoke grass, Maxwell Silver Hammer. Your father is right.” To Stephen: “I’m going out back to not smoke myself.”
Stephen said softly, “I’m not even sure why I hang with him, Max. He’s a pretty good drummer, an interesting guy, a real local character. He’s not all that bad if–”
“Forget it, man. Weed’s great.”
Stephen felt impelled to protest, but was mesmerized by the subtly shifting changes he discerned in Max’s expression. “You’ll like our songs, Max. I hope that you will.”
“I’ll await a thrill,” Max said, an impish challenge gleaming in his eyes.
It was Stephen singing and playing guitar, Ruddy Rod on drums, Big Sal on bass.
Three Beatles songs and two Neil Youngs, and then, with half a dozen folks tuned in, they played Stephen’s songs, Stephen introducing each with a clear-eyed gaze and a sincere anecdote about the song’s origin or moral thrust while Rod whirled his sticks and grinned madly at the ceiling and Big Sal lifted his cartoonishly-large, black-stubbled rubbery chin in the air with the dignity of a palace guard. “This was inspired by my lost dog,” Stephen would say. “This is about my Grandma Greenbaum’s chicken soup.” “This is for my father, Major Achievement, who felt that money meant merit and told my Uncle Steven, quote, He’s not a pimple on his old man’s ass.” Stephen sang with an aching voice and a family therapy stare that clanked against the side of his texting son’s downcast head. Max texted throughout, and Stephen’s voice quivered as if in response to the buttons Max punched. Perspiration pushed its way out through the pores of his forehead, and the damp warmth flooded Stephen with the recollection of shame at 16 when–awkward, zitted, for the most part unfriended–he was forced to make a public service announcement to a class full of mocking kids. He finished the song and drank water. “Max,” he entreated the texting, smiling boy. “Maxim,” he burst. His son looked up at him with the mild curious gaze of a TV-watcher. Stephen stole a glance at the cluster of folks engaged with his music hoping that they saw, comprehended, and sympathized with him. “Maxie,” he said. “I wrote this song for you.”
Stephen had spent the last year learning to fingerpick like Neil Young over long hours of practice afforded by his part-time assistant optometrist gig. He picked the song well on the Martin he’d saved for ten years to buy. “For you,” he sang, looking down at his son, who slouched languorously on a well-cushioned chair, “to help me sing what I couldn’t say to you,” his voice pure and tender, “to find and renew you, to sing my song loud, to make my boy proud,” his ringing blue-green notes beautifying the lyric of a father-son separation and a personal quest. There was an appreciative reduction of chatter as Sal’s fat bass notes dropped emotional depth charges and Rod’s jazzy brushes softened the hue. Stephen resolved the song with a willowy, elongated “for you” as the sense of fatherhood he had once set aside surged through him again. The sweet applause of hearts in concord further lightened his spirits. “Maybe we forgot to tell y’all this is a record release party.” He brandished the CD he’d recorded over the past eight months. “So if you’re the sort of person who likes to buy this sort of music, this is the sort of music you might like to buy.”
“Or not,” crashed Rod’s cymbal.
“Buy or die,” slurred Max.
Stephen stepped to the table and made a ceremonious gift of his cd to Max as Rod passed the bowler beneath a scattering of bills which he fluffed up like a salad of greens. Max studied the cd case. “Seeking Home? You should call it My Art Lesson Money or My UC Tuition, or whatever.”
Stephen petrified with one arm frozen at a right angle to his body. A woman who had listened intently to the show clasped his wrist in her hand with its bat wing bones. She was trim with short silvery hair that spiked smartly over her forehead, and she looked into Stephen’s dazed eyes with a twinkling gaze of understanding and sympathy. “I’ll take one. That was wonderful.”
Stephen allowed her lightness to lift him. He engaged with her, and was gratified by her questions about his song ideas. He sold the disc to her, made a note to mount her twenty dollar bill on a plaque, sold a second cd to a young woman, then turned and discovered that Max had gone and had abandoned his father’s cd on the table.
Stephen walked to his car under a dark moonless sky obscured further by the sheets of fog jetting in from the ocean. He stepped into his clunker and inserted his cd, and was immediately consoled by the pleasurable sound of the music, the intelligent heartfelt lyrics, the consciousness that he had created it all and had done so with professionalism. And was he not a pro, he mused, having just drawn other peoples’ hard-earned money from a hat, having sold two cd’s? He pulled from the curb, drove to the corner, and rolled right around it. Part way down the block he checked the rearview and glimpsed Ruddy Rod, unmistakable in his bowler hat with his jaunty gait, gesturing wildly at his gangly companion, a tall, rubbery form receding in the darkness who appeared to be Stephen’s son; Stephen couldn’t say.
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