Wigger Story #3: The Prince Of King’s Island

Wigger talks about his grandmother again to the only person who listens to him. Jimmy Prince steers his truck down Mason Montgomery Road in West Chester, Ohio. It’s a beautiful day, but it will be hot on the pavement at Kings Island. The music is bumping from the 12” woofers, the 8” tweeters, and the bazooka bass tube under the seat of the truck. Jimmy is trying to enjoy the ride, but Wigger won’t shut up about his memaw. “She said sensitive people are born suffering, and they never stop.” Jimmy doesn’t respond, just listens and casually gulps from a pocket flask he stole from his father’s closet earlier this school year. The liquor is his dad’s, too. His dad hasn’t missed the flask or the booze because liquor never runs out in the Prince household and because Jimmy’s dad drinks out of the bottle, and the bottles are stacked in the garage until there’s enough to haul them away to the family-owned junkyard. There’s a machine down there in the Prince junkyard that burns hot enough to turn glass into sand, erasing objects like they never existed.

Jimmy grows tired of Wigger’s blather. He enjoys the skinny kid’s company, but Wigger talks about deep things in simple ways that annoy Jimmy, like they are things he should know already, but it’s the first time he’s hearing them. Jimmy doesn’t want to think about deep things right now. His mind is on Kings Island pussy, one of the best things about summer vacation as a teenager in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1991. Maybe Wigger was a little retarded. Jimmy didn’t know, but the immediate remedy lay in finding a song with good bass and interrupting Wigger to say, “Check this shit out. Listen to this bass line.” Wigger loved being moved by the bass under the seat when it got to rolling and tumbling.

As they drive east into Mason, toward Kings Island, DJ Magic Mike’s Vicious Bass fills the truck cabin and the perimeter beyond. When they stop at the intersection of Tylersville and Western Row, the bass from inside Jimmy’s truck makes the pedestrian warning sign rattle on the nearest light pole.

The boys pull into a United Dairy Farmers convenience store. “Gotta fill up the tank,” Jimmy said. He digs in his back pocket for the wallet and fingers out a five. He hands it to Wigger and says two nouns. “Snacks drinks.” Wigger sets off on his mission and enters the modern institution of fuel to the clang of a bell hanging above the doors. He nearly trips over a mop handle sticking out of a bucket with contents that sting his eyes and claw at his throat.

“Watch out, kid!” A pretty fat lady yells at him while remaining posed in a leaned-back position against the pay counter. She smokes a Basic cigarette and ashes in the short trash can at her feet. Alan Jackson’s “Midnight In Montgomery” plays from the portable cassette radio on the counter next to her, with the name GABBY! bedazzled in sparkling stars on the left tape deck of the machine. Wigger sees all of this but says nothing, noting how much his real father loves that song. He played that cassette over and over during board games last summer in the Florida heat. A midnight ride. Eerie. Romantic. Outlaw shit.

Wigger walks to the snacks first. Looking back at the shrew, he notes the mountain of assorted cigarette cartons sprawled on the counter like an accident that already happened in this strange, dirty, but somehow also antiseptic place. The cashier stubs the cigarette out on her shoe, tosses the butt in the trash can, and kicks it to the corner behind the register. She takes up stuffing the cigarette packets from the carton into the clear, spring-loaded shelves sitting above the register like dusty munitions on a naval transport that’s never seen battle.

Waffling between salt and sugar, Wigger weighs his options. He fills his hands while the cashier watches him with disinterested suspicion. She’s seen many thieves in her time, and more than a few lovers, but she’s let most of them go. She still nails the creeps and disrespectfuls; and the jury is out on Wigger if she catches him stealing. He could be a little creep, but he seems only annoying in a wannabe way with his baggy, shuffling clothes hanging on a pin-prick frame. She’d think he was black if it wasn’t for his pale white face. What is it with these little suburban white kids suddenly wanting to seem poor and black? Was there a worse thing to wannabe in America?, she thinks. She watched him move around the small space in the convex mirror up in the corner of the store, passing by the sugar sodas. She had him pegged for a mountain dew kid, but he clinked out two glass bottles of wild cherry clearly canadians. She understands enough about this little kid to abate her minimum wage curiosity. Now, she just wanted to see him gone.

She doesn’t look at Wigger while ringing up his order, but she notes he dropped a small bag of paid for Planter’s Peanuts when he fumbled out the exit door, which pushed back so hard against his little frame that it chattered his teeth and caused the snacks to dislodge from his grip while his awareness was preoccupied by embarrassment. Wigger misses some things he shouldn’t.

After the door lodges back into frame and the bell is silent, the big and pretty cashier walks patiently around the counter, picks up the peanuts, opens the bag, and starts eating, while casually watching the fight about to happen over at pump one, right where that little wigger kid was walking toward.

While Wigger was being surveilled by the cashier, Jimmy was about to brawl with a car of black kids who were parked on the opposite side of the pump. The argument started because the rap music Jimmy was playing in his monster truck sounded like an amphitheater next to the tinny, cheap stereo in the black kid’s ford escort. The two young men in the front seat were seventeen-year-old cousins, and their sisters, younger by one and two years, were in the backseat watching the scene unfold on the other side of their unlocked car doors with rolled-down windows.

“Want you turn that shit down, homie?” The black kid couldn’t stay quiet over his outrage that this country ass white boy had the nerve to play Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow The Leader” and have it sound so good and loud coming out of this shiny, new country ass truck sitting higher than a Ford Escort. The passenger leans down and stirs around under the Escort's seat. Jimmy, in his head, did a math equation of violence and waited to apply the formula because suckers move first.

To his credit, Jimmy Prince ignored the kid in the beginning, but the kid keeps talking shit, mistaking Jimmy’s silence for weakness. In the city streets, silence is weakness. But in the country, silence means waiting for the right moment to attack. Where these kids are gassing up the cars right now is a place in between those worlds of experience. The kid keeps running his mouth as Jimmy nozzles the gas gun back into the pump’s cradle. Wigger is on his way back to the truck, and the cashier is still watching the scene from inside the store. She empties the rest of Wigger’s peanuts into her mouth and crumples up the wrapper, but only holds it because she can’t take her eyes off what is happening outside the front window. I can’t believe I get paid to watch crazy shit like this happen every day. This is her favorite show, strangers fighting over nothing, because this is a place they all have to come to and figure out how to live together for a few minutes of shared reality every day. What nobody realizes, at this moment, is that this is Jimmy Prince’s show, but he hasn’t hit the play button yet.

Jimmy opens up the truck door and steps up on the custom foot rail he installed with his little brother, holding the bolts in place while their dad sits in a waffle lawn chair, laughing and flicking lit cigarette butts to try and break Jimmy’s concentration. Jimmy reaches behind the driver’s seat and pulls out a nearly empty glass bottle of Gatorade. He uncaps it and pours it out as he walks around the pump. He moves here like he moves on the football field, toward a place in space with a goal that he will make happen or die trying. He smashes the bottle on the escort’s bumper, and the glass explodes around the back left tire. The girls scream, and the kid’s cousin opens the door and gets out while staying low to the ground, because the wise bow down when shit pops off. Get low and stay alive longer when the weapons come out. Both city and country rough kids know this lesson, but everyone here except James Prince is too late to respond, and Jimmy is already at the kid, holding the broken bottle dangerously close to his neck, but still far enough away to maintain control through terror, which is the Prince family's method of owning a tight situation. Jimmy learned the effectiveness of this technique early in life because he was a victim long before he started working to become the choice. And now it is time to give a little back. Time to choose.

Wisely, the kid isn’t fighting back, and he doesn’t say a word. Jimmy teaches a lesson here, also without saying a word. After a tense forty-five seconds of Jimmy and this bug-eyed black kid staring at each other in silence with a jagged-edged convenience store weapon of death between them, Jimmy watches the rage and terror drain from the kid’s eyeballs, and the kid goes limp with resignation. He’s ready for it, and Jimmy feels a shift in the weight of his opponent's soul’s composure. This fight is no longer fun, and this soul is no longer an opponent. So Jimmy lightens up his grip and takes the bottleneck away. They stare at each other like two strangers who just ended a hot and sweaty dance together. Jimmy releases the kid by shoving him back with minimal force, not unkind —the kind that says, “Now you know where you are and who runs this part of the world.”

It would have ended there if the cousin had stood up from where he was crouched down and shown he wasn’t a threat. But Wigger sees the kid and thinks he’s lunging for Jimmy, so he drops the snacks and bottles to get out the flea market stun gun Jimmy gave him to hold in case they needed it today. The stunner was in the front pouch pocket of the Baja shirt Jimmy also gave Wigger to wear like a pack mule. Jimmy’s Chapstick is in there, as well as five dollars of pocket change for the games.

By the time Wigger gets the stun gun in his hand, Jimmy has already dealt with the situation. Unfortunately, Wigger’s baggy jeans were already sliding down his ass when he accidentally stuns himself in the stomach, through the baja shirt. The pants fell, taking his underwear, and now this skinny little boob was on the ground, stunned with his dick out. Wigger’s big, flaccid dick and long balls are exposed to the gas station, and the cashier started choking from laughing so hard. The baggy pants balloon around his ankles from the blowing wind, and everyone is laughing, even Jimmy. One of the girls looks down at this oddity of miniature (but also massive) humanity, then elbows the other girl, then puts her first fingers together to estimate the length. They nod, affirmatively, each laughing and leaning out further to get a better look. Roller coasters suddenly seem like faraway entertainment compared to this scene.

Jimmy holds up both palms in resignation at the cousin, letting him know the danger has passed. He claps the driver kid lightly on the back twice, then gently pushes him forward again; it is time to move on. Jimmy is still laughing, walking toward Wigger as the escort drives off, wheels squealing, passing feet from Wigger’s aching head. Wigger stirs to the recognition that his thighs and balls are breezy. Jimmy helps him up, and Wigger quickly pulls his pants up. Jimmy took off his belt and handed it to his companion. Matter-of-factly, Jimmy says, “Christ, Bud, you need to get pants that fit you.”

He smiles at Wigger, who smiles back, adjusts the belt, and flinches at its constraint. “You can’t keep pulling your dick out to get out of fighting, little man. Eventually, you’re going to have to throw a punch or something.” They both laugh, but Wigger doesn’t explain to his big friend that he stunned himself trying to save him. It is too pathetic to admit the failure to show up for Jimmy when he needed him most.

“Come on, bud. Let’s ride a roller coaster.” Wigger protests and reaches down to start gathering the snacks, but Jimmy cuts him off by saying, “Fuck that shit. Leave it for fat Nancy to clean up.” The pump speaks in the big lady’s compressed voice. “I fucking heard that, Jimmy Prince. You little shit. And I’m going to tell Kathleen what you said about her best friend.” Jimmy holds a middle finger up in the air, aimed at the cashier’s window, while they both climb back up into the truck. Wigger hands Jimmy the Clearly Canadian that didn’t break, and he opens it, takes a long swig, and passes it back to Wigger, telling him to drink the rest. They pull out of the convenience store, rolling slowly while Jimmy places his sunglasses on his face and looks back at the convenience store, where he sees Nancy Crawley flipping him off. Pulling out, he shows her his middle finger again. Then he leans over and says to Wigger, “You wouldn’t believe it, but fat Nancy was a piece of ass back in her high school days.” Wigger’s eyes go wide in wonder. He looks over at the big lady waving her arms in fury behind the cashier’s window. Jimmy laughs and tells him, “My mom said if she had as many coming out of her as went in, she’d look like one of those Japanese blowfish.” They were still laughing when Jimmy drove through a clean red light to get to Kings Island faster.

Walking away from the parked truck in the Kings Island parking lot, Jimmy tells Wigger to remember they parked in Huckleberry Hound Five. Jimmy always parks in Huckleberry Hound Five at Kings Island. Jimmy does things consistently, so he doesn’t have to think about them anymore. Wigger makes a mental note that will never be erased. To the day he dies, he will remember that they park in Huckleberry Hound Five when they come to Kings Island. At the gate, they flash season passes, the closest thing Wigger has to an ID card, where he can show somebody his name is what he says it is, and the fuzzy picture goes along with his face. Every year, the background of these passes is a new color and there is a date at the top along with the bearer’s age.

Kids in high school are supposed to stay where they are when they get there. Dorks are dorks. Jocks are jocks. Pretty girls aren’t friends with ugly ones outside school. And nearly everyone is trying to get laid. But what Wigger is doing with Jimmy Prince is an abuse of the system of rules that confine the small and weak to the shadows of high school. Jimmy has opened a door for this strange little person to come through and mingle with his betters. Some kids will come to see this act as a betrayal of social grace and a vote for chaos. They will come for revenge one day, but not this day.

Wigger and Jimmy Prince walk into Kings Island full of swagger that Jimmy conjures up like uncapped gasoline fumes. The pavement steams from the heat and hose water. Wigger walks in the wake of Jimmy’s self-confidence and finds himself lifted by Jimmy’s presence. This small kid is thinking bigger thoughts these days. They move past the park gates and step through the front gate gifts store, where all the baby toys and chatchkees are displayed for appeal to the undecided. Wigger is back on the subject of his grandmother, and it’s annoying Jimmy, who finally turns around and snaps at him, “Shut the fuck up dude, and pay attention! There’s bitches all around here! Some of them might be watching you, but you won’t know it if you run your fucking mouth all the time.” Wigger wasn’t insulted. He was corrected and grateful for the lesson. He stayed quiet for a few minutes.

They leave front gate gifts and arrive at the main forum, two humans in a seething crowd of human energy that made them both feel small, even Jimmy, who quickly finds a circle of confidence to defend by shouldering his way through the crowd; and Wigger follows in his draft like a cyclist in dead heat. Jimmy bears left to part the crowd, and they head towards oktoberfest and the flying pirate ship careening back and forth thousands of times every day, while passengers still scream and squeal no matter how many times they’ve ridden the ship, or one like it somewhere else like this.

