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.
September 6, 2010
August 27, 2010
Dough Boy
Dear Readers:
Some need speed, Dough Boy needs to knead. I hope you will find this tale worth your time, and please do comment, as I'd love to get a conversation going. Do you relate to any of the characters or situations? Are there similar stories you'd care to mention? Any favorite images, descriptions, or moments in the tale? Your favorite pastry, perhaps? Thanks for reading!
Note: "Dough Boy" has been accepted for the December, 2010 issue of Sugar Mule magazine.
"Dough Boy"
At nine years old, he was Duke for a day.
“Where are you going, Mikey?” A note of alarm wormed into Mom’s voice. Three weeks since moving in, he had not ventured out.
“I’m Duke now. Goin’ a play.” The conk of wooden bats falling hard on the asphalt, the sweet siren song of boys out in the street.
“Out?” Her cookie-dough hands kneaded each other red. She studied her son: his dumpling chin set, his furry brow knit. “Have fun out there. Duke.” The forced note of cheer for herself more than him. She reached for his ballcap to straighten the bill, was shocked when he jerked his head from her hands.
Thus Duke ventured out.
“Duke,” sneered the leader, a crew-cut called Butch. “You’re like, The Duke of Earl, man?”
Duke chewed Dubble-Bubble, stared up through eyes sheltering deep in dark sockets.
“Don’t you like, talk, Duke Man?”
“Sure he does.” A blond scarecrow called Skeeter clapping Duke on the arm. “He said his name’s Duke. Like, put up your dukes,” miming boxing moves.
“Right,” Butch grinned, feinting towards Duke like Sugar Ray in close. “You like using your dukes, Dukey boy?”
Duke rooted to the grass, stared up in wonder at Butch.
“Weird little troll, tell you that much.”
“You bat first, Duke,” smiled Pee Wee.
Middle of the street, pitch the rubber ball to yourself. Up ball, grab bat, swing bat, miss ball. Again and again. Then once again, his tongue sticking out. Boys’ mitts on their heads crowning bursting clown faces.
“It’s like, a magic wand,” Pee Wee grinned without malice. “Like that guy on Ed Sullivan, kept those balls in the air without touching his wand, like the wand repelled `em.”
They grinned. He did too.
“What’re you smiling at, dick head?”
“Hello, Duke.” She tried her best to make it sound real.
“I’m Dick now.” He compressed jagged lips, scrunched his dark brow intently. She laid down the spatula, reached for her boy. He collapsed within himself, and she held back fearing an explosion.
“I’m don’t think you should play with those boys, Michael.”
He broke down and trudged into his room.
She bought him a cowboy hat and a cap gun, a chemistry set, a model T-Bird with a full set of paints, a model World War II battleship. The chemistry set took.
Hour on hour, alone at his desk, wearing safety goggles, filling beakers precisely, measuring out powdered chemicals in tiny spoons, making fizzes, colors, sizzles, stinks. The stink bomb freaked the dog, she ran wildly in circles. The invisible ink was runny but worked. Spy notes to his mother, placed in the dog’s collar, ferried to the kitchen. His mom played along, to her way of thinking: Brownies in ten minutes, hon. He cut her reply into dozens of little squares, dissolved them in a phosphate solution, hunkered back down to work.
His dad, in the doorway, was hip to it all. “How’s it goin’ in there, Professor?”
Professor. A jagged grin turned halfway to Dad; then back to work. A rubber band boat propelled by baking soda and vinegar traversed the bathtub and never capsized. Based on all these successes a new mission was born: the launch of a missile from the front lawn. This was, however, an insecure zone. Mission Control postponed the launch. Captain America, Batman, Mad. Tag with the dog. Itching powder upon the dog’s skin, washing her off with hose-water and tears. TV days turned to weeks, school days to school months; then John Glenn flew, and the mission was on. He marched to the front lawn launching pad on a clear-sky Saturday at cartoon time. The rocket thin and red, the launching pad filled with baking soda and vinegar for massive propulsion. The backyard test launches had all been successful. Goggles up, missile in. Three figures on Schwinns soared up the street. He turtled over the launching pad and heard but did not see Butch, Skeeter, and Pee Wee whizzing past, and didn’t see Pee Wee peeling off like a fighter pilot, wheeling towards him in a wide graceful arc up the slope of his lawn.
“Whatcha doin’, man?” A not unfriendly smile.
Without looking up, too intent for distraction: “Missile launch,” and some technical mumbles. He prepared to shake up the launching pad, then remembered his dad’s admonitions. “You gotta back up,” he told Pee Wee. Pee Wee, not wee now just a bit undersized, smiled amiably and backed up his bike. Pleased with his eminence, “The Professor” mumbled a private incantation, shook the launching pad up, and pointed it at the sky. Fizz-whoosh-whizz and up flew the missile but not very high. Foamy vinegar flowed down his fist, acrid smell pinched his nostrils.
“Ai right,” Pee Wee smiled, respecting the effort and the intent. He rose up on the pedals of his red three-speed, piston-charged into the wild blue yonder.
“Is your name Professor?” they giggled.
All girls were from space, but especially these two: pretty and tall, with inscrutable laughter, and a cryptic conversational code. Did they wish to hug him and call him their mascot, like Jill’s giggly high school friends? Or did they simply think him a jerk.
“I’m ... I dunno,” he shrugged.
They laughed even harder, teeth glinting like knives, and pinned him against the hallway wall next to a poster of Abraham Lincoln.
“You told Miss Conners you were the Professor,” chid the taller one with a smile that put him in mind of Catwoman.
“I ... she said it was a good answer,” he told his sneakers. In an unguarded moment, he’d proclaimed to the teacher, and all of the class: “They call me Professor.”
“You’re a professor,” snickered the less tall one with Barbie-blue eyes, “and you got a C on the cell worksheet?”
He withered beneath their Siamese cat gazes, took hope when he saw that Pee Wee was approaching abreast of two friends. “Hey Pee Wee!” he hailed, desperation amping his voice up to audible. A friendly word would set him free.
Pee Wee was Gordy away from the block. “Pee Wee,” one friend chortled. Pee Wee/Gordy flashed rodent teeth. “Hey there, Dick Head.” Then he punched his friend on the arm and led him on a chase down the hall.
Solace was found in brownies warm, soft, and sweet as his mother, who looked askance when he reached for a second, then softened her look when his eyes pooled with shame. “Have some milk,” she sighed. Milk was good, there was no harm in that. Homework in the kitchen each day after school. Two brownies with milk and no more than two, she drew the line there. He accepted her terms with a sly smile. His belly, face, thighs all rounded like dough. “My Pillsbury Doughboy,” she said with a grin somehow loving and mocking. She jabbed at his belly, he slapped her hand. She recoiled and he swatted the milk glass, flooding the table and soaking his pants. The next day the incident went unspoken. Two brownies with milk, and she too ate brownies as he did his homework. They dipped them in milk, compared milk moustaches, blew bubbles with straws, played follow the leader with fingers fast-walking through trails of crumbs. A little more time and she softened too.
Dad noticed. Was mute. He kept it inside, day on week upon month. “What’s with the damn brownies,” he finally burst.
“Michael’s learning to bake,” she lied upon reflex. “It’s a good thing, to bake. Cooking’s useful for boys. Like on cookouts.”
“Cookouts.” They had never had cookouts. He waved her away with the back of his hand, trudged vexed and defeated back to his den–his principal reason for buying the house.
She gazed at her son in silent communion. He scrunched his brow to mirror her gaze, and she burst out laughing. The baking lessons began the next day.
A plump kid at his high school had not many options. His tenth grade friends, two, were geeks years before geeks were cool, and they murdered each school day with corrosive jibes at themselves and each other, then scurried, relieved, to the safety of home. His home reeked of smoke, for his mom had lost weight and smoked instead, and exercised, hacking, in front of the tube, compliant with Jack LaLanne’s kindly commands.
“I’m gonna make lamb chops tonight,” he said on the landing of the sunken living room. She sat in her leotards, spread-eagled before the TV, gazing up at LaLanne in his snug workout suit, his curly hair mop and his crinkly smile with ineffable longing. “Lamb chops,” he repeated, letting his head droop. She turned to him but did not seem to see. “Lamb chops,” she repeated, as if mouthing a prayer she no longer believed. Her blue eyes sparkled beneath pooling tears, and he thought them the most beautiful eyes in the world, thought her the most beautiful thing in the world. She blinked; tears cascaded. He wished to run to her to kiss her face dry, stood rooted as if at the edge of a pond. She reached out arms like willow branches, but he would not venture into the pool.
He avoided his father whenever he could, not easy to do in a three-bedroom rancher. He craved a TV, Dad exploited the craving: “Tell you what. Bring me A’s in science and math, and it’s yours.” An A in chem but a B in geo; Dad pressed his advantage: “How’s about we finally work a little of that excess poundage off, champ? Lose ten pounds by July, and we’ll get you that tube. Fifteen maybe.”
He ate Weight Watchers with his mom for a month. They watched TV snacking on roasted salt mushrooms and whole wheat toast topped with warm cottage cheese and cinnamon. One night he folded a chocolate-covered cherry from his secret stash into her hand. She was intent on her program, didn’t notice at first, then opened her palm, flung the cherry up into the air as if it were a spider. “Don’t do that, Michael!” Three Kool Menthols finally calmed her down. Two days later the weigh-in came. He rigged the scale and got the TV.
