God I love the ancient Greeks. And I had the chance to share a little of that love in a flash fiction contest requiring the tale to be set in Delphi. It explores the Apollonian-Dionysion divide (I use the less familiar Hellenized "Dionysos" btw) and copped the celery wreath (that's what they won in the Nemean Games at Delphi; the familiar laurel wreath is an Olympian thing). The contest was sponsored by
Doorknobs & Bodypaint; "Apollo's Light" is here.
November 24, 2011
August 22, 2011
Flash: "Insidious"
My flash fiction piece "Insidious" won honorable mention of sorts in a contest by the fine flash fiction zine Doorknobs & Bodypaint. The parameters were: 250 words max, set in 1946, had to employ the phrase "without right," major theme treachery, sub-theme insidiousness. That was almost longer than the story! Thanks always for reading.
June 29, 2011
"Fig Tree Gazing" in Compass Rose
Can a longtime couple get it together? "Fig Tree Gazing" touches this tender topic in the just-published annual Compass Rose, the wonderful lit mag of Chester College in New Hampshire. The editors favored the story with their Editor's Choice designation. This is really a beautiful magazine. The print and main online editions are lovely, and the iPad edition has a marvelously fluid interface. And they're wonderful lit-loving people, too. Check them out, and if you'd like to support a great college lit mag, why not order a copy for ten bucks? If you'd like me to inscribe a copy for you, shoot an email and we can arrange it: jstevensondell@gmail.com
The title of the tale? A riff on an Emerson allusion to an Arabian proverb. Enjoy a fig now!
The title of the tale? A riff on an Emerson allusion to an Arabian proverb. Enjoy a fig now!
April 4, 2011
Rear View
Father-Son Stuff ...
The afternoon he left home for good, Stephen Greenwood knelt on the carpet, clutched the arms of his seven year-old and bored into his gaze with eyes as hard and serious as drill bits. Max let his head fall and lolled it like a narcoleptic until his father’s voice found just the right note, and then he lifted his face to the man. “Nothing’s changing,” Stephen exhorted with a fervor that encouraged and alarmed the boy.
Three years later, a year before Stephen ceased his twice-monthly, three-hour roundtrips from San Francisco to the grassy suburb he had fled, he learned from his ex that Max–skinny, vulnerable, prone to tears–was being bullied. Enlarged and charged by the urge to protect, Stephen endeavored to teach the boy boxing. “Balance,” he said in the seclusion of a stand of trees in the park in which they spent every other Sunday, punctuating the point with an evangelical thrust of his finger. He had grown his hair long shortly after leaving, and when he bounced on the balls of his feet to demonstrate the art of boxing, his hair swished like a horse’s tail across newly-toned shoulders. “You look like a Spartan,” said Max with a smile aimed shyly at his dad’s chin. Stephen raised the edges of his plunging moustache and cuffed his son’s head affectionately; but to his surprise the boy swatted his dad’s hand away and made two fists which he pressed to his face grinning like an elf either magically lethal or powerless and bluffing.
When Max was seventeen–six-foot-two, doughy thin, with hair dyed coal-black and nails to match, with a driver’s license and his mother’s car–he determined to start seeing his father again. His mother had advised him to forgive his father for his own sake if not for the sake of his dad; and besides, she had added with a shrewd expression, child support would end at eighteen, and wasn’t it wise to get in good with your father? Max nodded out of respect for his mom, but his decision was prompted mainly by tales of a city where boys had black nails.
The man who greeted Max at the door of the studio apartment was not the feral figure of the boy’s childhood but a mild presence who blushed and shyly lowered his gaze, once penetrating, now uncertain and small, from the appraising stare of his son. Uncertain how to greet his son–handshake, soul shake, bro hug, kiss?–Stephen tried a bit of each, so that the greeting resembled the grappling of beginning dance partners. A few awkward moments later, Stephen thrust a wooden plaque at his son and eyed him hopefully, but Max’s arms remained limp at his side, and he smiled slyly beneath lidded eyes. “Check it out,” Stephen repeated with an affect of casualness that was undermined by a note of desperation. His moustache drooped at Max’s flat affect, and a reciprocal smile rose on Max’s lips. He enfolded the plaque in long slender fingers. “It’s shiny,” he said.