Walking by the spinning barrels over a two-foot pond, Jimmy’s pussy radar goes off, and he spots two girls laughing and being unironically beautiful and generous with their joy in public. They were the black girls from the back of the escort at the gas station, gorgeous. Jimmy comments on the breasts of the older girl, while noting her shape, her neck and ears, the way her long fingers grip the edge of the barrel in slow spin. She is exotic to Jimmy’s eyes, beautiful and strange, but her skin is not a mystery to Wigger. He spent his childhood looking up into black faces, smiling at most of them, brothers and sisters in poverty, running the streets of Decatur, Illinois. Complaining about hunger never does a thing.

“Those are the girls from earlier,” Jimmy says. Wigger says, “Yeah.” Jimmy says, “That means those other kids are here, too.” Wigger says, “Yeah.” Jimmy says, “Keep your guard up, bud.” Wigger asks why. Jimmy says, “Because I’m getting that girl’s phone number today.”

They turn around to walk away and find themselves surrounded by more black faces. Many more. Wigger immediately picks out the kids from the escort. Jimmy finds the eyes of the biggest black man he’s ever seen. This is no kid, and he didn’t look like a man to be fucked with at any time. “There go that motherfucker, right here, Dee. This big white bitch.”

No word is said while the crowd passes around them to the rhythms of kaleidoscope music, injecting a surreal aura into this moment. The enormous black man steps forward in one smooth leap, like he is sliding onto a dance floor, and he’s up in Jimmy’s face, eyeballing him and pushing his massive pectorals into Jimmy’s big ones. But Jimmy neither backs down nor gets aggressive. This is a dance, two lions sizing each other up at the watering hole of this man-made pond with its ridiculous spinning barrels filled with people amusing themselves halfway to death.

Now the black guy (Dee is his name), Dee starts flexing his chest muscles against Jimmy’s, bouncing them, and it’s almost like they are making out. It’s nearly sexual. Wigger has hung with Jimmy long enough to know when he’s calculating to attack, and Wigger steels himself to be kicked, punched, bitten, spit on, and screamed at because that’s how these scenes have always gone down for him as the only skinny white kid in a sea of black and brown faces. This is normal for Wigger, but not for Jimmy.

In Jimmy’s world, black people are called ████ as a reference, nearly void of the intensity of hatred. It’s simply the word his daddy has used to call black people what he thought they were, and Jimmy learned it like learning the word ball for the round objects that bounce off hard surfaces. Black faces are not seen in groups like this in the suburbs and farm towns of Cincinnati, not in 1991. Downtown, sure, but not at the United Dairy Farmers, where actual farmers fill their tractors at sunrise on Saturday mornings. But Jimmy didn’t have to act because a radio crackle, followed by a commanding voice, broke the silence of a pending war without dialogue.

“YOU KIDS SIMMER DOWN RIGHT HERE AND NOW!” A Kings Island park security guard forces his way into the crowd and separates Jimmy and Dee. Five other security guards run up and create a perimeter around the two biggest kids. Billy clubs come out. Cincinnati PD has stations all around the park with at least five officers on site every day, rotating between these stations. There is a near-military coordination of law enforcement here that these kids will never defeat with their anger alone. “99 - respond at Oktoberfest.” The answer comes back fast, “99-this is PD. Go ahead.” “Seven youth in a conflict. Five guards are on scene. Requesting two officers.” The answer is automatic, “Dispatched 99.” The guard ends communication with “Roger.”

The Cincinnati Police arrive to break up the scene, but none of them wants the paperwork of arresting Dee or Jimmy, so they tell them to walk separate ways, and they do. Wigger and Jimmy walk towards coney island while Dee and the others move back towards international main street. But at Kings Island, all roads lead to the same place.

Maurice is the name of the kid who drove the escort. His cousin is Durrell. Maurice calls back towards the spinning barrels. “Sharonda! SHARONDA!” Jimmy and Wigger are walking past the barrel ride exit and run into the girls. Sharonda is nearly as tall as Jimmy, and her body makes Wigger blush in lust. Sharonda stops to look at Jimmy staring at her, smiling sweetly like a suitor. “What you looking at, white boy?” Jimmy didn’t hesitate or posture. What he says to her isn’t a pickup line. “One of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen.” The little girl next to her is taller than Wigger but much smaller than Sharonda, and she laughs at the audacity of this big country white boy, trying to pick up her cousin at Kings Island. Who do these white people think they are? They think they own it all, don’t they? But all she says is, “Come on, Ronnie. We got to go.” Jimmy nods at her and says, “I’ll see you around, Ronnie.” Walking away backwards, unable to take her eyes off Jimmy, Sharonda smiles back at him and says, “You just might, white boy.” She turns around and runs to her crowd. Maurice asks her in a huff when she reaches the group, “Fuck you talking to that asshole for?”

Wigger and Jimmy Prince enter the arcade to the sounds of ear-splitting, clanging bells and sirens, with the screams and yells of little children in various states of agony and ecstasy. Parents yell at each other. Children yell at other children, and some yell back at their parents, while the employees working these games yell at everyone because that’s their job. A clown shows a little girl a magic ball disappearing, and she slaps her face with both hands in joy, her eyes rolling up to find her mother beaming down on her child like god surveying a good sixth day of work. In the next aisle of games, a father hunches down to wipe ice cream from his little son’s face, who smiles with big white teeth to validate the routine and effort. Wigger sees, hears, and notes all these things at once, like a mental flood he’s learned to control. He does not speak of these recognitions to Jimmy, who quietly prowls the aisles, looking for young women to engage in the labor of flirtation.

Jimmy spots two girls toward the exit on the other side of the arcade. One is tall by her long legs and skinny, while her friend is short, squat, and hyper-aware. The small one is pretty, but the tall one is gorgeous and young, unspoiled by time and disappointment, but this will change fast soon.

Jimmy walks up and introduces himself like it’s the most natural act in the world. The girls are surprised and jump when he speaks to them because his voice is so deep, like a man’s, but his face isn’t quite a man’s face yet. The tall girl leans in to hear Jimmy better, and he puts his arm gently on her upper back and pulls her closer to talk into her ear over the loud clangs. The short one looks at Wigger and doesn’t smile. He returns the sentiment. An amused look passes between the girls, and they allow Jimmy to continue his sales pitch. Jessica is the tall girl’s name, and Shelly is the shortie. They are from Hamilton High School and both have season passes to Kings Island.

Jimmy explained earlier to Wigger that finding girls with season passes here is important because this place has a lot of shadows and nooks, where make outs happen, an entire underground of saliva swapping and finger fucking under the waistbands of dozens of teenage underpants every day. So many sticky and bloody panties are left behind in these liminal teenage spaces that they are swept up by the Kings Island janitorial staff and kept in black lawn garbage bags that fill up fast and are marked as human waste.

Jimmy gets Jessica’s number and nudges Wigger toward Shelly. They smile, and she puts out her hand to shake, but Wigger awkwardly grabs her first two fingers and shakes them around like an alien who just dropped down on earth. He almost leans in to kiss her hand like the old movies, but she pulls it back rapidly with a bewildered, nearly disgusted look. After a few more minutes of Jimmy’s monologue of flirting, the pairs part with an agreement to meet up at 6 for some early dinner and a couple of rides. It’s 4 PM now, what Jimmy told Wigger was “the hunting hour” at Kings Island. Walking away, Jimmy explains his plan to convince Jessica to let them drive her and Shelly home tonight. Hamilton is only ten miles from the Prince farm, and they can stop at one of a hundred make-out spots in the woods and valleys where Butler and Hamilton counties merge.

The boys mill around for a while, hanging outside the potato works to scan the crowd for other young females looking around for young males. The smell of vinegar and fried potatoes is intoxicating, and Wigger nearly swoons from hunger. They walk down to the la rosa’s pizza near the vortex roller coaster. The sweet, hot la rosa’s smell is worse for Wigger’s rumbling stomach than the potatoes. Jimmy Prince takes a break from scanning the crowd and monitors his little accomplice. “Are you hungry, bud?” Wigger nods. “Let’s get some fries.”

After eating, they wipe their mouths and leave a mess on the table for someone else to clean up. They get in line to ride the vortex. It’s a long wait as the line slowly moves, and the temperature rises in the convex oven of the sky above their heads and the concrete below their feet. Wigger stares into the ride exit courtyard, watching the people coming off the roller coaster. A little boy hugs his daddy’s leg and says, “Please don’t ever take me on that ride again!” And the Dad laughs, swings the boy up into his arms, and says, “I’ll bet next year you’ll be begging me to go on it!” They laugh together and walk off into the crowd. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

The metal gates that served as the barrier between the people waiting to get on the ride and those getting off the ride crash down, and the people leaning on them collapse on their backs and sides. A collective moan erupts from the ground at their feet.

Wigger didn’t know that this is what happened: Remember Dee? He was the muscle-bound adult black man who hung out with teenagers from his neighborhood because they worshiped him, and a few of them did things for him from time to time in exchange for money, his protection, and counsel. Dee is kind of big shit in his neighborhood. Well, Dee wants to get with Sharonda, who is seven years younger than him. Her older brother went off to college on a basketball scholarship, and he and Dee have been down since they were little. But when Sharonda hit puberty, Dee fell in love with the girl he once of thought of as a little sister, and he saw it as his duty to watch over and protect her, especially in public.

Well, on the way from the altercation with the cops (I cannot get arrested again. Three strikes. In George Bush America, that’s it for me), Dee overheard Ronnie talking to her little cousin about that handsome white boy he was about to make look ugly back there. Ronnie was trying to play it off, but she was clearly interested in that white boy, and this set Dee’s heart on fire. He steamed about it while they waited in line at the racer rollercoaster.

All he wanted out of this day at Kings Island was three minutes with her. He paid for all these little asshole kids from the street outside his grandma’s house to come to the amusement park. He even drove most of them here in his uncle’s van. He didn’t want their money, and he didn’t need thanks. He knew what he did was boss baller, giving these neighborhood kids a little vacation on a hot summer day. Parents ain’t got the time or money for this shit. I do it. All Dee wanted was to sit with Sharonda between his legs on the skylab for three minutes. He wanted her to feel how he felt about her, how big his love was for her, and how much he wanted to give it to her as something special between them, intimate, and forever. But then those white boys showed up and put a pin in that balloon of hope, crossed a line through the name of the plan.

The skylab was a rotating wheel with twenty spokes coming out, and at the end of those spokes were human cages fitting two people comfortably or three in a clutch. Riders got into the cage cars like laboratory animals, sliding the moving gates into their latched positions, where every cage was checked twice by two separate safety employees, giving thumbs up to the ride operator, confirming all the cages were sealed. The ride starts spinning flat and raises itself up ninety degrees while still spinning, bopping up and down from there. The second and third passengers sit between the legs of the passenger before them. The centrifugal force pushes humans into an intense three minutes and twenty seconds of physical intimacy, enforced by physics. The Skylab was responsible for more romance and drama than any other ride at Kings Island. These little human cages incubate and birth love stories or become minor assaults every eight minutes the ride is operational. Dee wanted the love story. He wanted Sharonda between his legs today so he could start working to get between hers, maybe tomorrow or the next day. Dee had all summer to work on Ronnie, or so he believed when they all gaggled into the park today as a motley crew with dark skins and presupposed sins in the eyes of these white people and their park security.

It sounded to Dee like Ronnie’s cousin had gotten into a pissing match at the gas station with some hillbilly boy in a big truck and a little skinny boy he was rolling with. It sounded like a stage act to Dee. White people are a mystery. They built and run this fucked up world where he was born with a deficit he couldn’t even buy his way out of if he had the money. Dee said something to call attention to himself when Ronnie’s little cousin (what’s his name?) finished his story where they got out of there with a little dignity intact, and said that little wigger had the biggest dick he’d ever seen on a white boy. One of the other little kids, way too young to be so funny, said, “You know cause you be sucking them white boy dicks.” Everyone laughed and Ronnie’s cousin got mad and threw a rock at the little smart ass boy. Then Dee said what he said, because he wanted Ronnie to know that shit wouldn’t happen when he’s around. He said, “I wished I’dda been nare. Knock that muhfucker out and wait till he wakes up an do it aggin.”

In the vortex line, Dee overheard Ronnie and her girl cousin again talking about that big white boy. And look who just showed up. And there’s that little wigger boy supposedly with the big dick. Thinking of a small white boy with a big dick made Dee angry. He didn’t know why that made him angry, and not knowing why added fuel to the anger. It was growing like a fast cancer in his head. And he knew by Ronnie’s smile and the way she was looking at the big white boy that she wasn’t going to be sitting between his legs on the skylab today. He could now read the future of today like a map of a park. Soon, Ronnie and her girl cousin would go off on their own. They would agree to meet by the eiffel tower before the park closes. They going to find them white boys... Dee looks over at Jimmy and Wigger, who are laughing and joking with the older couple in front of them, like they didn’t just about get their asses whipped and their day ruined. Laughing. And Dee is here, scowling, getting angrier by the second. The sun is hot and Dee’s best nikes are sticking to this nasty ass concrete. These white people around him stink and are talking about bullshit that doesn’t matter in Dee’s world.

An intense roar emerges from the depths of his heart and rips through his amygdala, firing neurons so ancient that when their behavioral patterns activate, the creature who takes the following action is not the one who paid for all these ungrateful little kids to come to this forsaken theme park and witness what was about to go down. Each child and every stranger present for this disaster will remember it until the depths of their old age or the demise of their early deaths.