He watched summer TV reruns and news with his proto-geek friends, one gangly, one plump. They hee-hawed at the world while feasting on treats that he prepared nightly from his birthday cookbook: stuffed mushrooms, steak tartare, deviled eggs, and, one night, for a tea party lark, white bread sandwiches with the crusts cut away, putting on British airs, erupting in hysterical cackles and shrieks that pleased his mom in the living room and irritated his dad in the den. He was slicing olives for an encore round of sandwiches when the gangly one, Ted, flounced to his side: “These are just divine, darling” in an emergent baritone, and Michael had to use the back of his hand, still clutching the knife, to wipe the tears that pooled in his eyes. His father appeared, Ted flew like a leaf back into Michael’s room. Michael looked joyfully up at his dad.
“Your friends are weird, Michael.”
No movement save a tightening of stubby fingers on the slicing knife and a rapid dissolution of his gaze into darkness. “You are.”
The plump one, Eugene, was soft in spirit and body. It was he who remained when the summer got long and Ted tired of watching the world on TV, soldiers wading through rice paddies, hippies protesting out on the streets. “Girls Girls! Girls!” Ted had gawked at comely protesters in fringed leather vests revealing flat bellies, had followed them out onto the streets with no plan. Eugene was content to cocoon. The two sat on cushions on Michael’s bedroom floor and leaned back against the bed like a pair of young rajahs. Sometimes they’d drift away and doze. “Keep the door open,” Dad advised, “it’s an oven in there.” Or lean against each other, arms melding like warm dough. “I said open,” Dad snapped before fading away for the rest of the summer.
They sent him to college to broaden himself. Dad set him up to rush his old fraternity, but he wandered the streets of Berkeley instead: incense, flyers, bookstores, bums. With two days left in Pledge Week, Dad cancelled “a big meeting,” flew up, pressed him into the rental car, drove him in silence to the frat house, and sat in the car watching him trudge up the broad stone steps all the way to the door. He became a Tri-Delt. Although forced upon them, although short and soft, he was accepted provisionally: for when they’d venture to Telegraph, conspicuous frat boys, he was quick with terse quips to fend off hippie jibes; and when they were drunk and couldn’t count change, he’d figure tips and settle bills neatly. They first called him Doc, then Beaver, then Scuzz, but none of these stuck. Then Keith, a querulous jock and a leader, dubbed him “Chuck” with a wink over beer. Although it was senseless it sounded okay, for he didn’t know that act followed name: Late at night, after the first big house party of the year, Keith and some others who had been denied drank hard and bitterly on the deck. Keith pointed his cleft chin at Chuck, and his minions pinioned his arms behind him, pulled his head back, pinched his nose and opened his mouth to a river of beer. They held his head up, the countdown began. “One small step for man” joked one when Chuck stood up with the vague idea of walking to the bathroom; Chuck doubled over as if shot and erupted, fell onto the deck barely conscious. The vile muck pooled under his cheek. One guy placed a laurel wreath on his head, and a sympathetic soul lagged behind to drape a blanket over him. Three days later Michael pulled the washer’s discharge tube from the drain pipe before fleeing the house.
He took an apartment off campus with a slender English major who peered at him wryly as if Michael were Raskolnikov–right there in the room for his amusement. Robert, the English major, was beloved of Noreen, a English major who thought him an intellectual giant, though really he was just more assertive than she. They supped on hors d’oeuvres that Michael created, clutching petits fours with long fingers raised as they supposed they would hold cigarettes at cocktail parties one day. They allowed Michael to listen to the erudite chats, and one night even allowed him to chime in beneath Robert’s indulgent Freudian gaze and the soft gaze of Noreen, whose long, slender fingers, pale as the skin of a veal calf, clutched at his heart to the point of pain, sending him to the bathroom to catch his breath. His desire for Noreen showed in his clumsy efforts not to stare at her, she intensifying his longing with gazes tender with comprehension. Robert too comprehended, called him “Robert Cohn” and “Holden” and alluded unsubtly while drinking gin to The Lord of the Flies’ Piggy and Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy; then punishing Noreen, Michael, and himself with contrived noisy sex sounds broadcast through the walls to Michael’s next door room.
He took a studio in the flatlands of Oakland and stared at matches burning down to his fingers. There was only a hot-plate, he lost fifteen pounds. Walking through Sproul Plaza, its antiwar rallies and civil rights rallies and leaflets and petitions for every cause that could be labeled “left wing,” his underdog’s heart drew him to the Young Republicans’ table where a girl with a bouffant Trisha Nixon-do stood flag-carrier straight as a pack of hissing leftists maligned her. He joined The Young Republicans on the spot and fell for the girl, who was well groomed and forthright and knew what she wanted, and looked at him with princess eyes that entreated rescue from some lonely castle. He licked envelopes beneath her direction despite the glue’s bitter taste and his well-hidden distaste for Nixon, his puppyish constancy wearing down her resistence. One day she joked that a well-known Democrat was a “secret fag.” He allowed dismay to flood his eyes, she stared at him apprehending a roach.
He disappeared within his studio bunker with matches he let burn down to his fingers, candles in the dark and matching dark music, and Chef Boyardee eaten cold from the can, two or three at a time. He studied sometimes, sometimes he wandered Telegraph silent as a monk on a vow of silence, with a cryptic grin implying he knew. One midnight he walked the cold streets of Oakland beneath the overpass as if daring muggers. He returned home excited but also disappointed not to have been beaten. His mother called often, a frightened shrinking voice. He’d search but not find the power to speak. She’d call him again and he’d watch the match burn down, resolved not to blow the flame out until she stopped ringing; she rang and rang and he burned his fingers. He wrote heartfelt jagged poetry, struggled through five poor sit-ups, cut the phone cord with a kitchen knife and poured himself into letters to his mother that he cut up and burned.
Jill drove down from Oregon and tugged him north. He begged her to drive the long way through the coast redwoods and spoke no further word, which was okay with Jill. “Never you mind,” she said with a lilt she’d acquired since high school. He stared strangely out the passenger-side window as they wound beneath paternal redwoods that enfolded them in protective shadows. She shared a house with four young women studying theater at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She prepped her roommates, and hey spoke softly when he came out of Jill’s room three days after arriving, calling him “Jill’s famous brother,”“M’lord,” “Master Michael” and such so as not to affright him. He sank into the soft couch and cradled his mug of hot cider, and they allowed him to be himself and to partake of them being themselves: hopeful, worried, nurturing, frank. They poked him sometimes with kind, curious eyes.
“I need a job,” he squeaked in two weeks. Jill found him a job at a preschool for university parents. The kids considered him a kid for his shortness and softness and because he spoke seldom in a voice that was soft except at story time, when he became a whiny toad, and a gruff-but-kind bear, and a know-it-all owl, and a flummoxed giraffe with such conviction that they crawled up close to stare at his lips to see if he really, truly was human. One bold girl padded onto his lap; then the rest of the curious animals clambered up too, each in turn forcing another off the cliff of his knee. The owner stared down at him with some apprehension–she’d checked his background, but what to make of this strange, shy creature who smelled of cookie dough and cried so like a baby elephant that a boy pressed a tissue to his moist eyes.
Miss Miranda Plum, a young would-be elementary school teacher, was drawn to him too, became his kitchen assistant and then his apprentice. Head down over his workspace like a boy preparing to launch a toy rocket, he taught her to make golden wafers encrusted with sugar crystals, Janey Fingers (Janey: the owner) and “Michael’s Famous Brownies” (as Miranda called them), all from scratch and wonderful, though he’d make the brownies only twice a month, for his hips still carried the remnant of his boyhood excesses. To teach her his secrets he had to speak some, but mostly he mimed his instructions, sometimes unfolding in mock comic confusion like Charlie Chaplin mistaken for a baker and pressed into emergency service baking for the king. Surrounded by kids and having no escape, he let them crown him with a white baker’s hat spangled with arts-and-crafts cookies.
On weekends Miranda took him to the woods to a womb-like shadowed glade, a secluded fern dell, a clear river gathering late summer chill. She pointed toes down and plopped into the water, he followed her in with a splayed, foot-first jump that scattered squirrels. His dam burst in hysterics of wild forest howls; her eyes widened to receive him like a vision of nature. She apple-bobbed to him, they came together like a building snowflake and whirled in the water, bobbing, spinning, clinging, squeezing. They enclosed each other, he dove into her essence, fell into her “Baby;” her baby; her own.
Some need speed, Dough Boy needs to knead. I hope you will find this tale worth your time, and please do comment, as I'd love to get a conversation going. Do you relate to any of the characters or situations? Are there similar stories you'd care to mention? Any favorite images, descriptions, or moments in the tale? Your favorite pastry, perhaps? Thanks for reading!
Note: "Dough Boy" has been accepted for the December, 2010 issue of Sugar Mule magazine.
"Dough Boy"
At nine years old, he was Duke for a day.
“Where are you going, Mikey?” A note of alarm wormed into Mom’s voice. Three weeks since moving in, he had not ventured out.
“I’m Duke now. Goin’ a play.” The conk of wooden bats falling hard on the asphalt, the sweet siren song of boys out in the street.
“Out?” Her cookie-dough hands kneaded each other red. She studied her son: his dumpling chin set, his furry brow knit. “Have fun out there. Duke.” The forced note of cheer for herself more than him. She reached for his ballcap to straighten the bill, was shocked when he jerked his head from her hands.
Thus Duke ventured out.
“Duke,” sneered the leader, a crew-cut called Butch. “You’re like, The Duke of Earl, man?”
Duke chewed Dubble-Bubble, stared up through eyes sheltering deep in dark sockets.
“Don’t you like, talk, Duke Man?”
“Sure he does.” A blond scarecrow called Skeeter clapping Duke on the arm. “He said his name’s Duke. Like, put up your dukes,” miming boxing moves.
“Right,” Butch grinned, feinting towards Duke like Sugar Ray in close. “You like using your dukes, Dukey boy?”
Duke rooted to the grass, stared up in wonder at Butch.