Stephen nodded: friends had warned him: seventeen. “It’s shiny, true. And it has an inscription.” He recovered the plaque and gazed at it as if at a prayer book:
To Dr. G, for helping us see the beauty of song.
Love, Ms. Kendrick’s Klass
A smile bloomed on a father’s face. “I had them all singing Beatles songs, Maxim! Fifth graders. Can you imagine?”
“Imagine all the people,” Max slurred.
“Lennon reference, that’s my boy. I mean man.” Stephen squeezed himself down into the workstation between the couch and the little free-standing bookcase that separated his living and sleeping areas. “Look at this, Max-A-Million Bucks.”
Max looked at the computer screen as directed, but the wordplay returned his gaze to the years when he was a fresh-out-of-the-box kid whose dad showered him with nicknames like confetti on a conquering hero and batted rhymes and puns around with him like birthday balloons.
Stephen looked up at his son like a ten year-old in a go-cart at the starting line shining up at his dad. “It’s my YouTube channel, Circus Maximus. For my songs.”
“`Twould seem to be.” Max’s smile opened like a tentative flower at dawn.
With an effort to heed the advice of good friends that he not sound critical, Stephen observed in a carefully calibrated tone: “You’ve still got that great sardonic–”
“Ironic.”
“Attitude, eh?”
“B.”
“Har! Hey Maxim, look: sixty-seven subscribers.”
“Hey, Stephen, look: Some graying hippie wannabe stole your guitar.”
Stephen jerked his head back but let the jibe go. “This fan–guy’s from Australia.”
“He looks twelve, man. You sure it’s even legal to talk with him?”
Uncertain how to read his son’s comments or his cryptic expressions, which changed in kaleidoscopic fashion , Stephen instead addressed the computer. “This girl–young woman–is from England, man.”
“They’ve got Internet there?”
“Audible sigh. Listen, dude, are you ready to roll?”
“Sure, dude, if it’s French.”
“You can’t stop that, can you?”
“You can’t top that, Shamu?”
“Hey,” Stephen said with mock indignation, “I’m not even five pounds overweight.” He patted a stomach that was flat from dissolution rather than design. “Let’s head to my gig.”
“Where I’ll dance a jig,” mumbled Max with a self-conscious grin.
The café in the Richmond, just blocks from the sea, was deep and narrow and brightly lit. In the roomy front were thick hardwood tables; in the slender midsection an upright piano and a scaled-down drum kit and a worn love seat and an upholstered chair; in the back, a cozy nook in which underfed middle-aged scholars with stringy hair read by small table lamps. The walls featured black-and-white photos of the neighborhood and watercolors by neighborhood kids, and on the bookcase were paperbacks and beaten board games. Stephen held the door open and beamed at the scene, funkier than any in his suburban hometown, which was his son’s hometown also. “Cool, is it not?”
“I don’t know. Is it naught?”
“Dude, you are something.”
“In that case, I’m aught.”
“And you are caught!”
Max arrested his smile as if suddenly conscious of the painful unhipness of their old rhyming games, and replaced it with a haughty mask.
“Let’s eat,” Stephen said, noting the retrenchment. When standing Max slouched like a question mark but was half a head taller than his dad even so, and he gazed over Stephen’s head at the menu board. “Ummm,” he mosquito droned, “umm umm umm umm..” The counter girl smiled at Max’s schtick and the discomfiting effect it had on his father. “A bowl of Our Famous Onion Soup,” Max declared at last, “and a big cuppa joe.”
“You drink coffee?” Stephen queried with raised brow.
“Extra large,” Max told the girl, who wore the signature adornments of her generation–nose ring, tattoo (red roses, green vines climbing up the throat)–but was cool with the dinos of Stephen’s generation who sat the place all day and all night. Stephen wondered whether his son liked the girl or whether he liked girls at all, for his nail polish, soft skinny frame and languid demeanor suggested gayness to Stephen, though he was unsure of the code even after ten years in town.
“And a glass of red,” Max slurred into the hair that thatched his dad’s ear.
Stephen smiled at the jest but Max stared seriously into his eyes. With a confidential hush Stephen said, “I’ll let you have a sip of mine, old pal.” Seeking confirmation from his man-boy he added: “A little sip couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Not at all, old boy.”