Dee rushes into the metal gate with all the force in his young, strong body. All the anger he’s been saving up since he was a baby boy, soaked up rage, soggy in his cellular matrix, boiling red bubbles explode outward without reason or target. This intense rage will simmer and hiss hours from now, when Dee’s sitting in a cold, dark place, going through the short list of people who can help him and then starting over again at the top. On some lists, the top is still the bottom.

Dee hit the metal gate like a linebacker. These pipe metal gates, linked together in a set of twenty, usually kept the vortex line in a neat two-by-two queue. The gates jolted forward in a fanned motion and fell over like dominoes chained together, and all the people leaning against the gate fell over after it, tumbling to the ground with the crowd’s collective groan. Purses and bags spill out like a coordinated movie stunt. Screams everywhere, followed by scrambling, and then the fighting started.

Jimmy Prince was sitting on the low concrete wall opposite the gates, which were now lying on the ground. Dee regained his balance and was already zeroed in on the big white boy he was about to rush and attack. Jimmy had also clocked Dee when the heads of the people between them were removed from blocking the view because they were either collapsed to the ground trying to figure what just happened, or they were leaning down to help others get back to their feet and pick up their shit before pickpockets descended to feed like pigeons in a park.

Jimmy and Dee stared each other down and reached a moment of violent intimacy with their eyes probing as deeply as possible before the inevitable happened. Jimmy leaped over Wigger, who had fallen from leaning on a gate that suddenly wasn’t there anymore. “Fuck it, let’s do this!” “Jimmy Prince’s famous last words,” as his mom called them. Fuck it! Let’s do this! Any time she heard Jimmy and his cadre of little criminals playing in the yard get to fighting one another, this was the line Jimmy spoke out loud to everyone when he’d had enough and was about to become violent. That’s usually when she got involved to settle the situation, because the last thing the Prince family needed was the county sheriff poking around on a disturbance complaint.

Jimmy grew up farm fighting in the fields around West Chester and the junkyard his family ran that ate and processed the trash of the township. But junkyard and cornfield fighting, as rough as it could get, still didn’t match what Dee came up with in his neighborhood. When you threw down on the streets of Bond Hill, it was either to get a rep or keep one. The stakes were higher in the streets than the fields and that is a little story of America.

Their two bodies collided in air and knocked the wind out of both of them. They landed and the kicking started. Both of these young men had good fighting forms. They each clearly understood the importance of covering up with a solid guard. Their arms were mainly weapons of defense, and their legs mostly offense, though a good fighter knows to switch these up once they have broken their opponent’s guard and are inside the punishment zone. That’s when a street conflict becomes combat jazz.

Both landed good shots on the face. Both were already bleeding. Dee’s knee was scraped up and Jimmy may have sprained his ankle when they fell to the ground. It hurt, but this situation ran on adrenaline. They were semi-evolved animals in a concrete jungle fighting over a space neither would stay long afterward to occupy.

Jimmy caught Dee in the head with a knee when Dee tried to rush him to the ground. Unfortunately, for Dee, Jimmy was an excellent wrestler. He could have gone to state finals if he’d stuck with it past freshman year. But he loved football more. Jimmy easily tied Dee up with a turnaround, and suddenly they were both on the ground, but Jimmy was on top of Dee’s back, and Dee’s face was on the concrete. The fight could have been over, but two of the young boys Dee paid for their tickets weren’t about to see their sponsor get beaten up in a white man’s theme park by a white boy while all these white people stood around watching and some of them cheering it on.

Fuck that!

Yeah, fuck that!

The two kids ran in with leg stomps to both sides of Jimmy’s head. He released Dee and fell over, palms reflexively cupping both sides of his damaged head, and different shoe prints muddied both sides of his face like blurry tattoos. Blood poured from Jimmy’s mouth and nose. He was fucked up and Dee was on his feet now, snorting like a bull. “MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER!” Dee ran at Jimmy and stomped his back, his neck, then started kicking at his ribs. The two kids also started stomping and kicking at Jimmy, who was limp on the ground, covering his head and taking the blows like a man. That’s what Jimmy’s dad would have said to him if he’d witnessed this scene. “You took it like a man, Jim.” But then, his dad would have flipped the metaphorical cup over to reveal the knife of harsh words he used to cut away his son’s manhood before it could sprout to challenge his own. “But you should have gotten back up and beaten that ████ to the ground, or stayed down. Man who loses his pride in a fight, Jimmy, may as well lose his life.” His father never offered a compliment without a weightier insult to immediately erase it.

Being kicked and beaten while covering up and not screaming is a lesson Jimmy’s dad taught him early. This is natural. This is the order of the world. Words were high hopes, because this is how life is lived by most people, kicked without mercy or measure and expected to shut up about it.

No one saw Wigger coming or expected what was about to happen to upset this already upsetting situation. This little white kid jumped on the big black man and stuck what looked like a VHS camera battery into the soft tissue of the man’s neck. Immediately, the big man straightened up and looked up to the sky, his muscles flexed like he was in a bodybuilding competition. Dee fell to his knees and planted his face into the sticky, hot pavement. He will have a pavement burn on his nose and right cheek that will take weeks to heal and leave a noticeable scar for the rest of his life. At one point, his nickname will be “ScarrDee.”

Wigger hops off the fallen man and descends on one of the kids, catching him in the lower back with the stun gun. Electricity snaps into the boy’s skin, but it only provides fuel for his kinetic motion, as he and his friends run from the ride, scattering in different directions. This is a defensive tactic of urban survival, where splitting up a group of people who run in multiple directions forces a dispersion of police resources and therefore minimizes the likelihood of more arrests. The strategic principle is that police can’t arrest a group if they aren’t all together. Poor kids of all colors call this getnahfuckout!

Wigger’s MeMaw once told him, “Groups of people are hard to control, but people alone are harder to control. And people working in pairs can upset the world. That’s how Jesus sent the disciples out, in pairs. Remember that.”

Wigger runs to help Jimmy get to his feet, and they’ve got to get the fuck out of here.

But Sharonda got to Jimmy before Wigger could. She was helping him to his feet, while Dee, the man who paid for her ticket, lay unconscious feet away from them. Someone handed her three napkins that they had taken from the ice cream stand across the plaza. She mops motherly at Jimmy’s face blood. The fight had gone out of Jimmy when he was getting kicked, but seeing this angel appear over him and offer solace in the form of a flimsy paper napkin made this whole day worth it.

“Damn, white boy, you sure know how to thow a party.” He laughed, but didn’t get cute. He said the following in a straightforward manner, like someone who sees a west coast sunset for the first time. “You are one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” Sharonda chose to react as if this were a cheap pickup line instead of a confession of love, but she will think about this moment obsessively for months. “Shit, your head is fucked up, white boy.” And then suddenly Jimmy got pulled to his feet by Wigger, who screamed at him, “We got to get the fuck out of here, Jimmy.” Police descended on the area after an embarrassing six and a half minutes of unassisted madness in the crowd. Anything could have happened.

Jimmy looks at Wigger, calculating his priorities along with resources and constraints because this is how his brain works in a crisis. Jimmy turns to look at Sharonda and says matter-of-factly, “You and me. I’ll find you.” This makes her smile, though she quickly hides it, turning her attention to Dee, who stirs under her touch and from her voice. Jimmy and Wigger are gone by the time Dee’s awake and starting to lean up.

The police arrive and yank Dee from the ground, slamming him back down. Then he is cuffed and dragged from the area, taken to the incarceration cells managed by the Cincinnati Police Department. The only personal witnesses from the young posse he paid for to get into these cursed white people’s theme park were Sharonda and her cousin, who both felt sorry for Dee, but neither of whom would stand up for him during his trial. Their parents won’t let them. But Ronnie quickly turns her thoughts to that beefy white boy and getting a ride home tonight in that big truck.

Jimmy and Wigger made it out of the plaza just before the Cincinnati Police and park security arrived to arrest Dee. Wigger stopped to stash the stun gun under a trash barrel behind the snow cone stand, near the bridge by the Amazon Falls ride, where people stood to watch the descending crafts full of people with scrunched up faces preparing to get soaked. It was known that if you wanted to get wet on a hot day, you could either sit in the front or back row of one of these twenty-person crafts, or you could stand on the bridge and wait for a wave of water to eject from the crafts’ impact. Everyone who wants can get wet here for free, and often those who don’t want to also get soaked.

Crossing the bridge, between raft ride touchdowns, they encountered the two girls from the arcade. The tall girl, Jessica, ran to Jimmy and took the napkin from his hand that he was using to mop up what remained of his face blood. He had a big gash on his nose, where one of the kids had booted his head into the concrete and his face scraped against a small shard of glass the park janitorial staff had yet to get to with their brooms and dustpans.

“Oh, you poor thing. Sticking your fingers where they shouldn’t go again, I see.” She was smirking at him, and Jimmy suddenly felt much better. He was back on the flirt. “And where would you like me to stick my fingers, Jessica?” Her smirk ended, and her face got serious. She leaned in closely to his ear and whispered something Wigger couldn’t hear. Whatever she said made Jimmy smile, and he smacked her ass playfully, then said for Wigger and Shelly to hear, “You’re a bad girl, Jessica.” The tall girl handed Jimmy back the bloody napkin and said, “Try me.” Wigger’s eyes went wide, and her friend Shelly shook her head, mildly dismissive. Jessica did this all the time. Tall people, both she and Wigger were thinking at the same time; they do what they want. Shelly and Wigger looked at each other, and a knowing shared experience passed between them; they are sidekicks looking for their own main stories.

The four of them spend the next few hours together, riding rides, talking, and flirting. Shelly and Wigger are developing a silent shorthand of eye rolling reactions and facial ticks that might pass as amusement but never laughter. They built up an arsenal of pleasant moments while walking behind their much taller companions who never seemed to shut up.

After they stopped to retrieve the ditched stun gun, the conversation quickly turned sexual as Jessica and Jimmy used their words (and a little performance art on both sides) to determine how sexually compatible they’d be together. The answer was they would be fucking right now if this was a bedroom and not a theme park.

Wigger and Jimmy learned a lot about Jessica’s sexual history, which she bragged about at a level on par with Jimmy’s ego when it got to exercising and flexing. Inevitably, the size of Wigger’s dick came up when Jimmy told the story of the morning’s antics at the gas station, which lead to the fight he had just barely survived. The story Jimmy told was a hero’s journey with Wigger as the foolish hero. Jimmy was conscious enough to know he had already scored a spot between Jessica’s legs. All he needed now were circumstances and opportunity to align, and that would likely be days, not weeks. Now that his future fucking with Jessica was secured, Jimmy is trying to help Wigger out with Shelly.

When Jimmy got to the penultimate moment of the gas station story, the one where Wigger dropped his pants and passed out, Shelly looked at Wigger’s cute but young-looking face, and then down at his crotch. She thought, How big could it be? Wigger looked embarrassed and tried to change the subject by asking who was hungry, even though he had no money to buy himself food. He’s actually really cute when he’s embarrassed, Shelly thinks. Maybe there’s something more to this scrawny little guy.

The four of them eat dinner at la rosa’s pizza. Like a teenage boss, Jimmy pays for everything. He has the money, the truck with the tunes, and Jimmy has the plan, so Jimmy gets the pussy. But what the King has earned, the King can also give freely to friends and lovers. The talk turns from sex to movies and music. Shelly is a horror movie fan, a Nightmare on Elm Street obsessive. She loves Freddy Krueger, and she gives the group a brief but convincing lecture on how the original Nightmare was an allegory about alcoholism and abuse passed down by passive parents to curious and restless children. Shelly tells them about something called generational trauma, and it’s been happening as long as there’ve been people. Jimmy winces when he understands what she’s saying, but Wigger is entranced by how smart she talks. He swoons inside. Suddenly, Shelly here is the most beautiful girl in a world that just grew smaller and narrower.

When Shelly talked about movies, she became prettier to Wigger. When he first met her earlier in the arcade, he thought she had a pushed-up, piggish face, but her perky, curly blonde hair looked different in the golden light of the sinking sun, which was going down over this Ohio theme park, one of the most synthetic places in modern civilization.

With the sun setting, it would be cold soon. The four of them journeyed to the front gate lockers, where Jessica stored her day and night gear, consisting of two windbreakers for her and Shelly, and a large beach bag containing bikinis, towels, and suntan lotion, in case they decided to hit the water park, which they hadn’t after hooking up with Jimmy and Wigger. The girls tied the windbreakers around their waists, to Jimmy’s complaint that he couldn’t stare at Jessica’s beautiful ass now. “Aw, poor baby!” she teased, then tormented Jimmy by saying, “I hope you can see in the dark.”

They head to the skylab, which has its multi-colored lights on now and whizzes and whirs with blurry lines of color that light up the Ohio sky like a flaming pinwheel cast through a prism. The line is long, and they have a lot of time to snuggle up together as the cold air settles over what was once a quiet forest northeast of Cincinnati. At night, bats will come to roost in the trellises of the roller coasters, while raccoons and other varmints take over the surfaces of this concrete world. An occasional mountain lion will make its way into the theme park at night, feeding on a spectrum of nature that feeds on the refuse of humanity. In the morning, the arrogant and awful sounds of humans will drive the mountain lions back east, where they feel safer, though their stomachs will be full of risky meats.