“Weird little troll, tell you that much.”
“You bat first, Duke,” smiled Pee Wee.
Middle of the street, pitch the rubber ball to yourself. Up ball, grab bat, swing bat, miss ball. Again and again. Then once again, his tongue sticking out. Boys’ mitts on their heads crowning bursting clown faces.
“It’s like, a magic wand,” Pee Wee grinned without malice. “Like that guy on Ed Sullivan, kept those balls in the air without touching his wand, like the wand repelled `em.”
They grinned. He did too.
“What’re you smiling at, dick head?”
“Hello, Duke.” She tried her best to make it sound real.
“I’m Dick now.” He compressed jagged lips, scrunched his dark brow intently. She laid down the spatula, reached for her boy. He collapsed within himself, and she held back fearing an explosion.
“I’m don’t think you should play with those boys, Michael.”
He broke down and trudged into his room.
She bought him a cowboy hat and a cap gun, a chemistry set, a model T-Bird with a full set of paints, a model World War II battleship. The chemistry set took.
Hour on hour, alone at his desk, wearing safety goggles, filling beakers precisely, measuring out powdered chemicals in tiny spoons, making fizzes, colors, sizzles, stinks. The stink bomb freaked the dog, she ran wildly in circles. The invisible ink was runny but worked. Spy notes to his mother, placed in the dog’s collar, ferried to the kitchen. His mom played along, to her way of thinking: Brownies in ten minutes, hon. He cut her reply into dozens of little squares, dissolved them in a phosphate solution, hunkered back down to work.
His dad, in the doorway, was hip to it all. “How’s it goin’ in there, Professor?”
Professor. A jagged grin turned halfway to Dad; then back to work. A rubber band boat propelled by baking soda and vinegar traversed the bathtub and never capsized. Based on all these successes a new mission was born: the launch of a missile from the front lawn. This was, however, an insecure zone. Mission Control postponed the launch. Captain America, Batman, Mad. Tag with the dog. Itching powder upon the dog’s skin, washing her off with hose-water and tears. TV days turned to weeks, school days to school months; then John Glenn flew, and the mission was on. He marched to the front lawn launching pad on a clear-sky Saturday at cartoon time. The rocket thin and red, the launching pad filled with baking soda and vinegar for massive propulsion. The backyard test launches had all been successful. Goggles up, missile in. Three figures on Schwinns soared up the street. He turtled over the launching pad and heard but did not see Butch, Skeeter, and Pee Wee whizzing past, and didn’t see Pee Wee peeling off like a fighter pilot, wheeling towards him in a wide graceful arc up the slope of his lawn.
“Whatcha doin’, man?” A not unfriendly smile.
Without looking up, too intent for distraction: “Missile launch,” and some technical mumbles. He prepared to shake up the launching pad, then remembered his dad’s admonitions. “You gotta back up,” he told Pee Wee. Pee Wee, not wee now just a bit undersized, smiled amiably and backed up his bike. Pleased with his eminence, “The Professor” mumbled a private incantation, shook the launching pad up, and pointed it at the sky. Fizz-whoosh-whizz and up flew the missile but not very high. Foamy vinegar flowed down his fist, acrid smell pinched his nostrils.
“Ai right,” Pee Wee smiled, respecting the effort and the intent. He rose up on the pedals of his red three-speed, piston-charged into the wild blue yonder.
“Is your name Professor?” they giggled.
All girls were from space, but especially these two: pretty and tall, with inscrutable laughter, and a cryptic conversational code. Did they wish to hug him and call him their mascot, like Jill’s giggly high school friends? Or did they simply think him a jerk.
“I’m ... I dunno,” he shrugged.
They laughed even harder, teeth glinting like knives, and pinned him against the hallway wall next to a poster of Abraham Lincoln.
“You told Miss Conners you were the Professor,” chid the taller one with a smile that put him in mind of Catwoman.
“I ... she said it was a good answer,” he told his sneakers. In an unguarded moment, he’d proclaimed to the teacher, and all of the class: “They call me Professor.”
“You’re a professor,” snickered the less tall one with Barbie-blue eyes, “and you got a C on the cell worksheet?”
He withered beneath their Siamese cat gazes, took hope when he saw that Pee Wee was approaching abreast of two friends. “Hey Pee Wee!” he hailed, desperation amping his voice up to audible. A friendly word would set him free.
Pee Wee was Gordy away from the block. “Pee Wee,” one friend chortled. Pee Wee/Gordy flashed rodent teeth. “Hey there, Dick Head.” Then he punched his friend on the arm and led him on a chase down the hall.
Solace was found in brownies warm, soft, and sweet as his mother, who looked askance when he reached for a second, then softened her look when his eyes pooled with shame. “Have some milk,” she sighed. Milk was good, there was no harm in that. Homework in the kitchen each day after school. Two brownies with milk and no more than two, she drew the line there. He accepted her terms with a sly smile. His belly, face, thighs all rounded like dough. “My Pillsbury Doughboy,” she said with a grin somehow loving and mocking. She jabbed at his belly, he slapped her hand. She recoiled and he swatted the milk glass, flooding the table and soaking his pants. The next day the incident went unspoken. Two brownies with milk, and she too ate brownies as he did his homework. They dipped them in milk, compared milk moustaches, blew bubbles with straws, played follow the leader with fingers fast-walking through trails of crumbs. A little more time and she softened too.
Dad noticed. Was mute. He kept it inside, day on week upon month. “What’s with the damn brownies,” he finally burst.
“Michael’s learning to bake,” she lied upon reflex. “It’s a good thing, to bake. Cooking’s useful for boys. Like on cookouts.”
“Cookouts.” They had never had cookouts. He waved her away with the back of his hand, trudged vexed and defeated back to his den–his principal reason for buying the house.
She gazed at her son in silent communion. He scrunched his brow to mirror her gaze, and she burst out laughing. The baking lessons began the next day.
A plump kid at his high school had not many options. His tenth grade friends, two, were geeks years before geeks were cool, and they murdered each school day with corrosive jibes at themselves and each other, then scurried, relieved, to the safety of home. His home reeked of smoke, for his mom had lost weight and smoked instead, and exercised, hacking, in front of the tube, compliant with Jack LaLanne’s kindly commands.
“I’m gonna make lamb chops tonight,” he said on the landing of the sunken living room. She sat in her leotards, spread-eagled before the TV, gazing up at LaLanne in his snug workout suit, his curly hair mop and his crinkly smile with ineffable longing. “Lamb chops,” he repeated, letting his head droop. She turned to him but did not seem to see. “Lamb chops,” she repeated, as if mouthing a prayer she no longer believed. Her blue eyes sparkled beneath pooling tears, and he thought them the most beautiful eyes in the world, thought her the most beautiful thing in the world. She blinked; tears cascaded. He wished to run to her to kiss her face dry, stood rooted as if at the edge of a pond. She reached out arms like willow branches, but he would not venture into the pool.
He avoided his father whenever he could, not easy to do in a three-bedroom rancher. He craved a TV, Dad exploited the craving: “Tell you what. Bring me A’s in science and math, and it’s yours.” An A in chem but a B in geo; Dad pressed his advantage: “How’s about we finally work a little of that excess poundage off, champ? Lose ten pounds by July, and we’ll get you that tube. Fifteen maybe.”
He ate Weight Watchers with his mom for a month. They watched TV snacking on roasted salt mushrooms and whole wheat toast topped with warm cottage cheese and cinnamon. One night he folded a chocolate-covered cherry from his secret stash into her hand. She was intent on her program, didn’t notice at first, then opened her palm, flung the cherry up into the air as if it were a spider. “Don’t do that, Michael!” Three Kool Menthols finally calmed her down. Two days later the weigh-in came. He rigged the scale and got the TV.
He watched summer TV reruns and news with his proto-geek friends, one gangly, one plump. They hee-hawed at the world while feasting on treats that he prepared nightly from his birthday cookbook: stuffed mushrooms, steak tartare, deviled eggs, and, one night, for a tea party lark, white bread sandwiches with the crusts cut away, putting on British airs, erupting in hysterical cackles and shrieks that pleased his mom in the living room and irritated his dad in the den. He was slicing olives for an encore round of sandwiches when the gangly one, Ted, flounced to his side: “These are just divine, darling” in an emergent baritone, and Michael had to use the back of his hand, still clutching the knife, to wipe the tears that pooled in his eyes. His father appeared, Ted flew like a leaf back into Michael’s room. Michael looked joyfully up at his dad.
“Your friends are weird, Michael.”
No movement save a tightening of stubby fingers on the slicing knife and a rapid dissolution of his gaze into darkness. “You are.”
The plump one, Eugene, was soft in spirit and body. It was he who remained when the summer got long and Ted tired of watching the world on TV, soldiers wading through rice paddies, hippies protesting out on the streets. “Girls Girls! Girls!” Ted had gawked at comely protesters in fringed leather vests revealing flat bellies, had followed them out onto the streets with no plan. Eugene was content to cocoon. The two sat on cushions on Michael’s bedroom floor and leaned back against the bed like a pair of young rajahs. Sometimes they’d drift away and doze. “Keep the door open,” Dad advised, “it’s an oven in there.” Or lean against each other, arms melding like warm dough. “I said open,” Dad snapped before fading away for the rest of the summer.