As soon as they sat Stephen raised his wineglass to toast his son, 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 deftly maneuvered the glass to his lips. He drank long and hard. Stephen widened his eyes, and Max laughed huskily and expulsively at his consternation. “You’re blowing your image, man, getting all excited like a square from the burbs.” Max had emerged from his squeaky-voiced stage with a baritone that he loved to show off.
“Raising your son right!” rasped Ruddy Rod into Steven’s ear from behind. He was in the midst of a six-week coke binge, and unruly tendrils of cocaine-white hair reached out from beneath his black bowler like weeds seeking light. He had lately quit the last of the scores of short-term gigs that had been his working life, and lived on a crafty disability claim and the proceeds from selling grass around the corner.
“No,” said Stephen. “I mean yes, he’s my son. But as for the raising him right–”
“Horseshit,” said Max, with a collegial glance at Rod’s encouraging grin. “You’re raising me fine,” words belied by the mockery in his smile at Rod.
Rod’s protuberant eyebrows, twin snowbanks with antennae, quivered at the discord between father and son, and he fixed shining eyes on Max as if to imply that a bond more potent than that between Max and his father existed between Max and himself.“You’re father talks a lot about you,” he suggested with a grin designed to provoke.
Max lowered his eyes and smiled demurely.
“And I’ve written about him, too,” Stephen hastened. “You’ll hear that tonight.”
Rod leaned in on Max like a barfly imposing wisdom by force of will and a hint of menace. “And they’re good,” he intoned, pressing Max’s slender forearm to the table and squeezing as if to test Max’s vital force.
“I can’t wait to hear `em,” Max told the table. “He used to sing me to sleep in the old days. Solid gold days,” this last with a private smile at his dad akin to those which he would discreetly share with his father at seven to proclaim his allegiance when Mona would press her hand to her forehead and deride with ever-growing panic Stephen’s talk about moving to San Francisco to plug into music and meet colorful people and discover himself. Stephen thought he recognized the supportive expression 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, plus he’s got that wise guy grin, like he knows something we’re too old or screwed up, or too old and too screwed up to get, you know what I mean? Hey didja get him his Let Timmy Smoke t-shirt yet, or are you gonna plead poverty like always?”
“I didn’t, and I’m not–”
“You’re not?!” Rod made a fake show of astonishment. He straightened up and burlesqued perfect posture, and tapped his nose theatrically to show Stephen that he understood the role he was to play. “Of course you’re not. Hell no you’re not! Don’t smoke grass, Maxwell Silver Hammer. Your father is right.” To Stephen he added, “I’m going out back to not smoke myself.”
Stephen’s tone conveyed doubt and remorse. “I’m not even sure why I hang with that guy, Max. He’s a decent drummer and an interesting guy, and a real local character, you know? He’s not all that bad if–”
“Forget it, man. Weed’s great.”
Stephen felt it his fatherly duty to protest, but the subtle shifting changes in his son’s countenance puzzled and froze him. “You’ll like our songs, Max. At least, I hope you will.”
“And I’ll hope for a thrill.” An impish challenge gleamed in Max’s eyes.
Stephen sang and played guitar, Ruddy Rod was on drums, and Big Sal on bass. They started out with three Beatles songs and two Neil Young tunes, and then, with six or eight folks tuned in and approving, they played Stephen’s songs. Stephen introduced each with an anecdote about the song’s origin or moral thrust while Rod twirled his sticks and grinned madly at the ceiling and Big Sal uplifted his cartoonishly-large crescent moon chin with the dignity of a palace guard. “This was inspired by my lost dog,” Stephen would say. “This is about Grandma Greenbaum’s soulful chicken soup.” “This is for my father, Major Achievement, who famously told Uncle Steven, about me: He’s not a pimple on his old man’s ass.” Stephen sang with an aching voice and a seeking stare that clanked against the side of his son’s downcast head, for Max was texting, and texted throughout. Stephen’s voice quivered in response to hi son’s punching of the keypad buttons, and beads of sweat pushed their way out through the pores of his forehead, their damp warmth flooding Stephen with the day at 16 when–awkward, zitted, and for the most part unfriended–he was forced to make a public service announcement to a classroom full of mocking kids. He finished the song and drank water.