Shelly puts her hand in Wigger’s and is pleased to find it warm. She remarks to him how warm his hands are, and she leans into him with her breasts, finding the heat radiating from his flesh as welcoming as a blanket on her couch on a cold winter’s day. Something about this little man is inviting and feels safe to her now. Wigger seizes the opportunity for intimacy and hugs Shelly almost innocently, transferring more of his warmth into her cold, grateful flesh. Their outer thighs meet, and Wigger looks down to notice the goose flesh popped out all over her tanned, shaved legs. She looks at him, nods, and laughs. She says, “I always get goose pimples at night. It could be a hundred degrees out here, and I’d still get them.” Wigger shows her his hand and asks, “May I?” She nods, and he places his hand on her bare thigh above the knee. His warmth feels good to her, and her cold feels good to him.

Jessica reminds them that there are two other people here when she says, “Would you two just fuck already?” Shelly pushes at her friend and says, “Stop it.” Wigger blushes and removes his hand from Shelly’s leg. Jimmy smiles at his little buddy, who is doing a good job of making out. They both are. Most of the teenage girls standing in front and behind this foursome are jealous because one of the boys is big and gorgeous, and the small one is okay, good enough to make out with, but these two sluts got to them first. That’s what most of the young girls think. Most of the teenage boys would like to fight Jimmy for Jessica, but think twice when they see his size and the wounds on his face, marking him as a fighter and a survivor. The boys don’t register that Ronnie and her cousin are standing several people behind them in line. They don’t know that Ronnie has desperately been looking for Jimmy for two hours, in the hopes that he can give them a ride home. Dee has already been incarcerated in the Butler county jail, and he won’t be released until tomorrow.

It was finally their turn on the skylab and the foursome broke into natural pairs. Both boys sit in the back of their respective cars and the girls sit between the boys’ legs, as unspoken ritual requires in this place at this time. The ride attendant comes by to slide the entry gates into place and checks the latches. Double thumbs up. Nervous bellies anticipate the ride to come. Wigger hugs Shelly around the stomach. Jimmy places his hands on Jessica’s upper inner thighs, and she leans back hard into his strong body. Jimmy’s erection grows thick, and Jessica hums and nuzzles further into him when she feels it through their pants and the thin windbreaker.

As the ride begins, the couples melt into one another. To Wigger’s surprise, Shelly grabs his hands on her belly and moves them up to her breasts, teaching him how to stimulate her. He cups them, and his fingers quickly find her nipples because she’s wearing a t-shirt and a thin bra.

These things are easy to learn.

She leans back and exposes her neck for kissing. Wigger takes the hint and obeys. She tilts her mouth up, and they fall into a kinetic tongue kiss while holding firm under the massive force of this ride’s physics. Their teeth knock painfully, but their tongues find each other, and they play in each other’s mouths for several seconds. There are two minutes left in this ride. Shelly breaks the kiss and nestles into Wigger’s small frame. The sun has nearly set, and the ride spins faster. Wigger’s hands explore Shelly’s breasts, squeezing and probing for purpose, meaning, and response. He smiles as the wind whips her hair against him in measurable patterns, careening with this spinning wheel of kinetic motion and the potential for sex. This is the greatest day of Wigger’s life so far. He has titties in his hands and a girl put them there for him to squeeze. He has a big friend with power, influence, and money. The whole world waits for him after this ride is over.

Pairs of people stumble off the skylab, and a young boy rushes to the trash can by the exit to throw up. His parents run to his aid and console him, shepherding him away to sit on a bench together outside the ride exit, where they work through this small crisis as a family. Jessica helps Jimmy get his big body out of the skylab car, and they wait by the exit for Wigger and Shelly to arrive. Jimmy makes a big show of smelling his finger and nodding at Jessica, who laughs and pushes him away playfully. The four walk to the park’s exit, and it’s dark and cold outside now. The nightlife on international main street is in high gear. A jazz band plays on the corner by the candy shop, and further down the street, a barber shop quartet serenades an old couple, the wife in a park wheelchair. The wind blows the old bittie’s hair towards the exit like it’s trying to escape this life.

Jimmy and Jessica kiss long and hard in the shadows by the front gate exit. They broke away from Wigger and Shelly to let them say their goodbyes. Wigger’s kiss with Shelly is shorter than Jimmy’s and Jessica’s, but it’s full of tongue and passion. Shelly has to know. She reaches down and feels for the proof of Jimmy’s story. She has no idea if that is Wigger’s leg or if Jimmy’s story was understated, but her hand is filled. Suddenly, she feels tired and young, too young for this. Wigger, sensing an emotional shift inside Shelly, breaks the kiss and looks into her eyes, finding the quiet truth of her youth. Neither of them has any clue what they are doing, and neither wants to do it anymore right now. Neither says anything, but Shelly grabs and squeezes his hand as a sign of truce, and they walk to rejoin their partners.

The group journeys toward the passenger pickup, where Shelly’s dad will drive up and sit, car idling in a long line of other impatient parents to whom time and money matter more than their children. “My dad’s kind of strict,” Shelly tells them. “So, it’d be best if you two weren’t there when he picks us up.” The boys understand, and phone numbers are exchanged. And they are off on their next adventure by the time these girls pile into Shelly’s dad’s truck and drive off into the cold Ohio night.

“Where’d we park, bud?” Jimmy is testing him, but Wigger remembers everything.

“Huckleberry Hound Five.”

“Fuck yeah, it is!” Jimmy smiles at him. “Gimee five! You pulled that Shelly chick!” They five. “I’m proud of you.” It is the first time anyone has said that phrase to Wigger and not meant it as an insult. No one had ever been proud of him before because no one had ever really noticed him. Jimmy Prince was the first person to see the man this little boy could become. Jimmy Prince was the first person to invest in Wigger. At this moment, their brotherly love for one another transcends a typical friendship as lived by those who swim only on the surface of life’s ocean. What is happening here is more than an emotion. Rather, it’s a congruent, shared experience of the highest mental order, beyond opposites and attachments, involving two souls rotating around one another in a defined time and a place in space. Be here now.

Wigger startled when Sharonda came out of the shadows of the parking lot, followed by the small gang of dark-skinned children, two of whom were kicking Jimmy only a few hours ago. The group had been tailing Jimmy and Wigger since they left the park with two white girls. For an agonizing ten minutes, Ronnie convinced herself they were going to have to beg a stranger for a ride back home. Damn, Dee! Fuck you have to get arrested for? And for what? Why can’t you let it go with this white boy? Ronnie could ask herself the same question.

Her cousin, walking next to her, is thinking similar thoughts, but also knows this situation is going nowhere good. Ronnie and this white boy are going to cause trouble if they end up together. The world is filled with so much trouble. Why add more? But what happens between the logic center of the brain and the hormones of teenagers is less a disappearing act and more like a massacre of best intentions. Jimmy shifts seamlessly into flirting with Sharonda, and she is selfishly a satellite in his orbit for a seemingly unselfish cause, getting these poor kids home before their curfews at ten-thirty. Nothing good happens in their neighborhood after eleven, which is the time their parents would start worrying and making phone calls. There is a clock on this.

Of course, they’d give them a ride home. Jimmy even high-fived the two boys who kicked him. He knew who they were, and he showed them what his father would call “white man’s mercy.” But like Dee, Jimmy understands the way into Sharonda’s heart (and then her pants) is to get in good with these kids. He will slip into the spot that Dee prepared, and Jimmy, not Dee, will be the savior of these kids’ day. The youngest ones pile into the back of Jimmy’s truck. Wigger gets into the rear cab and folds down the side seats, the other for Ronnie’s cousin, who is definitely attractive to Wigger. Two girls in one day. Is that even possible? But this girl wants nothing to do with Wigger right now; she’s barely hanging on.

Ronnie hops up into the cab, and she and Jimmy buckle their seats and look at each other and smile. Something electric passes between them, but nothing is said. Wigger slides open the back window, and three attractive and smiling black faces immediately appear like a stage show. The kids in the truck bed are acting up, giddy with the freeway ride to come. Jimmy yells out, “ALRIGHT EVERYONE BACK THERE, SIT THE FUCK DOWN AND DO NOT STAND UP WHILE WE ARE IN MOTION! YOU WILL FLY OUT OF THIS TRUCK ON THE HIGHWAY AND THEY WILL HAVE TO SCRAPE YOU UP WITH A SHOVEL! DO NOT FUCK AROUND IN MY TRUCK! DO YOU ALL UNDERSTAND?”

Gruff replies confirm consent, and the kids all sit down, their backs to the bedsides of the truck. Jimmy calls out to them, asking what they want to hear. One calls back, “DOC!” Thirty seconds later, Mindblowin is playing loud, and the bass rumbles all their asses and insides. On the way home, the kids in the back are laughing and farting while the bass drum thumps the truck and the surrounding environment as free passengers cruise across Butler county, hit 275 and take it to 75 south, nearly all the way down to the river.

When the kids get dropped off, they scatter to various houses like birds leaning into magnetic flights home. Ronnie leans over and kisses Jimmy on the cheek, and he accepts it like a gift. She hands him the wadded-up slip of paper that she’s been carrying around since before the last skylab ride. It’s her phone number. “Call me,” she says, while opening the heavy truck door and sliding out backwards, her eyes not leaving Jimmy’s. So much emotion hangs in the air. Ronnie’s cousin grows impatient and reaches around to the seat latch, which springs forward violently and loud, breaking this moment and their staring.

“THANK YOU!” her cousin shouts out like a complaint.

In the rearview mirror, Jimmy watches the girls watching him pull away. The little cousin says something to her bigger cousin, and they turn around to walk away, their backs to the fleeing truck. If Sharonda listened to what her cousin told her at that moment, it would have changed the course of her life. But water goes where it will.

Wigger and Jimmy drive back up to West Chester, listening to DJ Magic Mike. Halfway back, Jimmy changes the CD to Bell Biv DeVoe. By the time Jimmy pulls up to Wigger’s house, the kid is asleep, leaning up against the truck window. Jimmy lets the truck idle a couple of minutes before waking his buddy up and dropping him off at his driveway. Jimmy Prince leaves off into the summer night with a day’s work well done.

Wigger Story #2: Shooter

TEMPLATE NOTE: This is a trial journal template. I always start one of these notebooks when I agree to take a case because I find it helpful to capture details of what’s happening, along with my emotional reactions and thoughts about the circumstances of evolving situations. This planning template was last updated in January 2024. It should be reviewed and revised in January 2025.

Day One...

I was walking out the door when the alert hit our phones. My wife said, “Holy shit, a shooting at your old high school!” I said something stupid because I think I was in shock. “But it’s a middle school now!,” I said as if that mattered in this version of America. We didn’t talk more about it because I was already late for the train to the city and had at least fourteen things to finish before noon. I forgot about the shooting until the following alert hit at 10:37 AM. The shooter was captured live and was a student at the school—no more details. Things were normal until 11:57. I remember this because I was leaving for a lunch meeting at noon and was already late. Up until that phone call came, this was just another American school shooting that happened to other people.

I didn’t recognize the phone number, but the 513 area code got me to answer. Who is calling me from Cincinnati? I accepted the call before I thought it through and later wished to God I’d let it go to voicemail.

“This is Benny.” I immediately knew who it was because some people’s voices are like that; they pull you into the past like a hook through your cheek on a taut line. I hear voices of people from the past in my dreams at night. Often, these characters of memory admonish me and fill my sleep with dread. Benny’s is one of those voices I hear in my dreams the most often, but hearing it coming from my phone in waking life sent fear into my nervous system like I hadn’t felt in years, not since before I met my wife, had my kids, and paid my mortgage off. I hadn’t felt fear since I hung out with Benny in high school.

“You. You’ve... seen the news? About the shooting?” I said yeah, thinking he was reaching out because of the horror in our hometown. I thought, Wow, he thought of me when this happened. I was honored at first, and then he said what he said. “It’s my kid. The one who shot the others.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat to cover it up. “Darrel, I... I don’t know what happened to the kid. I lost him a couple of years ago. He just stopped talking to me. And he started scowling all the time. I could have... I should...”

I had mercy on him and interrupted. “Benny,” I said. “Man, I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. It was a damn sorry conversation I was having with this guy I used to laugh with all the time. And his voice was the same. It was killing me how much it was the same, like an old recording on an answering machine. And then I asked a dumb question. “How can I help, Benny?” I should have checked my compassion, but my wife got me back into the church shortly after we were married. You listen to talk about forgiving people long enough, and you start to make soft moves with inconvenient consequences. I drifted from my faith in high school and college, chasing superficial things that mattered more to me then than they do now. And that’s a problem when you’ve made bad choices and got lucky with the results. Being a better person means offering help when someone comes asking, but being a better person sometimes sucks.

Even though Benny didn’t say it, he was asking for my help because I’m a lawyer, a criminal defendant. Benny knew this because he’d been following my career for years. I’m no Warren Buffet, but I make good money compared to most earners my age. Church changed me in more ways than forgiveness. I’m not greedy anymore, either. I appreciate what I have even as I’m throwing it away. I’ve been working to set more reasonable expectations for my happiness. I don’t need much but love and a little attention. I want to die peacefully in my bed after having sex with my wife one last time, but I’ve been an absentee father and husband for so long that I don’t know if I can fix it with her and the kids. It’s why I’m in therapy and doing these journals to understand the balance between my work and personal life. The cost of getting to enlightenment may be simply helping friends when they ask for it, especially when it’s inconvenient.