They sent him to college to broaden himself. Dad set him up to rush his old fraternity, but he wandered the streets of Berkeley instead: incense, flyers, bookstores, bums. With two days left in Pledge Week, Dad cancelled “a big meeting,” flew up, pressed him into the rental car, drove him in silence to the frat house, and sat in the car watching him trudge up the broad stone steps all the way to the door. He became a Tri-Delt. Although forced upon them, although short and soft, he was accepted provisionally: for when they’d venture to Telegraph, conspicuous frat boys, he was quick with terse quips to fend off hippie jibes; and when they were drunk and couldn’t count change, he’d figure tips and settle bills neatly. They first called him Doc, then Beaver, then Scuzz, but none of these stuck. Then Keith, a querulous jock and a leader, dubbed him “Chuck” with a wink over beer. Although it was senseless it sounded okay, for he didn’t know that act followed name: Late at night, after the first big house party of the year, Keith and some others who had been denied drank hard and bitterly on the deck. Keith pointed his cleft chin at Chuck, and his minions pinioned his arms behind him, pulled his head back, pinched his nose and opened his mouth to a river of beer. They held his head up, the countdown began. “One small step for man” joked one when Chuck stood up with the vague idea of walking to the bathroom; Chuck doubled over as if shot and erupted, fell onto the deck barely conscious. The vile muck pooled under his cheek. One guy placed a laurel wreath on his head, and a sympathetic soul lagged behind to drape a blanket over him. Three days later Michael pulled the washer’s discharge tube from the drain pipe before fleeing the house.
He took an apartment off campus with a slender English major who peered at him wryly as if Michael were Raskolnikov–right there in the room for his amusement. Robert, the English major, was beloved of Noreen, a English major who thought him an intellectual giant, though really he was just more assertive than she. They supped on hors d’oeuvres that Michael created, clutching petits fours with long fingers raised as they supposed they would hold cigarettes at cocktail parties one day. They allowed Michael to listen to the erudite chats, and one night even allowed him to chime in beneath Robert’s indulgent Freudian gaze and the soft gaze of Noreen, whose long, slender fingers, pale as the skin of a veal calf, clutched at his heart to the point of pain, sending him to the bathroom to catch his breath. His desire for Noreen showed in his clumsy efforts not to stare at her, she intensifying his longing with gazes tender with comprehension. Robert too comprehended, called him “Robert Cohn” and “Holden” and alluded unsubtly while drinking gin to The Lord of the Flies’ Piggy and Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy; then punishing Noreen, Michael, and himself with contrived noisy sex sounds broadcast through the walls to Michael’s next door room.
He took a studio in the flatlands of Oakland and stared at matches burning down to his fingers. There was only a hot-plate, he lost fifteen pounds. Walking through Sproul Plaza, its antiwar rallies and civil rights rallies and leaflets and petitions for every cause that could be labeled “left wing,” his underdog’s heart drew him to the Young Republicans’ table where a girl with a bouffant Trisha Nixon-do stood flag-carrier straight as a pack of hissing leftists maligned her. He joined The Young Republicans on the spot and fell for the girl, who was well groomed and forthright and knew what she wanted, and looked at him with princess eyes that entreated rescue from some lonely castle. He licked envelopes beneath her direction despite the glue’s bitter taste and his well-hidden distaste for Nixon, his puppyish constancy wearing down her resistence. One day she joked that a well-known Democrat was a “secret fag.” He allowed dismay to flood his eyes, she stared at him apprehending a roach.
He disappeared within his studio bunker with matches he let burn down to his fingers, candles in the dark and matching dark music, and Chef Boyardee eaten cold from the can, two or three at a time. He studied sometimes, sometimes he wandered Telegraph silent as a monk on a vow of silence, with a cryptic grin implying he knew. One midnight he walked the cold streets of Oakland beneath the overpass as if daring muggers. He returned home excited but also disappointed not to have been beaten. His mother called often, a frightened shrinking voice. He’d search but not find the power to speak. She’d call him again and he’d watch the match burn down, resolved not to blow the flame out until she stopped ringing; she rang and rang and he burned his fingers. He wrote heartfelt jagged poetry, struggled through five poor sit-ups, cut the phone cord with a kitchen knife and poured himself into letters to his mother that he cut up and burned.
Jill drove down from Oregon and tugged him north. He begged her to drive the long way through the coast redwoods and spoke no further word, which was okay with Jill. “Never you mind,” she said with a lilt she’d acquired since high school. He stared strangely out the passenger-side window as they wound beneath paternal redwoods that enfolded them in protective shadows. She shared a house with four young women studying theater at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She prepped her roommates, and hey spoke softly when he came out of Jill’s room three days after arriving, calling him “Jill’s famous brother,”“M’lord,” “Master Michael” and such so as not to affright him. He sank into the soft couch and cradled his mug of hot cider, and they allowed him to be himself and to partake of them being themselves: hopeful, worried, nurturing, frank. They poked him sometimes with kind, curious eyes.
“I need a job,” he squeaked in two weeks. Jill found him a job at a preschool for university parents. The kids considered him a kid for his shortness and softness and because he spoke seldom in a voice that was soft except at story time, when he became a whiny toad, and a gruff-but-kind bear, and a know-it-all owl, and a flummoxed giraffe with such conviction that they crawled up close to stare at his lips to see if he really, truly was human. One bold girl padded onto his lap; then the rest of the curious animals clambered up too, each in turn forcing another off the cliff of his knee. The owner stared down at him with some apprehension–she’d checked his background, but what to make of this strange, shy creature who smelled of cookie dough and cried so like a baby elephant that a boy pressed a tissue to his moist eyes.
Miss Miranda Plum, a young would-be elementary school teacher, was drawn to him too, became his kitchen assistant and then his apprentice. Head down over his workspace like a boy preparing to launch a toy rocket, he taught her to make golden wafers encrusted with sugar crystals, Janey Fingers (Janey: the owner) and “Michael’s Famous Brownies” (as Miranda called them), all from scratch and wonderful, though he’d make the brownies only twice a month, for his hips still carried the remnant of his boyhood excesses. To teach her his secrets he had to speak some, but mostly he mimed his instructions, sometimes unfolding in mock comic confusion like Charlie Chaplin mistaken for a baker and pressed into emergency service baking for the king. Surrounded by kids and having no escape, he let them crown him with a white baker’s hat spangled with arts-and-crafts cookies.
On weekends Miranda took him to the woods to a womb-like shadowed glade, a secluded fern dell, a clear river gathering late summer chill. She pointed toes down and plopped into the water, he followed her in with a splayed, foot-first jump that scattered squirrels. His dam burst in hysterics of wild forest howls; her eyes widened to receive him like a vision of nature. She apple-bobbed to him, they came together like a building snowflake and whirled in the water, bobbing, spinning, clinging, squeezing. They enclosed each other, he dove into her essence, fell into her “Baby;” her baby; her own.
June 2, 2010
"Lawrence"
Jon Sindell copyright 2008
This is a favorite story in part because of its social commentary. Your comments, as always, are most welcome.
"Lawrence"
In Lawrence’s soft smile were sculpted the loving acceptance of parents resigned to a slow-thinking son, and the loving support of a brilliant big sister who’d passed up the chance to live with college friends to guide her one-year-younger brother through one last perilous year of high school.
It had always been thus. Walking to school on Lawrence’s first day of first grade, Mercy had cheered her brother with the promise of a flying saucer at recess. Smiling sweetly to the classmates nearest him as the kids tromped giddy and nervous out to the playground, Lawrence tumbled out the news that his sister was bringing a spaceship to him–and they could ride on it! Jasmine–tall, pretty, and bursting with confidence–tittered at Lawrence when Mercy arrived with a saucer-shaped cookie; a pair of tentative girls behind Jasmine stood like wee ladies-in-waiting, observing the scene with slowly dawning grins. Mercy comprehended her brother’s plight and marched back to the cafeteria to spend her allowance plus two borrowed bucks on flying saucers for all three girls. When she returned, the girls were perched atop the monkey bars while Lawrence munched below them and gazed up as if they were high wire angels. When the tribute cookies were eaten and the sated angels floated down to ground, Mercy extended her arms into Buzz Lightyear wings and led the three girls, with Lawrence in the rear, on a soaring, banking, careening space caravan to the outer reaches of the little kids’ yard, the other kids gaping with envy and awe. The three girls adopted Lawrence that day, and kept him all year.
Lawrence was Mercy’s living doll, and she cherished him suchly. In their yard, at the park, at the playground he was her wind-up doll. She’d crank the oversized key in his back and send him on a tottering, high-stepping march towards thorny bushes, hard benches, the model boat pond, a wheeling, snarling frenzy of dogs, or the basketball court where the rough kids played, she chasing after to alter his course with a turn of his shoulders to avoid disaster. Slowly the game evolved: How close to the hazard before she would turn him? Close, very close, and he never slowed and never shed character, and she never failed to turn him at the last. Indoors he was her dress-up doll: a pirate, Cowboy Woody, Gandalf, Mulan. In her precocious fourth grade psychology phase, she dressed him in their mother’s white nightgown and studied his reaction with notepad in hand: “It’s so comfortable, Mercy. I feel like a queen!” The sweetness of his smile overwhelmed her clinical curiosity and the mischievous impulse which it disguised. She flung the notepad onto the floor and pulled the nightgown up over his head. “I’ll get you some king clothes, Laurie, complete with a crown.” She kissed the squeaky-clean hair atop his head. Never again did she mess with his mind.
Instead she was straight with him, straight with him always. “Is Santa Claus real?” he asked her at eight. She shook her head no, and he smiled like a scientist who’s just had a rebel theory confirmed. Because she was straight, his trust in her grew. “Where do babies come from, Merse?” he asked at age nine. She pulled the anatomy book from the reference shelf and showed him a womb in all its wondrous intricacy. He furrowed his brow and spent hours sketching a longitudinal section of the uterus and ovaries with such faithful detail that his impressed teacher posted his “smiling cobra” on the classroom wall. Two days later Lawrence asked, “How do the babies get in there, Mercy?” She showed him the page of male anatomy. “I’ve got those!” “Do you?” she deadpanned, forgetting his lack of irony until she saw him innocently reaching for his zipper. “Laurie, I’m joking! Of course you’ve got those.” “So you don’t want to see them?” he rejoined, confused by her uncharacteristic rejection of his offer to share. Ennobled by a sudden appreciation for the enormity of her role, Mercy intoned in her best grown-up voice, “No, Laurie, you don’t show `em to anyone. They’re your own private jewels.”