“Max,” he entreated the texting boy, whose smirking gaze was fixed to his phone. “Maxim,” Stephen burst. Max looked up at his dad with the mildly curious gaze of a TV-watcher, and Stephen gazed at a cluster of folks engaged with his music in the hope that they had seen and comprehended and sympathized with him. “Maxie,” Stephen said. “I wrote this song for you.” Stephen had spent most of the last year learning to play like Neil Young: his
optometry gig, part-time by design, gave him lots of practice time. He played the song well on the Martin he’d saved for years to buy.
“For you,” he sang to his languorous son,
“to help me sing what I couldn’t say to you,
to find and renew you,
to sing my song loud,
to make my boy proud,”
the guitar’s blue-green notes saturating the lyric of a father-son separation and a father’s quest for redemption. There was an appreciative reduction of chatter as Sal’s fat bass notes dropped emotional depth charges and Rod’s jazzy brushes softened the palette. Stephen resolved the song with a willowy “for you” as the feeling of fatherhood surged through him again. Sweet applause from hearts joined in concord lightened his spirits.
“Maybe we forgot to tell y’all this is a record release party,” he said, holding high the CD he had spent eight months recording with a year’s worth of savings. “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 ceremoniously handed his cd to Max as Rod passed the bowler beneath a scattering of bills which he fluffed like salad greens. Max studied the cd case. “Seeking Home?” he said. “You should call it, My Son’s Art Lessons, or My Son’s Missing Art School Tuition or whatever.”
Stephen’s arm froze at a right angle to his body. A woman with spiky silver hair who had listened intently to the show clasped Stephen’s wrist in a hand whose bones showed through loose skin like bat wings. Hers eyes twinkled with compassion. “I’ll take one,” she said. “That was wonderful.”
Stephen accepted her support and engaged her in a prolonged conversation, for her questions about his song ideas validated his sense of himself as an artist. He sold the disc to her and resolved to mount her twenty dollar bill on a plaque, for this was the first record he ever had sold. He sold a second cd to the woman’s grown daughter, then turned to discover that Max was gone. His father’s cd remained on the table.
Stephen walked to his car under a moonless sky in which sheets of fog jetted in from the ocean. He stepped into his car and inserted his cd and was consoled by the pleasurableness of the music and the intelligence of the lyrics, and most of all by the knowledge that he had created it all, and had done so with professionalism. And was he not, he mused, a professional musician, having just drawn other peoples’ hard-earned money from their wallets in exchange for his music? He pulled from the curb and drove to the corner and rolled right around it. Partway down the block he checked the rearview and glimpsed Ruddy Rod, unmistakable with his bowler hat and jangling gait, flinging his hands up into the air as if tossing confetti over the head of his gangly companion, a tall, rubbery, receding form who appeared to be Stephen’s son: Stephen couldn’t tell.
The afternoon he left home for good, Stephen Greenwood knelt on the carpet, clutched the arms of his seven year-old and bored into his gaze with eyes as hard and serious as drill bits. Max let his head fall and lolled it like a narcoleptic until his father’s voice found just the right note, and then he lifted his face to the man. “Nothing’s changing,” Stephen exhorted with a fervor that encouraged and alarmed the boy.
Three years later, a year before Stephen ceased his twice-monthly, three-hour roundtrips from San Francisco to the grassy suburb he had fled, he learned from his ex that Max–skinny, vulnerable, prone to tears–was being bullied. Enlarged and charged by the urge to protect, Stephen endeavored to teach the boy boxing. “Balance,” he said in the seclusion of a stand of trees in the park in which they spent every other Sunday, punctuating the point with an evangelical thrust of his finger. He had grown his hair long shortly after leaving, and when he bounced on the balls of his feet to demonstrate the art of boxing, his hair swished like a horse’s tail across newly-toned shoulders. “You look like a Spartan,” said Max with a smile aimed shyly at his dad’s chin. Stephen raised the edges of his plunging moustache and cuffed his son’s head affectionately; but to his surprise the boy swatted his dad’s hand away and made two fists which he pressed to his face grinning like an elf either magically lethal or powerless and bluffing.