Benny and I paid a cost of silence and distance to preserve our friendship in time, frozen in the ice of 1993. We didn’t have a blowup but silently agreed to leave each other alone. I haven’t spoken to Benny in more than twenty years, but I hear his voice in my dreams at least once a week. And hearing his actual voice brought up dusty boxes from the basement of my heart, and I dumped their contents on the kitchen table of my brain and started sorting memories and misrememberings into different piles of crazy. I told my wife over dinner about how we hung out with some crazy motherfuckers in high school, Benny and I; white boys with nothing to lose and nothing to live for but getting laid, drunk, and gaining a reputation for being crazier than the kid last weekend. We witnessed and often participated in flagrantly reckless behavior, most of which I conveniently forgot happened. In our hour-long conversation, Bennie brought up some of the old stories, but in his versions, he was the craziest one. He pushed the boundaries further than anyone else. There wasn’t a dare he wouldn’t take. Benny once jumped out of a moving car on the highway because some dickhead bet him five bucks he wouldn’t. He broke his foot and took the cast off after a week, hacked it up with a saw, and cut his arm deep enough to butterfly band-aid back together. “Fuck that doctor,” he told us. “I can move my foot enough to kick your ass! Any of you needle dick motherfuckers!” And no one challenged him. That part of his story is true. We loved Benny. At parties, he made everyone laugh. Well, almost everyone. Benny could endure enormous physical pain without complaint, and that’s what made him tougher than the rest of us. Benny was a good friend until he was just a memory.

His mom was a special kind of mean and angry drunk. She left Benny’s dad the Summer I graduated high school, and I never asked or found out why. Parents can mess a kid up with words, silence, and bad ideas just as much as with their fists. Benny told me today she died a few years ago, having remarried to forget her old life with her old family. He said she eventually got her shit together and started climbing the AA steps. She called him to apologize, and he got so angry when he started crying that he hung up on her and they never spoke again. I don’t blame her for leaving Benny’s dad after what happened that Summer.

I deliberately lost touch with Benny by the end of the Fall of ‘93, just after I graduated high school when Benny was entering his senior year. Some shit went down at the time that couldn’t be undone. In retrospect, the situation could have likely been fixed if we had made a gesture to reconcile, but that didn’t happen. The truth is, I’m still fond of Benny. Despite the circumstances, the only possible good thing in this situation is for he and I to reconnect. This motherfucker made me laugh all the time. His humor started at crude and grew angrier the drunker he became and more whimsical and goofier when he was stoned. Stoned Benny was my favorite because his aggression and anxiety were lowered for a while, and it was like we were little boys again. We listened to great music while lying on the hood of his car for so many nights, passing bottles and joints while talking about the stars, God, and a life beyond Ohio’s sky.

Benny loved to chase women, but he never caught them for long, and that’s where he ran into trouble. I think it was because, back then, Benny was never told “No.” Or at least he never heard the word and understood its meaning. In high school, Benny expected things to happen a certain way for him, and mostly they did. There were a few exceptions; they all involved women or the girls they once were. He was always trying to fuck an older woman back then. None of our Moms were safe, but Benny couldn’t figure out how a woman worked, how to get her attention, or how to keep her happy. Instead, he professed to collect women and was always bragging about his teenage harem that never seemed to materialize in front of witnesses.

Shooter is Benny’s only child, and the more I learn about him, the more inevitable this tragedy seems. No mother in the picture. She’s in a long-term residential mental health hospital up near Cleveland, diagnosed with paranoid Schizophrenia. Benny sure could pick them. He was always a unique individual, far from perfect. Racist to the bone, the shit I’ve heard Benny say would break libel laws as well as the edicts of ethics, reason, and common decency. He seems to have mellowed over time, but I’m worried about building my defense around his ignorance of what his son planned and did.

Day Four...

Things are getting official now. Meetings with printed names, signatures, and check-in and check-out times are logged in visiting ledgers. The fundamental legal work begins with planning what to do next to achieve what we need to accomplish.

I’m in Cincinnati, set up in the hotel, and hosting strategy meetings to develop Benny’s defense. I’ve conferred with Shooter’s attorney to see if there was enough common ground to combine our cases and marshal our resources into a unified defense like OJ Simpson’s legal team presented when Benny and I were in high school. That was the first time I understood what a defense lawyer did when they did it well. We create reasonable doubt, the measure of law when applied to a formal accusation in a case presented before a judge and jury. Watching Johnny Cochran get OJ off a murder charge with a strong prosecutor wielding solid evidence was a master’s class for me. Eventually, it became clear that I wanted to be a criminal defendant. But today, I wish I had become a race car driver instead.

Day Five...

Details are coming out about the shooting. They aren’t good.

Shooter killed seven children and four teachers. He shot thirteen others, and all but one are out of intensive care. My client bought him the weapon used in the crime. News networks are already broadcasting the Christmas video where Shooter opens the gift of the gun he will eventually use to commit mass murder, along with outdoor videos of my client teaching his son how to clear the chamber and reload the weapon. Our defense is to claim ignorance of the intention and planning. We will cite medical limitations to parenting with Benny’s stage 1 Hodgkins diagnosis from earlier this year, and mostly, we will beg the judge and prosecutor for mercy and leniency.

This could have been handled more quietly if the video hadn’t come out. I represented a husband who got off on the weakest technicality for murdering another man. It was apparent he did it. The prosecutor hammered every fact into its hole, and I’m positive the jury would have convicted him unanimously. Then, the judge came in with an eleventh-hour mistrial because of something wrong with the evidence presented to the jury. I found that discrepancy and brought it to the judge’s attention during the trial. I’m good at what I do. That discrepancy was flimsy, but it stuck because there are two justices in America, and I was breaking my back to get Benny judged by the one I worked inside and knew so well, where justice is for sale and silence is the golden currency of that realm.

I’ve been in a lot of jails over my legal career. They are the saddest places on Earth, far lonelier and more miserable than any cemetery, no matter how solemn. Cemeteries are where people go to be free, and jails are where people go to live as slaves. Death is a release from prison, but I’m burying the lead. My client, my old friend Benjamin Prince, is being charged with mass murder even though there is no evidence to support that he acted with or was even aware of what his son was planning. I believed Benny when he confessed his innocence to me. His sobs sounded like they ruptured his throat. I don’t think he is lying about knowing what his son was up to. He seems to have been as lazy a parent as a student, phoning it in for over forty years.

The prosecution can’t prove his complicity, and I suspect they don’t care if they can. They need someone’s picture to put on the cable news porn that will soak the public in manufactured outrage to drive advertising revenue. The modern news cycle is sad but ironically necessary in a world operating on a cycle of grievance and punishment. I’m confident I can get Benny off the murder charges. Reckless child endangerment and a few other charges will be harder to beat, and we’ll soon start negotiating time served and minimizing criminal fines.

The most critical question for our defense to provide is why Shooter lived up to his name. That question has to be answered in Benny’s case, and if it helps the Prosecution’s case, I think I can get my client off. Forcing the conversation on the news to be about why his son did it casts the perception of my client as a shocked, sick, and grieving father who is also a victim of his son’s alleged crime. This legal defense strategy has worked for hundreds of high-profile school shootings over the last twenty years in America. It’s legal precedent, established law, and a best practice that is practically an incentive for more shootings while lawyers and politicians farm money from fields of blood. I understand and accept my place in this system because it paid off my house, cars, and keeps my children in private school. But it still feels wrong when I’m rubbed raw during my worst days.

Many people in America are reflexively sympathetic to a poor, tax-paying white man whose child got caught up in a nest of violence and firearms. They want to believe liberal policy and policing are at fault. My job is not to judge the morality of my jury but to save my client’s life in a State that still executes for the crime of murder. I must convince twelve of them that my client is just like them and did what any of them would have done. But before I argue in front of a jury, I’m going for the plea deal, and I’ll push any button to make it happen.

I will visit Benny today in the county jail to propose this strategy. I don’t know how he will react to betraying his son on a public stage.

A few hours later...

I expected anger. I expected shouting. I could even have seen violence. But to sit there in that cold room on that hard plastic chair and look me in the eye after I told him his son would have to be sacrificed and scorned to save Benny’s life, and he said to me, “Fuck that boy. He made his bed.”--well, that messed me up. I wasn’t ready to see a father let his son go like that. Especially given what Benny went through with his dad, brother, and sister during all that ancient drama that I didn’t want to dig up from high school. And yet, here we stand with our shovels at this big pile of shit from our days gone by.

Day Seven...

Benny has agreed to the prosecution’s deal. He’s going to say what needs to be said about his son. He’s decided to betray his only child. None of this surprises me because I’ve seen this behavior from Benny before in a survival situation where it’s him or them. I was once on the wrong side of that line, and we didn’t talk again for thirty years.

“Report it like the news.” That is the direction I was given by the therapist who taught me this technique of trial journaling. He said, “Write a summary sentence about what’s going on. Then get into your feelings about what’s happening.” It was an effective technique that helped me separate the facts of these situations while allowing me to editorialize my emotional reaction to the high-pressure shit I deal with in my life and work. My wife says I take too much of my clients’ pain and suffering on my shoulders. I say it’s a welcome distraction, seeking to understand how other people suffer in these journals. It helps me separate signals from noise. Everyone needs a way to pull themselves together in tight spots, and this is my way.

I remember the day we buried Benny’s Rottweiler, Sam, on one of Benny’s dad’s many junkyard properties. Benny’s dad was a character. I won’t go into all that, but he was a scary man and was not to be dealt with lightly. It was about a mile walk into the deep Ohio woods past a junkyard filled with old cars, refrigerators, and all the refuse of our little community that his father made a lot of money from hauling, scrapping, and shipping out of Ohio. Junking is a cash or purchase order business model that is also a convenient shield for the untaxable business services of our economy and the kind transacted only with grubby cash. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, and loan-sharking are all criminally adjacent underworld services, and they were understood to be enterprises of the Prince family. But I also heard about things that disappeared, like cars supposedly involved in crimes. There were other rumors, far worse. A person we knew disappeared and she likely wasn’t the only one over the years. Most of Benny’s friends didn’t know what his dad was into and were smart enough not to want to know. Self-protection is a marker of the wise, and only dead people can hold onto courage forever.

Hauling that dog’s carcass into the forest wilderness of Ohio was an experience that changed my life because I decided then and there that I would never live in this State or raise my children near people like Benny’s family. I carried the shovel, and he carried the dead dog, possibly the meanest animal I’ve ever known. He bit three other kids that I knew of, and nothing happened because the parents of the kids that got bit knew you didn’t fuck around with the Prince family in this area. You put your head down, paid your kid’s medical bills, and counseled them as best you could to stay away from those Prince kids: Jimmy, Benny, and their troubled sister, Sandy. They were nothing but trouble. And those parents were right to think and say that to their children. The wise kids dropped out of sight and never came back. A few of us kept coming, and some kept getting bit.

It was a cold October day, and the ground in the forest was hard, with pine needles everywhere. There was the stink of something rotting nearby, and the vultures were circling over the treetops. I remember a hawk following our journey into the woods. I kept thinking it could smell the dog. We carried death into a place of death. We took turns digging the hole. Benny laid Sam’s body into the grave and put the tarp he was wrapped in over him, a temporary blanket between the earth and death. We stood quietly for several seconds. I thought Benny would say something nice about his dog. Instead, he looked at me and said, “I could bury you right here, and they’d never find you.” And then he smiled like it was a joke. I tried to laugh it off, but it messed me up, and that’s when I decided Ohio wasn’t for me. That was the Winter of my senior year, Benny’s Junior year, before things got messed up and fell apart. Whatever was in Benny’s head the day he said that to me in the forest is what I felt in the room with us today when he cut his son off to save himself. And I was the one who made that deal happen, all for my client and supposed friend.

Day Eleven...

Benny will pay his extensive bail by selling the last remaining land from his family’s trust (the last junkyard), and it will become a prison and solar farm. His family used to own half of this county, and for decades, they were above the law.

Today marks the final downfall of the Prince family in Ohio. It should have happened thirty years ago. These kids shouldn’t have died because Benny was destined to raise a mass murderer. He could have been one himself back in high school. He certainly played with guns enough. I saw it in his eyes the day we buried his dog. He was going to get me hurt or worse, like an oncoming semi-truck swerving into my lane. I pulled off that metaphorical highway.

His bail is $400,000, a large sum for this semi-wealthy area. It could buy a middle-class house here. Benny told me his Dad was worth twenty-five million dollars at his peak, and they lived in a dilapidated shit-hole with cars on blocks in the yard. Sam barked all hours of the day and night, chained to his pipe outside, embedded in concrete. Sam’s subdued canine rage in the cold of Winter gave way to ferocious anger in the heat of Summer. There are so few beautiful days in Ohio for an outside dog.

The Prince Family’s land sold fast every time a little bit went to auction over the decades, and eventually, a little bit was all that was left. Now, there is nothing but a prison coming. Rumor has it Ohio Law Enforcement will seize the final plot of Prince land to imprison immigrants who choose the option of slave labor over being deported back to the countries they sacrificed everything to leave. In a cynical moment, an American abolitionist, frustrated at the lack of systemic social progress, wrote, “It seems it is preferential for many to be a slave in a land of plenty rather than starve free in a land of nothing.”

Benny’s dad died ten years ago. Besides land, he was broke. He spent a few years in prison after we graduated high school, from dealing cocaine to the wrong undercover cop. Benny doesn’t speak to his sister Sandy, but she lives around here with all her criminal boyfriends, and it sounds like she runs a fight club between them. Some people change while others grow up to be exactly who we thought they were. It’s a mystery why. Benny won’t talk about his brother Jimmy, except that he is still alive and has lived in California since he left Ohio in 1993. Some things are better left unsaid.

I pick Benny up from county jail tomorrow. Somehow, he must put a life back together from this void. I don’t see it happening, but that’s the cynic in me talking. I’ve been advised the Prosecutor seeks the death penalty against Shooter Prince to be enforced immediately after the appeals run through. My client’s testimony will make that happen, and he is now free to reclaim his broken life.

Day Twelve...

Benny is out on bail. He is now one of the star witnesses for the prosecution. He will participate in sending his only child to death by the executive hand of the State of Ohio.