“Mmm, jewels,” he drawled like Homer Simpson. Then he stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and set to drawing a cross-section of male gonads, which he decorated with
ruby-red and emerald-green glitter gel.
In fifth grade he came home full of doubt. “Am I slow, Mercy?”
“Sure you’re slow, Laurie. You’re like the Internet when we had dial-up.”
Lawrence savored this image as he poured orange soda down his gullet. “I’m slow, like a snail. I’m slow, like a sponge. I’m slow, like SpongeBob!”
“Your slow, like Heinz ketchup. You’re slow, like home cooking ... like Dad’s stew, and how good is that! There’s a whole slow food movement thing, Laurie, and do you know why? Because fast food sucks.”
“I’m slow like slow food. My mind’s like beef stew.”
“Yep. Yummy and warm, with great stuff bubbling.”
She was always pouring new things in the pot. Tidbits, arcana, the trivial facts that made school more fun: headless chickens and roaches that lived, the details of strange celebrity deaths, the peccadillos of puerile kings. She served up weighty matter, too, savvy observations about how the world worked: “The principal’s only mean because she’s got a boss, called The Superintendent. And she’s only mean because her boss is the governor, and he used to harass women. Groped `em, in fact.” Or: “They only sell soda to make money for the school, Laurie. They don’t care if it makes kids fat.” Or: “Sure it’s a great country, but some of the guys who started it had slaves–and women couldn’t vote until nineteen-something.” He received these facts always with his head bowed over some manual task–building Legos, practicing knots for Boy Scouts, stringing beads, folding origami–with skill derived from entire days devoted to craft. He employed the head down strategy in school as well to avoid the sting of the teacher’s disappointed gaze when he lacked comprehension. Mercy knew not to ask him questions and besides didn’t need to, for she could intuit the gaps in his knowledge. “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff for some reason, but the Bible is totally against Harry Potter–it says you’re supposed to kill wizards with stones! And gay people, too, that’s Dumbledore two ways. I can show you the chapter, bro–chapter and verse.”
He widened his mouth as if punched in the gut.
“Lawrence my man, half of what they tell you is great in life ... isn’t.”
He rotated his head like a dog trying to understand the master’s odd behavior.
“But hey, half of what they tell you is bad ... is good!”
“So you tell me.”
She did. How ads couldn’t be trusted, how “Happy Meals” were unhappy for people who got fat and sick, how teachers got fired if kids didn’t do well on the standardized tests they both hated so much–this was the reason teachers made him cry, why they’d given her the medal she’d flung into the tree. She told him how Dad made his cuticles bleed because he was scared about losing his job, how Mom needed their sweet hugs when her blood sugar was low, how 9/11 was not our fault, sure, but we too had done bad things, had attacked Iraq for no good reason, put leashes on their men, killed thousands of regular people with bombs, not soldiers only Lawrence, but old woman and kids–
“Wha?” He had just put his remote controlled battleship in the pond, but turned to her with narrowed eyes that wished not to see.
“They act like only American dead people matter, L, but the bombs we drop kill innocent people along with the bad guys. And everyone acts like it doesn’t matter! And do you know why? Because they’re not us!”
He scrunched his face to dam up the tears, bent for a huge rock which he raised overhead and brought crashing down upon his ship.
“All those so-called great civilizations they tell you about, Lawrence, they hardly even mention they all had slaves. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans all had `em. And we had `em, too. They were cool in ways, sure–but slaves, little brother!”
“Show me,” he said, so she took him to the museum to see a painting of a pyramid beneath which straining slaves pulled massive blocks of granite beneath the eyes of muscled overseers with whips; then she rode him on her bike to the library where she showed him a photograph she had found of a fugitive American slave with lash marks on his back as thick as rope-cords. She could see the distress in his rounded eyes and mouth, so she checked out Spartacus to lighten his mood. He gazed in awe when dozens of slaves doomed themselves by stepping forward to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus!”
“I’m Spartacus,” Lawrence mouthed in wide wonder.
Years later in high school a tenth grader named Wieder was cornered against his locker in the hall. “Say, Wieder Man, is it true that you’re gay?” It was Boyce, the leader of a four-jock pack that formed a semicircle around Wieder. Wieder lowered his reddening face, which Boyce took as confirmation of the obvious. Wieder was in fact gay; worse for him, he was fighting a terrible crush on Boyce, who was tall, blond, and lean, and spent hours in the weight room as Wiederman covertly watched his desperate efforts to bulk himself up against teasing jocks who said he looked gay. “Hey, that’s alright,” said Boyce in a honeyed voice laden with sympathy. “We all need to be who we are, you know,” words lifted verbatim from a recent assembly lecture on tolerance. Boyce rested his hand on Wieder’s shoulder, raised his thumb and brazenly stroked Wieder’s cheek while one of his pals chortled and another faked retching. Wieder raised his
blue-eyed gaze to Boyce’s in tremulous stages till at last he gazed directly up into eyes shining with the knowledge of their own seductive power. “Just admit it,” cooed Boyce, leaning close to allow Wieder to feel his warm breath and see his lips pucker. “Just say the word, dude. Come on. Be yourself.” It was the seminal moment of young Wieder’s existence, terrifying and wonderful. “Say you’re gay,” murmured Boyce. “Say it. Come on.” Wieder blinked, and tears flushed from his eyes onto Boyce’s hand. Boyce disgustedly flung the drops. “Say it!” he snapped. “Say it! Say you’re gay!”
“I’m gay,” said Lawrence, who had grown tall and thin and had slid through a gap to stand next to Wieder. His hands were passively clasped at his groin and he gazed at Boyce with a sad-eyed, fatalistic frown as Boyce’s face froze at first then rebooted, the boys behind Boyce jockeying like hounds awaiting the alpha’s signal to attack. It would not have been the first such attack: Lawrence had been beaten in ninth grade by a different pack for “hating America!” after saying in class that slavery was evil and that we killed, too. But then in slid Tina, Lawrence’s combative, plump, short Chinese pal from Origami Club. “I’m gay,” she said, thrusting her chin up at Boyce as she grasped Wieder’s hand.
“I’m gay, too.” This was Kayley, whom Boyce had long lusted after in vain. Kayley knew that her dating record belied the assertion, so she pressed against Lawrence’s flank, twined her viney arm in his, and cooed in a precociously smokey voice, “Well I’m bi, anyway,” breathing warmth into Lawrence’s ear.
Foaming, fuming, red-faced and shamed, Boyce managed a feeble “I’ll see you later” at Lawrence, to which Kaley laughed, “Hands off him, he’s mine,” thus perfecting Boyce’s disgrace.
Lawrence dreamed of Kayley through sweat-stained nights, but managed only a bright, shy smile when they passed in the hall. She honored the remembrance of their stand with a smile, but did not stop to talk. He daydreamed too of Tina, lowing at her as they and two other girls folded origami like pioneer girls in a knitting circle, Lawrence unselfconsciously gazing at the lustrous black hair that curled sharply around Tina’s square jaw, gazing at her thick neck full of power and the soft curves beneath her red cable-knit sweater and the skillful hands that turned out flocks of cranes as she chatted of things Lawrence followed but dimly, detecting his interest but protecting his feelings by looking away from his dimly comprehending gaze, unsure how to fill his wide-open eyes. For prolonged eye contact with women there was still only Mercy, and when they locked eyes a circuit of trust flowed between them in alternating currents of question and answer, call and response.
“Is evolution true?” he asked during homework help, looking up from an illustration of the stages of human evolution in his bio book.
“Of course,” she smiled. She could tell from the way he sucked on his lip that more questions were coming, and she gave him time to formulate them.
“So we didn’t start as humans?”
“Nothing started like what it is now, L. Dogs came from wolves, and humans came from these guys–just like chimps and gorillas. We all come from the same primitive ancestors, and became different over millions of years.”
“So we’re cannibals.”
She marveled at his pure simple logic.
“Is that why you don’t eat meat, Merse?”
“I don’t eat animals, Laurie–meat is just a phony word for the animals people murder for food.”
“Murder? How?”
He had opened the spigot, and she let the facts flow. She told him about “Cattle–that means cows and steers, which are bulls who’ve had their testicles cut off–without anesthesia!–and they’re shot in the head with steel bolts and hung from chains, and while some of them are still conscious, they slash `em in the throat and hack `em into pieces with long knives.” She spoke of chickens, shackled, dipped in electrified water and then passed before buzzing rotary blades meant to slit their throats, some birds still conscious when the blade slices their throat, some dodging the blade only to die when submerged in a “scalding tank” thick with boiling water, feathers, and blood. Lawrence choked out the words, “That’s evil, Mercy” with his hand on his stomach, and she said the animals way they lived was even worse. With quiet reverence for the grim truth, she played for him an undercover film of a feedlot where steers stood hide-to-hide in an inches-high sludge of manure, mud, and urine, then showed a film of a factory egg farm where birds stuffed into battery cages lacked the room to even turn around. The camera closed in on a bird’s vacant eyes. Lawrence lowered his head towards the computer screen, his lip hanging low as if he lacked the will to stiffen it, his eyes mirroring the bird’s helpless gaze, his cupped hands unconsciously reaching for the screen as if to succor the hen.