When Max was seventeen–six-foot-two, doughy thin, with hair dyed coal-black and nails to match, with a driver’s license and his mother’s car–he determined to start seeing his father again. His mother had advised him to forgive his father for his own sake if not for the sake of his dad; and besides, she had added with a shrewd expression, child support would end at eighteen, and wasn’t it wise to get in good with your father? Max nodded out of respect for his mom, but his decision was prompted mainly by tales of a city where boys had black nails.
The man who greeted Max at the door of the studio apartment was not the feral figure of the boy’s childhood but a mild presence who blushed and shyly lowered his gaze, once penetrating, now uncertain and small, from the appraising stare of his son. Uncertain how to greet his son–handshake, soul shake, bro hug, kiss?–Stephen tried a bit of each, so that the greeting resembled the grappling of beginning dance partners. A few awkward moments later, Stephen thrust a wooden plaque at his son and eyed him hopefully, but Max’s arms remained limp at his side, and he smiled slyly beneath lidded eyes. “Check it out,” Stephen repeated with an affect of casualness that was undermined by a note of desperation. His moustache drooped at Max’s flat affect, and a reciprocal smile rose on Max’s lips. He enfolded the plaque in long slender fingers. “It’s shiny,” he said.
Stephen nodded: friends had warned him: seventeen. “It’s shiny, true. And it has an inscription.” He recovered the plaque and gazed at it as if at a prayer book:
To Dr. G, for helping us see the beauty of song.
Love, Ms. Kendrick’s Klass
A smile bloomed on a father’s face. “I had them all singing Beatles songs, Maxim! Fifth graders. Can you imagine?”
“Imagine all the people,” Max slurred.
“Lennon reference, that’s my boy. I mean man.” Stephen squeezed himself down into the workstation between the couch and the little free-standing bookcase that separated his living and sleeping areas. “Look at this, Max-A-Million Bucks.”
Max looked at the computer screen as directed, but the wordplay returned his gaze to the years when he was a fresh-out-of-the-box kid whose dad showered him with nicknames like confetti on a conquering hero and batted rhymes and puns around with him like birthday balloons.
Stephen looked up at his son like a ten year-old in a go-cart at the starting line shining up at his dad. “It’s my YouTube channel, Circus Maximus. For my songs.”
“`Twould seem to be.” Max’s smile opened like a tentative flower at dawn.
With an effort to heed the advice of good friends that he not sound critical, Stephen observed in a carefully calibrated tone: “You’ve still got that great sardonic–”
“Ironic.”
“Attitude, eh?”
“B.”
“Har! Hey Maxim, look: sixty-seven subscribers.”
“Hey, Stephen, look: Some graying hippie wannabe stole your guitar.”
Stephen jerked his head back but let the jibe go. “This fan–guy’s from Australia.”
“He looks twelve, man. You sure it’s even legal to talk with him?”
Uncertain how to read his son’s comments or his cryptic expressions, which changed in kaleidoscopic fashion , Stephen instead addressed the computer. “This girl–young woman–is from England, man.”
“They’ve got Internet there?”
“Audible sigh. Listen, dude, are you ready to roll?”
“Sure, dude, if it’s French.”
“You can’t stop that, can you?”
“You can’t top that, Shamu?”
“Hey,” Stephen said with mock indignation, “I’m not even five pounds overweight.” He patted a stomach that was flat from dissolution rather than design. “Let’s head to my gig.”
“Where I’ll dance a jig,” mumbled Max with a self-conscious grin.
The café in the Richmond, just blocks from the sea, was deep and narrow and brightly lit. In the roomy front were thick hardwood tables; in the slender midsection an upright piano and a scaled-down drum kit and a worn love seat and an upholstered chair; in the back, a cozy nook in which underfed middle-aged scholars with stringy hair read by small table lamps. The walls featured black-and-white photos of the neighborhood and watercolors by neighborhood kids, and on the bookcase were paperbacks and beaten board games. Stephen held the door open and beamed at the scene, funkier than any in his suburban hometown, which was his son’s hometown also. “Cool, is it not?”
“I don’t know. Is it naught?”
“Dude, you are something.”
“In that case, I’m aught.”