I picked Benny up from county jail at 10 AM. We spent the day cruising the old town as we had many times in the early ‘90s when we drove to Circuit City after school to buy the latest CDs that we listened to at full bass thumping volume in Benny’s Fiero, driving the 275 loop around the city and into Kentucky then back. That Fiero felt like we were sitting on the street, so low to the ground. Benny’s windows were tinted, and his stereo was the best money could buy. That red Fiero poured through suburban neighborhoods like a hungry sex machine running on a bass rhythm, which is precisely what it was when we were on the prowl with our dicks hard and sticks of gum soft in case we got to kissing on some young ladies. We listened to gangster rap, hardcore punk, and death metal. Then Benny got into some racist music that I couldn’t get down with—awful stuff. I felt my grandmomma’s ghost frowning at me just for hearing some of those songs.

And then, one Saturday night, Benny took me to a yard party during my senior year with a few of those racist bands playing. I have never been more frightened in my life. I stood in the shadows under the eaves of a barn on this large farm plot (I still don’t know whose house that was), way out in East Ohio, down in Appalachia, so close to the Ohio River we could smell it. I remember being dizzy drunk, telling Benny, “I can hear the fucking river!” I said it so many times, walking up through this property from where we parked, that he got pissed. “Shut the fuck up, man. You’ve got to be cool in here. Don’t say anything to anyone. Just nod to the music, drink your drink, stay by me, and shut the fuck up. These people don’t play around.” It was good counsel because we weren’t at that party ten minutes before I saw someone get stabbed in the leg.

Luckily, that night, I wore a plain black t-shirt with a turned-around Cincinnati Reds ball cap, which helped me fade into the background like I was nothing to worry about, which was confirmed in this crowd. Benny was trying to ball this lady, who was at least ten years older than him. And she was into him. They dipped out behind this barn, and I was left standing watch or standing around watching. What I saw was terrifying. Where do these motherfuckers come from? That’s mostly what I thought about watching the fighting and naked titties flashing to a soundtrack of punk rock where racist insults were wrapped into every chorus. And they sang along and screamed at each other and the band. Leaving that party was an escape.

My ringing ears were a blessing on returning to the car because Benny and I didn’t have to speak about what I just witnessed. It was two weeks before I hung out with him afterward, and he never played that music around me again or talked to me about what happened behind that barn with a woman nearly thirty years old in 1993. He was seventeen then, and she might be dead now. She probably is dead, along with many others in that crowd, because that was not a celebration of communal longevity. I saw one person light a short stick of dynamite with a cigarette and toss it into the mosh pit. No one got hurt, but not everyone laughed. I sure didn’t.

Trial Journal Conclusion and Journal Summary.

Benny took me somewhere unexpected today. I can’t write about it yet. I can’t even believe it.

Benny’s text woke me up. I’m leaving tomorrow and returning to New York to fix things with my wife. Whatever she wants, I’m doing it. I’ll quit my job, buy a puppy, and move our house to another state or country. I’ll get a Peloton and really use it, or we can even have another baby. I’m doing whatever she wants because nothing else matters to me now except getting out of Ohio and away from Benny Prince.

Trial Summary.

This was a successful case in that my client never went to trial. He is currently a free man out on bail and engaged in the judicial process of appealing to a higher court to mitigate his financial losses from legal fees and fines. He is pleading No Contest to a separate charge of endangering minors, which is a tremendous understatement of the crime he committed: having a child and pouring evil into him by design or allowed it to be poured in by ignorance, apathy, and complacency. Negligence is a kind word applied to Benny’s crimes. It won’t matter to the parents of those murdered children. They want to see Shooter Prince die, and Benny has given them their wish. But they will each learn that revenge will never ease the pain of their loss because that’s not how suffering a loss of love works. You can’t get over some experiences.

Benny is a sad person. I don’t know how he will pick up his life from here, and I don’t care. I’m the closest person he has to a friend right now, and I hate his fucking guts. I hope I never hear his voice again, not even in my dreams.

Post-Script.

It’s been a year since I talked to Benny and two months since Shooter Prince lost his appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. Shooter will be executed by lethal injection in two months. But Benny won’t witness his son’s execution. As the Prince Family Trust executor, I got a call this afternoon informing me that Benjamin Prince shot himself this morning. His body is being cremated. There will be no funeral for Benny Prince in Ohio before the execution of his only son. I told the coroner to bury both of their ashes in the county municipal beggar’s plot and don’t bother with a funeral.

Wigger Story #1: “Wigger Gets Started”

Wigger wakes up with an erection pressed into the bed he has slept in since he was a child. At fourteen, he still feels like a boy, but the fist in his pants pumps and grinds like a man’s drill. Groaning, this is the first time he comes today. He opens his eyes to the cold dark of his clean new bedroom. He groans in a different way and reaches for the tissue box. Cold weather has come early to Southern Ohio in this zero year of the 1990s.

A bowl clangs on the counter downstairs, and his older and bigger step-brother’s changing voice cracks when he screams, echoing in the quiet kitchen. The old man is already off to work down near Cincinnati, where he manages the operations of a box manufacturing company. The school buses will be here for both of them soon, and there will be frantic stuffing of backpacks and fussing, filling up the five minutes before the first bus arrives. “Where’s my fucking trapper keeper?” Wigger finds it and tosses it to his stepfather’s son. The handsome older kid tells Wigger to fuck off and stuffs it in his cheap backpack. That’s as close as they get to thanks these days.

“See ya, faggot.” His step-brother’s new nickname for Wigger.

“Fuck off, dick.”

Wigger’s new brother by marriage turns around and flips him off with both hands while exiting to the garage through the laundry room door, kicking it shut with a shoe while still flipping both birds.

The zipper on Wigger’s backpack broke on the second day, forcing him to carry it by hand in a school where a little kid lugging a big backpack around bigger kids gets noticed. If he seems alone, he’s going to get fucked with, and Wigger is small but mean, so these situations have never ended well for him. He bit a kid’s earlobe off in the fifth grade, and because everyone was poor, nobody sued anyone, and that kid never came around causing trouble again. But that was a different school in a different state. These middle-class kids here had never seen or known hunger, but Wigger had, though he’d never felt it. And most of these parents had lawyers or knew one.

He gets on the bus and drops his heavy backpack into the dark seat beside him. Hands and backs must carry everything these children born in the 1970s need during their school day, from morning until late afternoon, when they arrive home. Most of these children are welcomed by empty houses because their parents work jobs and drive in traffic. There are no second chances for these kids to retrieve the things forgotten, and Wigger’s house is fifteen miles from the school, forty-five minutes by bus.

Wigger is small, barely over five feet. And he’s skinny, likely malnourished from a diet of microwaved junk food, cereal, sandwiches, pizza, nachos, and soda. All he does outside school is play video games, read books, and jerk off, which is a new way to amuse himself that his body just showed him one day. Sometimes, he wrote stories, mostly sexy ones, about the girls he couldn’t talk to during the day. He thought about them all week, all of them. Every class was an opportunity, but nothing about Wigger’s life is serious now except the art he loves and all these girls who seem ten years older than him, a little boy pretending to be a man because his boner is getting bigger and bringing him lots of pleasure, more pleasure than his toys, books, and movies. These girls are alive in his imagination, but their images and actions bend toward him in fantasies. They are so horny that he goes mad each day, navigating the thick fog of their lust in his mind. But he also has thoughts and fantasies pushed into the dark there, where he keeps the earlobe of that little boy, things he doesn’t take out and examine.

The bus bumps and rocks and makes its stops, careening through the suburban neighborhoods sprouting up in the middle of these farm fields like stubborn, angry weeds.

Each day here so far has been filled with a constant series of erections that have to be dealt with, sometimes in the school bathroom. On these cold morning bus rides in the dark, he’s started doing what he calls dick push-ups. He takes out one or two heavy textbooks and stacks them on his lap. Then he leans back and starts thinking about one of the pretty girls on the bus, their lips, and how they’d taste on his. From there, undressing and grunting, getting wet somehow, and he can hear the real-world voices of these impenetrable girls, low and giggling, so cute the things they talk about, whispering about boys and what happens when their pants come off. That’s what Wigger wants them to discuss because it’s what he wants to show them. Eventually, with his hands relaxed at his sides, the books start moving up and down on his lap. Dick push-ups for the day he gets to show one of these girls what’s been growing from inside him. But that’s the problem- no one does, and he can’t find a way to make it happen. If only he were good at sports, but five-foot skinny nothings don’t perform athletically. Reading is scorned here. He keeps his Stephen King paperbacks in his backpack for now. Movies are cool, but you go to them and don’t talk to anyone. Kids with friends watch movies on home rentals together, but Wigger doesn’t have home rental friends here yet in Ohio.

After a few minutes of these pushups, he gets bored since he can’t pull it out and play with it. So, instead, he puts the books back in his backpack, fixes his Walkman headphones, and then pushes play on Kool G. Rap’s debut. The cassette is spooled to begin at "Truly Yours."Wigger closes his eyes and recites the lyrics silently in his head to one of the most misogynistic rap tunes published at that time.

Music in Wigger’s 1980s was millions of people listening together to songs and records either played on the radio or put on in cars, bars, living rooms, and bedrooms. Music for Wigger in the 1990s happened in foam-covered headphones connected to a Walkman tape deck. Now, Wigger didn’t have a thing to do with Black people in New York City, but he knew Hip Hop from the Decatur record shops and the crowded bedrooms of his poor Black friends. Street poetry poured street stories into his head, and Wigger grew up next to the hungry, poor city school kids. He was fed fully but also aware of the hunger around him and his inability to do anything about it. In the early 1980s, Decatur, Illinois, was a melting pot of poor and middle-class people working to get by and get high. All the boys played with Star Wars toys because the grade schools had no money for sports teams. Sports were what happened on the playground during recess, and they were free. For these Illinois boys, that meant mostly spitting, fighting, and break-dancing under the jungle gym between kickball games. Wigger was okay at breaking. One of the tough little Black kids had mercy on him, took him under his wing, showed him things, and protected him when the bigger kids targeted Wigger for ridicule, which they always did because he was born small. Many of them found out he was also born mean. He could do the tick and understood the difference between the worm and the caterpillar. But his specialty was the robot, and he could once do it on roller skates.

Homeroom begins without anyone noticing him as if he’s invisible, though he is almost the same height as everyone else when sitting in desk chairs. Cute Tracy passes him a note that he thinks for a moment is for him but is disappointed to see her gesture for him to pass it to the football player Neil Brock, sitting in the row next to him. Neil reads the note and winks back at Tracy right through Wigger like he wasn’t there to facilitate whatever exchange of sentiment passed on that folded-up paper.

In fifth grade, before puberty started dividing children into haves and have nots, little Wigger was voted the cutest boy in class by the other little girls, and that started a phase of obsession with the girls in school that burns inside him today in this first official Gym class, where only boys surround him. Wigger doesn’t like Gym. The past three weeks have been spent in the classroom, learning the grueling process of dressing for sports at school in a cold room with other naked boys, showing up to the line in time for calisthenics, running ten laps like indentured captives, and then moving into the main set of rotating sports and games that will teach competition, team play, and personal achievement to a generation of American boys and girls, but Wigger wishes this class was happening to someone else.

He dresses in high-thigh athletic shorts with a white t-shirt handed to him by the gym teacher when he enters the locker room for this third-period Gym. From the waist down, he looks like bleached chopsticks poking out of a dirty napkin. The Gym teacher handed him a shirt and said, loud enough for the entire locker room to hear, “You look like a small guy.” Even nice kids snickered, but the worst shouted insults.

“Hey, it’s mice nuts!”

“Small balls!”

“Don’t worry, shrimp, your nuts’ll drop soon.”

Laughter like cold rain.

All these boys are bigger than Wigger, so he keeps quiet and swallows every insult, but the mercury in his angry thermometer is rising. He dresses in focused silence and tests the lock numbers before hanging it through the hole of his shut locker and latching it. The problems started almost immediately during calisthenics, which he had never done before. Sure, jumping jacks and the simple shit, but burpees? Never. He was learning on the fly and looked small, bouncing, and ridiculously uncoordinated. Almost immediately, the Juniors start making fun of him. Wigger laughs it off as best he can and tries to modify his actions to be more like the other boys, confident in swinging their limbs and moving their muscles. Jesus, how big are their muscles compared to the skinny little arms and legs he uses mostly to grab things and sit down?

But there is one older boy who isn’t laughing and who eventually has enough and tells the others around him, “Knock it the fuck off and pay attention!” Wigger looks at the gigantic boy who ended his torment. This massive, beefy boy might be the most handsome person Wigger’s ever seen outside a movie. Big! Almost six feet tall and muscles on top of muscles. His sandy blonde hair is a skater punk cut that hangs across his eyes, causing him to constantly jerk his head to swing his hair out of his gaze. The old boy’s face looks chiseled from a marble slab, with a strong jawline and a sharp, short beard. This kid looks like a pro wrestler, nodding (not smiling but not frowning) at Wigger like, “I got you, little man.” Wigger nods a thanks back, and they finish the calisthenics. But someone trips Wigger when they’re running laps, and he skins his knee on the gym floor to a soundtrack of scattered laughter echoing in a gymnasium pierced by dozens of sneaker squeaks. It’s all Wigger can do to stop crying before it starts, and what’s coming aren’t tears of sadness.

The disaster happens in the shower when his 10:45 erection arrives at the worst possible moment.

“Jesus, look how big that little kid’s dick is!”

“Eew, it’s hard! What a little faggot!”

“No, dude, it looks like that little midget’s dick in that porno!”

“YES! The Dwarf Dong Lord!”

“Dong LORD! DONG LORD! DONG LORD!” The steamy shower becomes louder than life while laughter and insults converge into a cacophony of noise, all bent toward him, moving at him, now through him. Something bad is about to happen.