He ate no bite of stewed chicken that night, for he saw in the bones that stretched the blanched skin no meal, but a friend. The next night he would not touch his ground beef. The night after that he picked at the veggies in Dad’s famous beef stew, but would not touch the meat until the anguish in his mom’s voice moved him to do so. He took a spoonful into his mouth; the meat had the tang of death to him now, and he disgorged it back into the bowl on a vile stomach acid tsunami.
“Dead animals,” he murmured with a sorrowful gaze as his mom wiped his mouth.
“Dead animals,” he reported with sincere helpfulness in The Chefs Club, an
after-school class for kids behind in their graduation requirements. “Meat’s just a nice word for murder.”
Mercy, who bodyguarded her eleventh grade brother from a discreet distance as if he were the president’s son, glided to the cooking table and positioned herself between Lawrence and a meat-loving, thick-necked boy named Mark who was unaccustomed to being contradicted.
“You’re calling me a murderer?”
“No,” said Mercy with a disarming smile. “He’s just trying to help.”
Mark grinned down at Mercy through narrowed eyes. “Hey, I like brainy girls.”
“I’ve got glasses, so I’m brainy?”
Mark shook his head and smiled, turned to the counter and pressed a glob of raw ground beef with the heels of his hands, then rolled hunks of the beef into balls with occasional lascivious grins at Mercy. She stayed in position between Mark and Lawrence the rest of the day and the rest of the year, and rebuffed Mark’s frequent advances with subtle wit and grace.
In twelfth grade Lawrence was back in the Chefs Club, as was Mark, as was Boyce, as were two dozen kids who needed one more credit to graduate. “So you want to be a cook when you grow up, Lawrence boy?”
“Oh yeah,” Lawrence said dreamily. “It makes me happy to serve people food.”
Mark snickered ostentatiously at that, and Boyce, who had dropped out of sports and grown a jawline beard to go with his red-rimmed, lunchtime beer drinker’s eyes, snickered too. “I bet decorating cupcakes makes you happy too,” Mark said.
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “I love sprinkles the most.”
“Sprinkles,” Mark snickered. “Lawrence Man, where’s your sister?”
Lawrence rolled his tongue around the corner of his mouth in reflexive synch with his rolling of the pizza dough, much as a dog kicks when his paddle point is petted. As with all repetitive manual tasks, he rolled dough expertly. “She was accepted at Cal,” he said with
a strained effort to talk while rolling. “But she wanted to live at home, with me.”
“Who wouldn’t want to live at home, with you?” sniggered Boyce.
“Tell her hi from me,” said Mark with an anaconda arm around Lawrence’s shoulder.
They left him alone for the day and the week.
“Did you tell your sister hi from me?” Mark asked.
Lawrence was intent on shaping the tail of a croissant, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Mark backhanded him hard on the arm. “Did you?”
“Huh?” asked Lawrence. “Yeah. I said hi.”
“And?” The demand in Mark’s stare would have been understood by most guys but was wasted on Lawrence. “What’d she say?”
“She said not to get too close to that guy. But I don’t think the cooking table’s too crowded.”
Snickers erupted from Boyce and from Boyce’s pal Hank, who always wore a down-grin of mocking disdain. Mark raised his voice to tamp down theirs. “Is your sister a lezzie or what, Lawrence Man? I mean come on, that short hair.”
Lawrence smiled, visibly at a loss.
“He means,” said Boyce, leaning in on Lawrence’s face, “does she like boys?”
“Oh, sure,” Lawrence brightened. “She goes out with Draco.” Then, as if explaining: “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Which is what matters,” Mark snorted.
Lawrence earnestly nodded.
Mark, Boyce, and Hank dubbed themselves The Three Musketeers and settled in for the rest of the school year. Lawrence, who had been raised to give, bought a frozen Three Musketeers bar for each. They caucused privately and invited him to be the Fourth Musketeer. He proudly accepted. His status as Fourth Musketeer involved fixing the subpar results of their lackadaisical cooking efforts, wearing Mouseketeer ears for their amusement, and keeping his mouth shut when they chatted. They chatted about things he did not understand–hos and drugs and Grand Theft Auto and bad ass pits and how crappy school was–and they spoke with regret in coded terms of things they hadn’t done in high school, and how they had better do them while they could.
One of the things was making a film–a cooking show, they told Lawrence one day–and it would star him, the best cook in the class. Mark held the camera and Boyce held the mike as Lawrence proudly laid out the cooking table with tools and ingredients for his favorite recipe, his father’s beef stew, subbing soy meat for beef.
“You like wearing that apron, don’t you, Lawrence?”
Lawrence smiled at the camera’s friendly eye. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “It makes me feel like a real chef.”
“So remember the chef’s hat.” Hank presented the puffy white chef’s hat to Lawrence on a tray. Lawrence placed the hat on and flushed with pride.
Mark peered through the camera as if through the sight of a sniper’s rifle.
Smiling angelically down upon his domain, Lawrence diced carrots, celery, and onions; sauted the veggies and built up a sauce; tossed pearl onions, potatoes, mushrooms, peas, and soy meat into the pot; seasoned the simmering pot with herbs; inhaled the intoxicating aroma; stirred the pot lovingly, gently, sweetly. Occasionally he looked up shyly at the camera, as for years he’d looked up at loving parents and sister when taking on a new challenge. When the stew was ready, Mark led a giddy Lawrence by the arm to a seat of honor at a well-set table to receive the first bowl. Boyce behind them slid a mob of red, fatty beef chunks into the pot and filled Lawrence’s bowl, taking care to load it with extra meat which he submerged with care.
“Time for the chef to take the first bite,” said Boyce with the hushed anticipation of a golf announcer on the eighteenth hole. “Take a big bite, L.”
Mark took dead aim at the Lawrence’s face with the camcorder as he raised a spoonful of stew thick with beef chunks, potato chunks, carrot, and peas, all brown from the sauce. Through the viewfinder Mark observed Lawrence placing the spoon in his mouth and closing his eyes with sensuous joy as he chewed the stew well, as his parents had taught him; then he suddenly stopped, like one realizing he’s unwittingly entered a dangerous room. “Something’s wrong,” Lawrence hushed, pulling a half-chewed chunk of stringy meat from his mouth in tweezering fingers. He recognized the chunk as meat and his face swelled with horror and then the dam burst, the contents of his mouth and gut spewing wildly into and all over the table, slime and chunks and steam everywhere. With a sickly voice he told the camera, as if telling a friend: “There’s meat in there” as slime dripped from his mouth.
“There’s meat in there” was the tag on the clip on YouTube the next day, and it was also the caption beneath a close-up of Lawrence with bulging cheeks and imploding eyes a moment before the surge burst through his lips. The clip garnered two dozen views the first day, three hundred-plus the next, and well over a thousand by the afternoon of the third day when Lawrence learned of it and showed it to Mercy.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured, draping her arm across his shoulders, leaning her head against his, kissing the hair atop his head as she’d done when he was beaten up in ninth grade. He did not turn to her, but stared ahead and clicked play again. “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Mercy hushed. He forwarded to the part when Mark led him to the table. “I’m gonna get that monster thrown out of school,” she said with a tear in her voice. “First I’m gonna get YouTube to take that trash down, then I’m gonna see the principal tomorrow and get all those guys thrown right out of school!” The clip was at the moment when Lawrence realized he was a cannibal eating a fellow creature; now the spewing, now the aftermath–the clammy skin, the viscous drool, the horror that Lawrence summed up like so: “There’s meat in there.” “I should have been there with you somehow. I’m so sorry, baby.” Lawrence was hunched forward in a world of his own; her words couldn’t reach him. “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Again he played the regurgitation ... the close-up of the vomit all over the table ... the close up of the sickened boy with shiny, slimy lips. The boy turned to his sister:
“They’ll never eat meat again, Mercy. One-thousand three-hundred and fifty-five people. They won’t.”
She relaxed now, choked out a quivering laugh of relief and kissed her brother on the nose. An impulse led her to place on his head the king’s crown she’d bought for him many years before. She leapt to her feet and curtsied to the king and swept out the door to make plans to move in with her friends.
- end -
This is a favorite story in part because of its social commentary. Your comments, as always, are most welcome.
"Lawrence"
In Lawrence’s soft smile were sculpted the loving acceptance of parents resigned to a slow-thinking son, and the loving support of a brilliant big sister who’d passed up the chance to live with college friends to guide her one-year-younger brother through one last perilous year of high school.
It had always been thus. Walking to school on Lawrence’s first day of first grade, Mercy had cheered her brother with the promise of a flying saucer at recess. Smiling sweetly to the classmates nearest him as the kids tromped giddy and nervous out to the playground, Lawrence tumbled out the news that his sister was bringing a spaceship to him–and they could ride on it! Jasmine–tall, pretty, and bursting with confidence–tittered at Lawrence when Mercy arrived with a saucer-shaped cookie; a pair of tentative girls behind Jasmine stood like wee ladies-in-waiting, observing the scene with slowly dawning grins. Mercy comprehended her brother’s plight and marched back to the cafeteria to spend her allowance plus two borrowed bucks on flying saucers for all three girls. When she returned, the girls were perched atop the monkey bars while Lawrence munched below them and gazed up as if they were high wire angels. When the tribute cookies were eaten and the sated angels floated down to ground, Mercy extended her arms into Buzz Lightyear wings and led the three girls, with Lawrence in the rear, on a soaring, banking, careening space caravan to the outer reaches of the little kids’ yard, the other kids gaping with envy and awe. The three girls adopted Lawrence that day, and kept him all year.