“And you are caught!”
Max arrested his smile as if suddenly conscious of the painful unhipness of their old rhyming games, and replaced it with a haughty mask.
“Let’s eat,” Stephen said, noting the retrenchment. When standing Max slouched like a question mark but was half a head taller than his dad even so, and he gazed over Stephen’s head at the menu board. “Ummm,” he mosquito droned, “umm umm umm umm..” The counter girl smiled at Max’s schtick and the discomfiting effect it had on his father. “A bowl of Our Famous Onion Soup,” Max declared at last, “and a big cuppa joe.”
“You drink coffee?” Stephen queried with raised brow.
“Extra large,” Max told the girl, who wore the signature adornments of her generation–nose ring, tattoo (red roses, green vines climbing up the throat)–but was cool with the dinos of Stephen’s generation who sat the place all day and all night. Stephen wondered whether his son liked the girl or whether he liked girls at all, for his nail polish, soft skinny frame and languid demeanor suggested gayness to Stephen, though he was unsure of the code even after ten years in town.
“And a glass of red,” Max slurred into the hair that thatched his dad’s ear.
Stephen smiled at the jest but Max stared seriously into his eyes. With a confidential hush Stephen said, “I’ll let you have a sip of mine, old pal.” Seeking confirmation from his man-boy he added: “A little sip couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Not at all, old boy.”
As soon as they sat Stephen raised his wineglass to toast his son, 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 deftly maneuvered the glass to his lips. He drank long and hard. Stephen widened his eyes, and Max laughed huskily and expulsively at his consternation. “You’re blowing your image, man, getting all excited like a square from the burbs.” Max had emerged from his squeaky-voiced stage with a baritone that he loved to show off.
“Raising your son right!” rasped Ruddy Rod into Steven’s ear from behind. He was in the midst of a six-week coke binge, and unruly tendrils of cocaine-white hair reached out from beneath his black bowler like weeds seeking light. He had lately quit the last of the scores of short-term gigs that had been his working life, and lived on a crafty disability claim and the proceeds from selling grass around the corner.
“No,” said Stephen. “I mean yes, he’s my son. But as for the raising him right–”
“Horseshit,” said Max, with a collegial glance at Rod’s encouraging grin. “You’re raising me fine,” words belied by the mockery in his smile at Rod.
Rod’s protuberant eyebrows, twin snowbanks with antennae, quivered at the discord between father and son, and he fixed shining eyes on Max as if to imply that a bond more potent than that between Max and his father existed between Max and himself.“You’re father talks a lot about you,” he suggested with a grin designed to provoke.
Max lowered his eyes and smiled demurely.
“And I’ve written about him, too,” Stephen hastened. “You’ll hear that tonight.”
Rod leaned in on Max like a barfly imposing wisdom by force of will and a hint of menace. “And they’re good,” he intoned, pressing Max’s slender forearm to the table and squeezing as if to test Max’s vital force.
“I can’t wait to hear `em,” Max told the table. “He used to sing me to sleep in the old days. Solid gold days,” this last with a private smile at his dad akin to those which he would discreetly share with his father at seven to proclaim his allegiance when Mona would press her hand to her forehead and deride with ever-growing panic Stephen’s talk about moving to San Francisco to plug into music and meet colorful people and discover himself. Stephen thought he recognized the supportive expression 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, plus he’s got that wise guy grin, like he knows something we’re too old or screwed up, or too old and too screwed up to get, you know what I mean? Hey didja get him his Let Timmy Smoke t-shirt yet, or are you gonna plead poverty like always?”
“I didn’t, and I’m not–”
“You’re not?!” Rod made a fake show of astonishment. He straightened up and burlesqued perfect posture, and tapped his nose theatrically to show Stephen that he understood the role he was to play. “Of course you’re not. Hell no you’re not! Don’t smoke grass, Maxwell Silver Hammer. Your father is right.” To Stephen he added, “I’m going out back to not smoke myself.”
Stephen’s tone conveyed doubt and remorse. “I’m not even sure why I hang with that guy, Max. He’s a decent drummer and an interesting guy, and a real local character, you know? He’s not all that bad if–”
“Forget it, man. Weed’s great.”