But everything stops when Jimmy Prince enters the shower with his perfectly sculpted six-foot body and massive dick, even bigger than Wigger’s, because Jimmy looks like a family of mountain bears raised him. His dick is proportional to his massive body, but Wigger’s is not, and he looks like a freak to these boys with their normal and uninteresting little dicks.

Wigger would learn that Big Jimmy Prince’s life is about order. His meals and workouts, football practices, and classes are planned. He fills up his truck with gas on the same day every weekend, and the girls Big Jimmy digs out call him first to get on his schedule. But today, Jimmy Prince does something unplanned. He passes by his honorary first shower stall, closest to the doorway, and instead walks down to and turns on the spigot next to Wigger’s shower space.

All the boys are quiet while Jimmy lets the hot water run down his face and fall like a canyon river between his meaty pectorals, running rivulets over his abs, refracted through trimmed pubic hair, and launching off his flaccid massive penis like The Plunge waterslide at the Beach Water Park. After several seconds filled with the sound of water hitting the shower floor and the big drain taking it all away, Jimmy looks over and says to Wigger, loud so everyone can hear, “That’s a big dick, little man. Be careful where you stick that thing.” Some kids laugh, but most go back to showering in silence, and a few turn off their showers and leave.

Later, when everyone is dressed again in school clothes and the locker room boner story is just shooting gossip tendrils into the rest of the school, Jimmy Prince walks up behind Wigger on their way out of the gym and claps him on the shoulder. It feels like Hercules just laid a hand on him.

“My name’s Jimmy.” Wigger tells Jimmy his name. “Listen,” Jimmy says, “Where do you live?” Wigger tells him, and Jimmy says, “I’m going to pick you up Friday night, and you’re coming with me to the football rally. Afterwards, I’ll take you to Taco Bell, and you’re gonna meet some people.”

Wigger didn’t have time to react before Jimmy said, as if it were a fact, “You don’t worry about a fucking thing when you’re with me. You don’t pay for anything. You don’t do anything but keep your mouth shut and act cool. If you don’t know what it means to act cool, just shut up and think about it. You’ll figure it out. I’ll take care of the rest.” Jimmy takes his hand off Wigger’s shoulder and puts it out for slapping. Wigger smiles and slaps it, and it turns into shaking hands like a contract.

Jimmy smirks as a smile and says, “No one will ever fuck with you again.”

Pyrite

Author’s Introduction (2024)

I graduated in the Spring of 2000 with a BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University. At the time, BGSU offered one of the country's only Undergrad Workshop-based four-year degrees. It was hard work, and the entire BFA Program was designed to feed students into MFA Programs, which were very expensive relative to the earning potential for a short story writer who is really just another Professor of Writing Craft.

While preparing to read excerpts of my senior thesis from the podium of Prout Chapel in the quad, in front of my friends, colleagues, and parents, I concluded that if I were to write for a living, I would be broke for the rest of my life. That was a hard truth to swallow, but it went down.

It meant that writing as a vocation had to be put away on a shelf, especially if I wanted to raise a family and help provide for them. And so I went out and busted my ass for twenty years, sucking the shit pipe of Corporate America but loving the salary and benefits. It was the responsible choice.

When I read this story, I can feel the struggles I had with submitting to the tyranny of departmental politics and publishing anything they’d print to keep my job. I can also remember struggling with the challenge of being a privileged white man in an academic world that put its thumb on the scale for diversity (and this was 24 years ago). I had no idea how that perception would become weaponized by malicious billionaires and corrupted cynics. We needed more diversity in voices, but it’s a challenge to stare down the barrel of a gun and call the bullet pretty.

I often think about the version of me that said, “Fuck it. I’m going start writing now.” He went on to the MFA Program at Michigan or Iowa. And he fucking killed it there! He published a few books and thought he was hot shit. And now, he’s a fifty-year-old college Professor on the edge of tenure. But he’s still broke and probably divorced or never married.

He’s much like the character I wrote my final Fiction 404 Short Story about that Spring of 2000. Jack Stansfield was a warning to myself, and I’m glad I took it. But I wrote about him at the time with empathy and read about him now, 24 years later, with sympathy. I hope you will, too.

PS: Be gentle with the young man who wrote this. He was still learning his craft. Some terms are dated to the time this was written. I recommend reading in that context.

---

Jack Stansfield walks into his afternoon writing workshop with the space-measured pace of a marathon runner sacrificing distance for speed.  He touches the knob of the old wooden door and draws back, as if someone sneezed on it.  The moment of revulsion passes into the annals of feelings past, and he grabs the wobbling knob and turns.  He wipes his hand on the seat of his pleated khakis and walks into the classroom.

Earlier that day, Jack held his weekly house cleaning session consisting of collecting the piles of old clothes he never wore anymore (already stashed in various hiding spots around the house), unopened junk mail, empty boxes, and trash bags, throwing them all in a pile on his back deck because he didn’t feel like making the journey to the back alley to put it all in the dumpster.  After the mock cleaning, he lounged on the couch and began reading the latest Martin Amis novel.  He made it to page twenty-two when he realized that his creative writing class started in less than fifteen minutes.  He sighed and bent the book so it lay open on the table.  He had four shelves full of books, spines all broken under the will of a master reader.  He put two gray socks on, his brown loafers, wrinkled khakis, and his traditional denim jacket.  He stopped by the hallway mirror to fix his hair and thought better, preferring its unkept look.  Lately, he felt that he must allow his exterior to decay to allow his interior to foster—like breaking the spines of books; his body would either fall in line or fall apart.

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He had a five-minute walk from house to classroom and left with seven minutes till class time.  He kicked cut grass from the sidewalk and crossed the street at the crosswalk that forced all oncoming traffic to yield to pedestrians of the college, the community’s major lifeblood of revenue.  But this summer had been dedicated to letting him flower inside.  He had sworn this after Andrea had left two months ago, as he was grading student finals—his busiest time of the year.

The first time he saw her, he knew she was too good for him, so he had to have her.  She was standing at the bar, a college bar that looked the same as any other college bar.  When he thinks back on those days compared to these days, the bars all seem to blend into the same background with different players and background music like a weekend satire television show.  She was waiting in line for a drink, an empty beer bottle in one fist and a half-smoked Newport in the other.  She blew out smoke and scanned the room with her eyes, her attention skipping over the crowd like wave crests.  On the third time around the room and ever closer to the bartender, he caught her eye; she doubled back to him, and she was caught.  There was so much sexual desire in the way he was looking at her that, at first, she was taken aback, but after letting her eyes wander his body, she found his posture relaxed and non-aggressive enough to encourage flirtation.  Their gaze lock was broken by the bartender’s question, and through the transaction, she had completely forgotten about him, sitting alone in the corner, drinking a 7&7 and following her with his eyes as she walked away from the bar.  She might have forgotten him, but he knew that for that one moment, he had her.  There was a connection.  He thought about getting up to follow her out but didn’t feel the strength to play the game of tempting her away from her friends for some one-on-one.  He was pretty sure he could, but it didn’t feel right somehow.  He let her dissolve back into the crowd.  He finished his drink, left the glass on the table, slung his jacket over his arm, and sauntered into the north Ohio night.  That was in winter. 

The next time he saw her was in the spring.  There was a campus concert, a festival dedicated to the students, or, as Jack believed at the time, the students who contributed most to the economics of the campus—the white males.  At the time, it was a well-known truth that white males were the ones who pulled the crank that kept the madness of the modern world moving.  This was after the civil rights movement and the door to hippie peace and freedom had been opened at Woodstock and slammed shut at Altamont, after the sugar and gas crises, after the embassy takeover, after the cyanide-filled aspirin craze, after the icy space shuttle O rings and the ‘one eye blew this way, the other that way’ jokes; their affair began during glasnost and shattered in the age of no controlling legal authority.  

The biggest band on campus was playing, I’m Okay, You’re Okay was their name, and it was loud, and he was quite drunk.  He stood in line for the portable toilets that smelled like urine baked inside a football helmet at 400 degrees for twelve hours.  He looked over just as he was about to go in, and saw her.  She was wearing a stone-washed denim coat.  He was surprised to find her looking at him as well.  He was probably about to say something stupid, one of those cheesy come-on lines that all the guys in his freshman dorm swore to if the girl was drunk enough.  The ignorant phrase he was about to utter was cut short by a loud thunk, a sloppy sound, followed by high-pitched laughter.  A pledge for a campus fraternity had gone into the portable toilet that Jack was about to enter, and some of the active members had snuck up behind it and overturned it with him inside.  The door was face down, so the kid was trapped inside; a murky brown liquid seeped out the upper vents, and he could hear the kid’s wails of disgust from inside the plastic waste vessel.  He laughed.  He couldn’t help it.  It was the kind of laughter that isn’t due to the act being cosmically funny but more a kind of better you than me laughter, the self-gratifying guffaw that only compassion with relief it’s not you can bring. 

He had forgotten all about her, lost in personal hysterics, when his eyes went out, searching for someone to share the experience with now that it had been personally digested.  Their eyes locked, and for just a moment, the laughter stopped inside him, and he imagined in her as well.  Baby gaze, eye sex, and exchange of micro photons at invisible levels of hue.  She giggled.  He giggled.  She laughed, holding her stomach.  He closed one eye and convulsed in laughter.  She pointed at the face-down portable toilet, and they both lost it.  He wandered over to her as naturally as if they’d known each other for years, put his arm around her shoulder, and laughed together for a full minute.   It was a laughter he had not experienced since branded with the humor of a satisfying moment draped in the wonder of newfound lust and mystery that only an open and attractive stranger can bring.

His mind returned to the task, the workshop—the only place where writers are taken seriously outside board meetings in publishing houses.  “The workshop is the last bastion of free writing without marketing influence left in the modern age outside a private diary.”  Jack expressed these sentiments in the foreword to his first book of poems, Touching the Surface Below: Poems for a Forgotten Generation.  He thanked his students for “Keeping me on my toes and realizing that good writing is 99% revision and 1% inspiration.”

Simina’s story “Indian with A Dot, Not A Feather” is up today.  I want to begin by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this piece on an entertainment level.  I like the main character, Raja.  The brutality she was forced to use after her father’s death gives her a very nice source of conflict.  But I found the reaction to her sister’s dead baby to be a bit extreme.  Why would she commit suicide suddenly after finding the boy dead in his crib?  This woman sacrificed her entire life to provide stability for her family; it doesn’t make sense to me.  What do you guys think?  Well, I agree with you about the extremity of her reaction, but I think that the situation of her nephew’s death is the right time to show some change.  What kind of change do you see as appropriate here?  Something smaller.  It seems that in short stories, less is more.  It’s the small changes that seem gargantuan.  I remember one story by Raymond Carver about two couples sitting around a dinner table drinking. One husband continually gets jealous of his wife’s ex-husband the more he drinks.  And that little change makes the story so believable and, in turn, affects the reader so much more.

What do you think? I’m not sure what kind of reaction this character warrants because I’d like to know more about her.  We don’t get much of her feelings about her father.  The control issue is the primary conflict with this character because she loses the illusion of control when her nephew dies. Still, the suicide is so over-exaggerated that it overshadows this realization and leaves the reader feeling cheated, but I like this character. And I think she should be worked with.  Now see, I kinda disagree with you.  I was left wondering what exactly the relationship with her nephew was based on because, on page three, it says she cares very deeply for this kid, but we don’t see it any time in the story.  Just because the author says it, doesn’t mean it’s so.  I mean, I hate to bring up that cliché phrase from our 200-level courses, but show us, don’t tell.  And that’s just it, man.  The whole thing was cliché to me.  I’m so sick of reading stories about minorities like they’re still so challenged.  I have no sympathy for this character at all.  People die all the time.  She’s a bitch to her family.  She refuses to have sex with that guy on page seven.  She wouldn’t even call him back after their date.  It seems that the fact she was “Indian with a dot” was just thrown in there to give her some sympathy from the reader.  I don’t buy it, and I’m sick of reading stories like it, no offense, Simina.  It’s not your fault the literary community has fallen so in love with bullshit multicultural idealism that it’s forgotten about quality literature.

Jack takes control before Simina’s feelings get hurt.  He has to separate the derogatory from the literary.  Unfortunately for Simina, the class deflates into an exchange of views on multicultural literary theory, and her story fades into the background focus of the day’s discussion. 

When Jack awakes after nine hours and twelve minutes of sleep, his hair is mussed and matted to the contours of a rented Serta mattress.  After two cups of coffee and a stale cinnamon roll, he leaves for an English department meeting.  He walks in late as usual and is greeted by his smiling comrades.  Jack is the only committee member who has not yet received tenure but knows his time is approaching.  This problem had been plaguing him for some time: how long to remain a mere lecturer without any stability.  It has kept him awake at night, scratching the hives on his neck that come from worry and excess caffeine.  He cares for his students, but he also has a publishing career to think about, and Andrea’s absence only serves as a catalyst for the outgrowth of misery the darkness under his eyes has become.  Ballast shifts from one side to the other, and the line between work and writing grows as thin as the one separating Modern and Post-Modern art.  They’re only a war apart.

Jack’s first poem was published in a magazine specializing in gay poetry.  Jack had impure thoughts about a man once, his friend actually, during a late-night beer-drinking venture that led him to the edge of a blackout.  But he is not gay.  He remembers very little about the drunken fantasy.  The poem has nothing to do with homosexuality; it is a five-line stanzaic celebrating the ending of an addiction.  At the time, Jack had recently quit smoking, and his withdrawal had inspired him to write the poem.  He owns only one copy of Quorum magazine, which lays dog-eared and mite-eaten in a box in the dank basement of his monthly rented home.  The poem goes like this:

Moving Anthills

Nothing really matters

as much as when we drop

ground up ground onto the ground

and find progress bigger 

piles of dirt to step over.