Lawrence was Mercy’s living doll, and she cherished him suchly. In their yard, at the park, at the playground he was her wind-up doll. She’d crank the oversized key in his back and send him on a tottering, high-stepping march towards thorny bushes, hard benches, the model boat pond, a wheeling, snarling frenzy of dogs, or the basketball court where the rough kids played, she chasing after to alter his course with a turn of his shoulders to avoid disaster. Slowly the game evolved: How close to the hazard before she would turn him? Close, very close, and he never slowed and never shed character, and she never failed to turn him at the last. Indoors he was her dress-up doll: a pirate, Cowboy Woody, Gandalf, Mulan. In her precocious fourth grade psychology phase, she dressed him in their mother’s white nightgown and studied his reaction with notepad in hand: “It’s so comfortable, Mercy. I feel like a queen!” The sweetness of his smile overwhelmed her clinical curiosity and the mischievous impulse which it disguised. She flung the notepad onto the floor and pulled the nightgown up over his head. “I’ll get you some king clothes, Laurie, complete with a crown.” She kissed the squeaky-clean hair atop his head. Never again did she mess with his mind.
Instead she was straight with him, straight with him always. “Is Santa Claus real?” he asked her at eight. She shook her head no, and he smiled like a scientist who’s just had a rebel theory confirmed. Because she was straight, his trust in her grew. “Where do babies come from, Merse?” he asked at age nine. She pulled the anatomy book from the reference shelf and showed him a womb in all its wondrous intricacy. He furrowed his brow and spent hours sketching a longitudinal section of the uterus and ovaries with such faithful detail that his impressed teacher posted his “smiling cobra” on the classroom wall. Two days later Lawrence asked, “How do the babies get in there, Mercy?” She showed him the page of male anatomy. “I’ve got those!” “Do you?” she deadpanned, forgetting his lack of irony until she saw him innocently reaching for his zipper. “Laurie, I’m joking! Of course you’ve got those.” “So you don’t want to see them?” he rejoined, confused by her uncharacteristic rejection of his offer to share. Ennobled by a sudden appreciation for the enormity of her role, Mercy intoned in her best grown-up voice, “No, Laurie, you don’t show `em to anyone. They’re your own private jewels.”
“Mmm, jewels,” he drawled like Homer Simpson. Then he stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth and set to drawing a cross-section of male gonads, which he decorated with
ruby-red and emerald-green glitter gel.
In fifth grade he came home full of doubt. “Am I slow, Mercy?”
“Sure you’re slow, Laurie. You’re like the Internet when we had dial-up.”
Lawrence savored this image as he poured orange soda down his gullet. “I’m slow, like a snail. I’m slow, like a sponge. I’m slow, like SpongeBob!”
“Your slow, like Heinz ketchup. You’re slow, like home cooking ... like Dad’s stew, and how good is that! There’s a whole slow food movement thing, Laurie, and do you know why? Because fast food sucks.”
“I’m slow like slow food. My mind’s like beef stew.”
“Yep. Yummy and warm, with great stuff bubbling.”
She was always pouring new things in the pot. Tidbits, arcana, the trivial facts that made school more fun: headless chickens and roaches that lived, the details of strange celebrity deaths, the peccadillos of puerile kings. She served up weighty matter, too, savvy observations about how the world worked: “The principal’s only mean because she’s got a boss, called The Superintendent. And she’s only mean because her boss is the governor, and he used to harass women. Groped `em, in fact.” Or: “They only sell soda to make money for the school, Laurie. They don’t care if it makes kids fat.” Or: “Sure it’s a great country, but some of the guys who started it had slaves–and women couldn’t vote until nineteen-something.” He received these facts always with his head bowed over some manual task–building Legos, practicing knots for Boy Scouts, stringing beads, folding origami–with skill derived from entire days devoted to craft. He employed the head down strategy in school as well to avoid the sting of the teacher’s disappointed gaze when he lacked comprehension. Mercy knew not to ask him questions and besides didn’t need to, for she could intuit the gaps in his knowledge. “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff for some reason, but the Bible is totally against Harry Potter–it says you’re supposed to kill wizards with stones! And gay people, too, that’s Dumbledore two ways. I can show you the chapter, bro–chapter and verse.”
He widened his mouth as if punched in the gut.
“Lawrence my man, half of what they tell you is great in life ... isn’t.”
He rotated his head like a dog trying to understand the master’s odd behavior.
“But hey, half of what they tell you is bad ... is good!”
“So you tell me.”
She did. How ads couldn’t be trusted, how “Happy Meals” were unhappy for people who got fat and sick, how teachers got fired if kids didn’t do well on the standardized tests they both hated so much–this was the reason teachers made him cry, why they’d given her the medal she’d flung into the tree. She told him how Dad made his cuticles bleed because he was scared about losing his job, how Mom needed their sweet hugs when her blood sugar was low, how 9/11 was not our fault, sure, but we too had done bad things, had attacked Iraq for no good reason, put leashes on their men, killed thousands of regular people with bombs, not soldiers only Lawrence, but old woman and kids–
“Wha?” He had just put his remote controlled battleship in the pond, but turned to her with narrowed eyes that wished not to see.
“They act like only American dead people matter, L, but the bombs we drop kill innocent people along with the bad guys. And everyone acts like it doesn’t matter! And do you know why? Because they’re not us!”
He scrunched his face to dam up the tears, bent for a huge rock which he raised overhead and brought crashing down upon his ship.
“All those so-called great civilizations they tell you about, Lawrence, they hardly even mention they all had slaves. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans all had `em. And we had `em, too. They were cool in ways, sure–but slaves, little brother!”
“Show me,” he said, so she took him to the museum to see a painting of a pyramid beneath which straining slaves pulled massive blocks of granite beneath the eyes of muscled overseers with whips; then she rode him on her bike to the library where she showed him a photograph she had found of a fugitive American slave with lash marks on his back as thick as rope-cords. She could see the distress in his rounded eyes and mouth, so she checked out Spartacus to lighten his mood. He gazed in awe when dozens of slaves doomed themselves by stepping forward to proclaim: “I’m Spartacus. No, I’m Spartacus!”
“I’m Spartacus,” Lawrence mouthed in wide wonder.
Years later in high school a tenth grader named Wieder was cornered against his locker in the hall. “Say, Wieder Man, is it true that you’re gay?” It was Boyce, the leader of a four-jock pack that formed a semicircle around Wieder. Wieder lowered his reddening face, which Boyce took as confirmation of the obvious. Wieder was in fact gay; worse for him, he was fighting a terrible crush on Boyce, who was tall, blond, and lean, and spent hours in the weight room as Wiederman covertly watched his desperate efforts to bulk himself up against teasing jocks who said he looked gay. “Hey, that’s alright,” said Boyce in a honeyed voice laden with sympathy. “We all need to be who we are, you know,” words lifted verbatim from a recent assembly lecture on tolerance. Boyce rested his hand on Wieder’s shoulder, raised his thumb and brazenly stroked Wieder’s cheek while one of his pals chortled and another faked retching. Wieder raised his
blue-eyed gaze to Boyce’s in tremulous stages till at last he gazed directly up into eyes shining with the knowledge of their own seductive power. “Just admit it,” cooed Boyce, leaning close to allow Wieder to feel his warm breath and see his lips pucker. “Just say the word, dude. Come on. Be yourself.” It was the seminal moment of young Wieder’s existence, terrifying and wonderful. “Say you’re gay,” murmured Boyce. “Say it. Come on.” Wieder blinked, and tears flushed from his eyes onto Boyce’s hand. Boyce disgustedly flung the drops. “Say it!” he snapped. “Say it! Say you’re gay!”
“I’m gay,” said Lawrence, who had grown tall and thin and had slid through a gap to stand next to Wieder. His hands were passively clasped at his groin and he gazed at Boyce with a sad-eyed, fatalistic frown as Boyce’s face froze at first then rebooted, the boys behind Boyce jockeying like hounds awaiting the alpha’s signal to attack. It would not have been the first such attack: Lawrence had been beaten in ninth grade by a different pack for “hating America!” after saying in class that slavery was evil and that we killed, too. But then in slid Tina, Lawrence’s combative, plump, short Chinese pal from Origami Club. “I’m gay,” she said, thrusting her chin up at Boyce as she grasped Wieder’s hand.
“I’m gay, too.” This was Kayley, whom Boyce had long lusted after in vain. Kayley knew that her dating record belied the assertion, so she pressed against Lawrence’s flank, twined her viney arm in his, and cooed in a precociously smokey voice, “Well I’m bi, anyway,” breathing warmth into Lawrence’s ear.
Foaming, fuming, red-faced and shamed, Boyce managed a feeble “I’ll see you later” at Lawrence, to which Kaley laughed, “Hands off him, he’s mine,” thus perfecting Boyce’s disgrace.
Lawrence dreamed of Kayley through sweat-stained nights, but managed only a bright, shy smile when they passed in the hall. She honored the remembrance of their stand with a smile, but did not stop to talk. He daydreamed too of Tina, lowing at her as they and two other girls folded origami like pioneer girls in a knitting circle, Lawrence unselfconsciously gazing at the lustrous black hair that curled sharply around Tina’s square jaw, gazing at her thick neck full of power and the soft curves beneath her red cable-knit sweater and the skillful hands that turned out flocks of cranes as she chatted of things Lawrence followed but dimly, detecting his interest but protecting his feelings by looking away from his dimly comprehending gaze, unsure how to fill his wide-open eyes. For prolonged eye contact with women there was still only Mercy, and when they locked eyes a circuit of trust flowed between them in alternating currents of question and answer, call and response.
“Is evolution true?” he asked during homework help, looking up from an illustration of the stages of human evolution in his bio book.
“Of course,” she smiled. She could tell from the way he sucked on his lip that more questions were coming, and she gave him time to formulate them.
“So we didn’t start as humans?”