Stephen felt it his fatherly duty to protest, but the subtle shifting changes in his son’s countenance puzzled and froze him. “You’ll like our songs, Max. At least, I hope you will.”
“And I’ll hope for a thrill.” An impish challenge gleamed in Max’s eyes.
Stephen sang and played guitar, Ruddy Rod was on drums, and Big Sal on bass. They started out with three Beatles songs and two Neil Young tunes, and then, with six or eight folks tuned in and approving, they played Stephen’s songs. Stephen introduced each with an anecdote about the song’s origin or moral thrust while Rod twirled his sticks and grinned madly at the ceiling and Big Sal uplifted his cartoonishly-large crescent moon chin with the dignity of a palace guard. “This was inspired by my lost dog,” Stephen would say. “This is about Grandma Greenbaum’s soulful chicken soup.” “This is for my father, Major Achievement, who famously told Uncle Steven, about me: He’s not a pimple on his old man’s ass.” Stephen sang with an aching voice and a seeking stare that clanked against the side of his son’s downcast head, for Max was texting, and texted throughout. Stephen’s voice quivered in response to hi son’s punching of the keypad buttons, and beads of sweat pushed their way out through the pores of his forehead, their damp warmth flooding Stephen with the day at 16 when–awkward, zitted, and for the most part unfriended–he was forced to make a public service announcement to a classroom full of mocking kids. He finished the song and drank water.
“Max,” he entreated the texting boy, whose smirking gaze was fixed to his phone. “Maxim,” Stephen burst. Max looked up at his dad with the mildly curious gaze of a TV-watcher, and Stephen gazed at a cluster of folks engaged with his music in the hope that they had seen and comprehended and sympathized with him. “Maxie,” Stephen said. “I wrote this song for you.” Stephen had spent most of the last year learning to play like Neil Young: his
optometry gig, part-time by design, gave him lots of practice time. He played the song well on the Martin he’d saved for years to buy.
“For you,” he sang to his languorous son,
“to help me sing what I couldn’t say to you,
to find and renew you,
to sing my song loud,
to make my boy proud,”
the guitar’s blue-green notes saturating the lyric of a father-son separation and a father’s quest for redemption. There was an appreciative reduction of chatter as Sal’s fat bass notes dropped emotional depth charges and Rod’s jazzy brushes softened the palette. Stephen resolved the song with a willowy “for you” as the feeling of fatherhood surged through him again. Sweet applause from hearts joined in concord lightened his spirits.
“Maybe we forgot to tell y’all this is a record release party,” he said, holding high the CD he had spent eight months recording with a year’s worth of savings. “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 ceremoniously handed his cd to Max as Rod passed the bowler beneath a scattering of bills which he fluffed like salad greens. Max studied the cd case. “Seeking Home?” he said. “You should call it, My Son’s Art Lessons, or My Son’s Missing Art School Tuition or whatever.”
Stephen’s arm froze at a right angle to his body. A woman with spiky silver hair who had listened intently to the show clasped Stephen’s wrist in a hand whose bones showed through loose skin like bat wings. Hers eyes twinkled with compassion. “I’ll take one,” she said. “That was wonderful.”
Stephen accepted her support and engaged her in a prolonged conversation, for her questions about his song ideas validated his sense of himself as an artist. He sold the disc to her and resolved to mount her twenty dollar bill on a plaque, for this was the first record he ever had sold. He sold a second cd to the woman’s grown daughter, then turned to discover that Max was gone. His father’s cd remained on the table.
Stephen walked to his car under a moonless sky in which sheets of fog jetted in from the ocean. He stepped into his car and inserted his cd and was consoled by the pleasurableness of the music and the intelligence of the lyrics, and most of all by the knowledge that he had created it all, and had done so with professionalism. And was he not, he mused, a professional musician, having just drawn other peoples’ hard-earned money from their wallets in exchange for his music? He pulled from the curb and drove to the corner and rolled right around it. Partway down the block he checked the rearview and glimpsed Ruddy Rod, unmistakable with his bowler hat and jangling gait, flinging his hands up into the air as if tossing confetti over the head of his gangly companion, a tall, rubbery, receding form who appeared to be Stephen’s son: Stephen couldn’t tell.
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