“Nothing started like what it is now, L. Dogs came from wolves, and humans came from these guys–just like chimps and gorillas. We all come from the same primitive ancestors, and became different over millions of years.”
“So we’re cannibals.”
She marveled at his pure simple logic.
“Is that why you don’t eat meat, Merse?”
“I don’t eat animals, Laurie–meat is just a phony word for the animals people murder for food.”
“Murder? How?”
He had opened the spigot, and she let the facts flow. She told him about “Cattle–that means cows and steers, which are bulls who’ve had their testicles cut off–without anesthesia!–and they’re shot in the head with steel bolts and hung from chains, and while some of them are still conscious, they slash `em in the throat and hack `em into pieces with long knives.” She spoke of chickens, shackled, dipped in electrified water and then passed before buzzing rotary blades meant to slit their throats, some birds still conscious when the blade slices their throat, some dodging the blade only to die when submerged in a “scalding tank” thick with boiling water, feathers, and blood. Lawrence choked out the words, “That’s evil, Mercy” with his hand on his stomach, and she said the animals way they lived was even worse. With quiet reverence for the grim truth, she played for him an undercover film of a feedlot where steers stood hide-to-hide in an inches-high sludge of manure, mud, and urine, then showed a film of a factory egg farm where birds stuffed into battery cages lacked the room to even turn around. The camera closed in on a bird’s vacant eyes. Lawrence lowered his head towards the computer screen, his lip hanging low as if he lacked the will to stiffen it, his eyes mirroring the bird’s helpless gaze, his cupped hands unconsciously reaching for the screen as if to succor the hen.
He ate no bite of stewed chicken that night, for he saw in the bones that stretched the blanched skin no meal, but a friend. The next night he would not touch his ground beef. The night after that he picked at the veggies in Dad’s famous beef stew, but would not touch the meat until the anguish in his mom’s voice moved him to do so. He took a spoonful into his mouth; the meat had the tang of death to him now, and he disgorged it back into the bowl on a vile stomach acid tsunami.
“Dead animals,” he murmured with a sorrowful gaze as his mom wiped his mouth.
“Dead animals,” he reported with sincere helpfulness in The Chefs Club, an
after-school class for kids behind in their graduation requirements. “Meat’s just a nice word for murder.”
Mercy, who bodyguarded her eleventh grade brother from a discreet distance as if he were the president’s son, glided to the cooking table and positioned herself between Lawrence and a meat-loving, thick-necked boy named Mark who was unaccustomed to being contradicted.
“You’re calling me a murderer?”
“No,” said Mercy with a disarming smile. “He’s just trying to help.”
Mark grinned down at Mercy through narrowed eyes. “Hey, I like brainy girls.”
“I’ve got glasses, so I’m brainy?”
Mark shook his head and smiled, turned to the counter and pressed a glob of raw ground beef with the heels of his hands, then rolled hunks of the beef into balls with occasional lascivious grins at Mercy. She stayed in position between Mark and Lawrence the rest of the day and the rest of the year, and rebuffed Mark’s frequent advances with subtle wit and grace.
In twelfth grade Lawrence was back in the Chefs Club, as was Mark, as was Boyce, as were two dozen kids who needed one more credit to graduate. “So you want to be a cook when you grow up, Lawrence boy?”
“Oh yeah,” Lawrence said dreamily. “It makes me happy to serve people food.”
Mark snickered ostentatiously at that, and Boyce, who had dropped out of sports and grown a jawline beard to go with his red-rimmed, lunchtime beer drinker’s eyes, snickered too. “I bet decorating cupcakes makes you happy too,” Mark said.
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Lawrence. “I love sprinkles the most.”
“Sprinkles,” Mark snickered. “Lawrence Man, where’s your sister?”
Lawrence rolled his tongue around the corner of his mouth in reflexive synch with his rolling of the pizza dough, much as a dog kicks when his paddle point is petted. As with all repetitive manual tasks, he rolled dough expertly. “She was accepted at Cal,” he said with
a strained effort to talk while rolling. “But she wanted to live at home, with me.”
“Who wouldn’t want to live at home, with you?” sniggered Boyce.
“Tell her hi from me,” said Mark with an anaconda arm around Lawrence’s shoulder.
They left him alone for the day and the week.
“Did you tell your sister hi from me?” Mark asked.
Lawrence was intent on shaping the tail of a croissant, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Mark backhanded him hard on the arm. “Did you?”
“Huh?” asked Lawrence. “Yeah. I said hi.”
“And?” The demand in Mark’s stare would have been understood by most guys but was wasted on Lawrence. “What’d she say?”
“She said not to get too close to that guy. But I don’t think the cooking table’s too crowded.”
Snickers erupted from Boyce and from Boyce’s pal Hank, who always wore a down-grin of mocking disdain. Mark raised his voice to tamp down theirs. “Is your sister a lezzie or what, Lawrence Man? I mean come on, that short hair.”
Lawrence smiled, visibly at a loss.
“He means,” said Boyce, leaning in on Lawrence’s face, “does she like boys?”
“Oh, sure,” Lawrence brightened. “She goes out with Draco.” Then, as if explaining: “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Which is what matters,” Mark snorted.
Lawrence earnestly nodded.
Mark, Boyce, and Hank dubbed themselves The Three Musketeers and settled in for the rest of the school year. Lawrence, who had been raised to give, bought a frozen Three Musketeers bar for each. They caucused privately and invited him to be the Fourth Musketeer. He proudly accepted. His status as Fourth Musketeer involved fixing the subpar results of their lackadaisical cooking efforts, wearing Mouseketeer ears for their amusement, and keeping his mouth shut when they chatted. They chatted about things he did not understand–hos and drugs and Grand Theft Auto and bad ass pits and how crappy school was–and they spoke with regret in coded terms of things they hadn’t done in high school, and how they had better do them while they could.
One of the things was making a film–a cooking show, they told Lawrence one day–and it would star him, the best cook in the class. Mark held the camera and Boyce held the mike as Lawrence proudly laid out the cooking table with tools and ingredients for his favorite recipe, his father’s beef stew, subbing soy meat for beef.
“You like wearing that apron, don’t you, Lawrence?”
Lawrence smiled at the camera’s friendly eye. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “It makes me feel like a real chef.”
“So remember the chef’s hat.” Hank presented the puffy white chef’s hat to Lawrence on a tray. Lawrence placed the hat on and flushed with pride.
Mark peered through the camera as if through the sight of a sniper’s rifle.
Smiling angelically down upon his domain, Lawrence diced carrots, celery, and onions; sauted the veggies and built up a sauce; tossed pearl onions, potatoes, mushrooms, peas, and soy meat into the pot; seasoned the simmering pot with herbs; inhaled the intoxicating aroma; stirred the pot lovingly, gently, sweetly. Occasionally he looked up shyly at the camera, as for years he’d looked up at loving parents and sister when taking on a new challenge. When the stew was ready, Mark led a giddy Lawrence by the arm to a seat of honor at a well-set table to receive the first bowl. Boyce behind them slid a mob of red, fatty beef chunks into the pot and filled Lawrence’s bowl, taking care to load it with extra meat which he submerged with care.
“Time for the chef to take the first bite,” said Boyce with the hushed anticipation of a golf announcer on the eighteenth hole. “Take a big bite, L.”
Mark took dead aim at the Lawrence’s face with the camcorder as he raised a spoonful of stew thick with beef chunks, potato chunks, carrot, and peas, all brown from the sauce. Through the viewfinder Mark observed Lawrence placing the spoon in his mouth and closing his eyes with sensuous joy as he chewed the stew well, as his parents had taught him; then he suddenly stopped, like one realizing he’s unwittingly entered a dangerous room. “Something’s wrong,” Lawrence hushed, pulling a half-chewed chunk of stringy meat from his mouth in tweezering fingers. He recognized the chunk as meat and his face swelled with horror and then the dam burst, the contents of his mouth and gut spewing wildly into and all over the table, slime and chunks and steam everywhere. With a sickly voice he told the camera, as if telling a friend: “There’s meat in there” as slime dripped from his mouth.
“There’s meat in there” was the tag on the clip on YouTube the next day, and it was also the caption beneath a close-up of Lawrence with bulging cheeks and imploding eyes a moment before the surge burst through his lips. The clip garnered two dozen views the first day, three hundred-plus the next, and well over a thousand by the afternoon of the third day when Lawrence learned of it and showed it to Mercy.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured, draping her arm across his shoulders, leaning her head against his, kissing the hair atop his head as she’d done when he was beaten up in ninth grade. He did not turn to her, but stared ahead and clicked play again. “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Mercy hushed. He forwarded to the part when Mark led him to the table. “I’m gonna get that monster thrown out of school,” she said with a tear in her voice. “First I’m gonna get YouTube to take that trash down, then I’m gonna see the principal tomorrow and get all those guys thrown right out of school!” The clip was at the moment when Lawrence realized he was a cannibal eating a fellow creature; now the spewing, now the aftermath–the clammy skin, the viscous drool, the horror that Lawrence summed up like so: “There’s meat in there.” “I should have been there with you somehow. I’m so sorry, baby.” Lawrence was hunched forward in a world of his own; her words couldn’t reach him. “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Again he played the regurgitation ... the close-up of the vomit all over the table ... the close up of the sickened boy with shiny, slimy lips. The boy turned to his sister:
“They’ll never eat meat again, Mercy. One-thousand three-hundred and fifty-five people. They won’t.”
She relaxed now, choked out a quivering laugh of relief and kissed her brother on the nose. An impulse led her to place on his head the king’s crown she’d bought for him many years before. She leapt to her feet and curtsied to the king and swept out the door to make plans to move in with her friends.
- end -
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