At the time, Jack was amazed a homosexual would find worth in his words; he was amazed that anyone did, for that matter. Sitting in the meeting, Jack felt like a skeleton from the anatomy lab hung on a wire and pulled from a higher position in the Administration building.  Departmental notes were taken and Jack said yes and no and stated his opinion about mechanical things completely unrelated to the English language as it is experienced by those who grab it with both hands and yank until they’re sticky with viscous syllables.

Leaving the meeting, he felt like a man slipping away from the operating table, still under the effects of anesthesia.  He tried to shake the bureaucratic load from his mind as he stood at the urinal outside his workshop.  It was summer, and workshops ran every day for four weeks.  

Back at home, Jack sat in his favorite chair and exchanged his loafers for plaid padded slippers while he cogitated the idea of his phantom ex-girlfriend.  Everywhere he looked, some trinkets and knickknacks reminded him of Andrea.  The Elvis ashtray that now holds peanut shells-had to have it.  The Elton John flecked gold oversized sunglasses placed on the face of a ceramic Home Interiors basset hound; she had to have them both.  All these were necessities she couldn’t live without but couldn’t take with her when she left seven months ago.    

And when she finally left, he couldn’t remember why he loved her, only that he didn’t want her to go.  He had forgotten the late-night after-shower phone calls where she lay wet and naked on her flannel sheets, letting the air dry her young female body as they talked holes in the night.  He had forgotten the way she hid behind her hair when she was embarrassed, tousled brown strands hiding her emotions like a tightly beaded curtain hides a roomful of pot smokers, and how sexually inexperienced she was when they met.  She had kissed two boys before him and wouldn’t let him proceed as fast as he would have liked to; he loved her even more for making it something special, something sacred.  She had gotten an idea from medieval philosophy, an old romance story of King Arthur’s knights, that the sexual act was the sacramentalization of love.  The first night he went past the kisses and covered her nippled breasts with saliva, she went home caked with his scent and told him later on the phone that she loved it, that she wished she could bottle it and wear it every day.  And he loved her for that, too.  But all that slipped away the day she said goodbye as she stood in her faded jeans with the knees ripped out and the Guess patch torn off the back right pocket.  She had a gym bag strapped over her arm; it was small and couldn’t possibly hold all her belongings—just the sacred ones.  He later realized that everything she left was somehow associated with him.  Everything she took was hers alone: seventeen pairs of jeans, thirty-six shirts, nine sweaters, several pairs of socks, shoes, belts, jewelry, tampons, makeup, hair care products, smelly soap from the bath store, four purses, her tennis racket, workout video tapes, and inside that small gym bag she had a framed picture of her mother and father, her Bible, and a copy of twelfth-century romances with the story about the sacramentalization of love ripped out and left on the coffee table as the only reason why she was leaving.

Sometimes, Jack writes lines that make him think—what a good boy am I—but this self-praise always gives way to the fleeting reminder of his failure to please this one person who ever meant anything to him.  It is a pain that fuels the pipe dream of touching masses through words because words are little masks that make him seem whole, connecting his pain with some human expression.  And despite this vision of a spider web of syllables connecting the thoughts of every human being on the planet, he still lives with the fear that his words are nothing more than randomly arranged ink spots on bleached fiber.  He has always needed an audience.

The human eye can see a candle flame from as far away as ten miles in complete darkness.  Andrea was that flame, and his desire to reach masses of people through written words was the darkness that made her light visible from so far away.  He pictured thousands of flames burning from exposure to his own.  But he did not tend to her in this cerebral fire-burning ceremony, the only actual flame in his life.  She stood in stasis, surrounded by blue flame, and the glass cover he held her in became thick with smoke until her vision was blotted out entirely, and only the darkness remained.  Her wick nubbed, and the wax hardened over him where he remains to this day, preserved and protected until moments like this scratch away the wax and leave him open to his harsh inner feelings and inadequacies.

During the next few weeks, Jack Stansfield learned he was being considered for the Academic Advisor for Creative Writing position.  In the fall, he would listen to scheduling problems and general complaints about the program.  His workload would be increased tenfold, and tenure has still not been mentioned.  Jack has put on five pounds in the last two weeks and is getting half as much sleep as usual.  He hasn’t written a word since the beginning of the summer term.  He is now standing in front of his favorite urinal with his spraying penis in one hand and the thumb and first finger of the other rubbing his eyelids.  He hears a voice behind him, the head of the English Department, coming out of the stall.  Jack I need to speak with you, can we meet sometime today?

Jack walks into the chair’s office and sits down.  He sets his small Styrofoam cup of coffee on the desk and leans back into the chair.  Jack, thanks for coming.  I just wanted to let you know that the tenure board will meet in a couple of weeks to discuss your future here.  And Jack, it’s come to our attention that you graduated with a Masters Degree from here in ’87.  Now, there’s a policy at this university, Jack, that denies tenure to anyone graduating with a degree from this institution.  Now you’ve got my vote.  You know that.  But the Provost is like a goddam rock regarding things like this.  Would you like something to drink, Jack?  Anyway, he’s a goddam bastard when it comes to things like this, just between you and me.  He told me he’s not moving on with this issue.  Not even for you.  Just wanted to let you know.  Word is another candidate being considered for the poetry position.  He's an MFA from Georgetown and an Afro-American, Jack.  You know we don't have one on staff, and the University requires…Well, I’m sure everything will turn out fine.  Are you sure I can’t get you anything?  No?  Alright, Jack, I’ll have my secretary call you with any news. 

In the following weeks, whiskey shots become beard stubble, and Jack misses two of his last three workshops.  The students call and leave worried messages in the Creative Writing office.  He sits at his computer for hours.  He begins with the word processing screen and ends with the screen saver every time.  He moves the mouse deliberately to cancel the moving space picture, only to return to a blank screen with a blinking cursor.  The flashing vertical line is hypnotizing.  It breaks him down with every pass.  He looks at the invitation he received in the mail: Ecru Vellum Bristol with a gold foil sticker seal—Andrea’s wedding. After twelve years of marriageless monogamy, she found a job in another city and fell in love with a man on her lunch hour; a man who might wear Brooks Brothers suits and say things like, damn right on, and I’ll need that report by three, no excuses.  Jack leaves his desk chair and doesn’t return.  

He tries writing with a pen, pencil, marker and even stubs crayons until the tips rub raw, paper flaking off.  Nothing works.  He’s barren.  The words have been squeezed from his brain and leaked out his ears onto the floor of the Chair’s office.  They might still be in a puddle of dried ooze on the carpet that smells like a used-up dictionary.  

Students and stories.  Words and the mouths that speak them.  In sleep, he sees dotted lines and a word processor with a white cotton sheet of paper, and his name, Jack Stansfield, is at the top—a clean sheet waiting to be rubbed with keystrokes.  Foreign manuscripts with strange names are on the other side of the dotted lines.  Stories that need his input.  His advice.  Students’ stories or Jack's stories. Andrea’s wedding or Jack’s stories.   Andrea’s wedding or students’ stories.  The choices are mesmerizing.  He could sit all day and consider the options.  He does.

Jack goes out of the house only to get the mail.  He survives on the canned rations that have occupied the back of his food shelf for the last five years.  Cream of celery, bacon bean, and Spam jelly are stuck to the kitchen sink.  Bread crusts are lying under the trash bag in the garbage can.  Jack cries during a Purina cat chow commercial because the people look so happy that feeling good is something tangible, something you can buy in a can. It is all too much.  Jack has nothing left but sobs for his world.

After brooding in his misery for many days, Jack attempts to write about it.  As a writer, he has trained his eyes and ears to search and hunt down any human activity that could provide nuggets and frameworks for stories and poems.  More often than not, it was easier to train his academic eyes on someone else as a character study—but this time, he tried it on himself and came up with a void.  He would sometimes open a file on a character and type the words: This character is the type of person that would: and fill in the blanks.  He would do this for several pages until a character appeared with conflicts, problems, and always, always at the center a corpuscle of hope and compassion that united the character with the secret cause of universal suffering in the human reader.  These words bounced against Jack’s brain like a racquetball tossed out of the past and volleyed back again.  His professor in college spoke these exact words and attributed them to James Joyce, and Jack once believed they were divine, gold, and he also believed back then that at the rocky heart of every story, fiction or fanciful truth, is also a grain of true gold.  He believed this for as long as he could keep it in mind. Still, eventually, it became buried under reject letters, canceled checks, shredded first drafts, empty roller fine ink pens, clipped fingernails stained black from shaking up inkjet cartridges to get that one last page out, and used ideas—useless to anyone but him and his ruminations about the world.

Here’s what Jack believes about the world and his place in it:  the world is horrible.  Life is something that should not have been.  It hurts to watch cheetahs rip open the bellies of gazelles.  It hurts to watch the nightly news with stories of teenage mothers who kill their babies and the rest of the horrors and wonders that come with the information age.  There isn’t a place in this world for such a deep thinker as he; there is no place for such an aching heart and the blood it bleeds for the poor, the suffering, the wounded, and the misrepresented.  He was going to reach them all with his words, his stories, and his simple philosophy of life, which is—worthless, he now thinks.  Everything he’s ever written is meaningless in her absence.  He feels like a hollowed-out pumpkin with fire-bright candles in his eyes, staring at the seedy-moss innards that have just been ripped out and set in front of him.  Somewhere in that ganglion of failure are the words he needs to express this loss, but he can’t see past the bleeding flame to grasp their order, and the desire to do so echoes around his hollow head and submerges in the quicksand of his stomach; he’s staring at the pages of the ripped out twelfth-century novel she left when she left.

He lies in bed for a day.  He lies on the couch for two.  He musters the courage to step outside and finds it a pleasant day.  The words have stopped coming.  Phil Ochs shot himself because the words stopped coming.  He walks to his mailbox.  No mail.  It's only 9:30 in the morning.  He lightly kicks a milkweed by the steps with his padded slipper.  He thinks about his life.  He compares it to his neighbor's garden hose, which is full of holes but wound up and still hanging around. He remembers his first workshop, the faces of new writers—not new but open; they were open to things that weren’t right in front of their faces or inside their own heads.  He was going to be great, but he wasn’t.  He would be the model teacher who inspired greatness with respect instead of mediocre reactions bred of pity.  He was supposed to sound his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world instead of whispering it to drunken bums asleep beside dumpsters filled with library books.  He wanted to be the Everyman; the HE referred to on daytime talk shows, congressional hearings, faculty lunchrooms, and benefit dinners.  And the classes never really mattered to him—at all.  The students’ stories were never quite good enough for him to read; his written comments generally rambled into an obscure diatribe on aesthetics and left the bolts of the story completely.  In his mind, as the milkweed waved an obscene salutation, he was an utter failure in every sense of the word.  He had failed as a writer; his book wasn’t even in the top thousand.  He had failed as a teacher; none of his students went beyond filling in the alphabet bubbles on semester evaluations with written words of praise.  And he had failed as a lover; his one light having left and a binding apathy prevented him from asking the question that might have made her stop before she opened that car door and was sucked into that familiar black hole that so many bar stool residents have preached about over a hundred dollar liquor tab.  And now he feels like discharged semen in a wad of toilet paper, something that could have been but never was.

Jack Stansfield walks into his last 4:30 workshop with the discombobulated stagger of a town drunk on the run from Child Support.  He has no folders, papers, pens, or preconceived notions about what he will say to his five students.  He only feels the enormous weight of burnt wax and bookbinding leaking from the holes in his shredded shoulders.  He is less than a man.   He is a kite on a string released from the Creative Writing office window.  He is everyone at one point or another.

These are things he wishes he could say.  Sometimes, the narrator breaks down.  Sometimes, past and future tenses mingle in a story, which doesn’t mean anything more than the author forgetting the original plan.  Sometimes, characters don't speak with perfect quotation marks inside white bubbles surrounded by black lines that hold the words close in.  Sometimes, targets get switched in mid-firing, and the shooter can only watch the bullet go the wrong way.   Sometimes, the person in front of the room only hides behind a podium.  Sometimes they’re only dipshits in penny loafers, but sometimes they are human beings that have been up all night crying.  Sometimes, they miss the people they pushed away.  Sometimes, a story doesn't come together in the end.  Sometimes fiction doesn't mean lying, and sometimes people typing words into keyboards or putting ink on a page only talk to themselves.  Sometimes, what we wish to become is less than what we already are.

Jack Stansfield leaves his last workshop with the glass that held the melting wax in shards.  That crystal harp meant to sound the strings of redemption shattered, and the little heart rock is exposed to the harsh open air.  He pays no attention to his surroundings.  He doesn’t look back; if he did, he might see a wax trail, shredded bookbindings blowing across the cactus green campus lawn.  He thinks about the return address on the Ecru announcement on his desk at home.  The rock almost glitters in the bare Ohio atmosphere.  Two things are dancing in his mind and drilling at his rocky heart, and in the end, they are both the same thing—Pyrite—Fool’s Gold.

Written in Bowling Green, Ohio (April 2000)

The Hole

Sergeant Simmons tells the Congressman about the first man who died in the hole. “He was a contract worker, pounding rebar posts, along this edge here, to construct a safety fence.” 

The Congressman cranes his neck to take in the incredible scope of the cliff’s edge next to The Hole. “Ironic,” he says.

“How’s that?” the Sergeant replies, annoyed.

“I said it’s ironic, the man working to erect a safety fence falls in because of the lack of a safety fence.”

“That’s not what happened,” the Sergeant says. “He was pushed.” Pausing to choose his words, he adds, “But I believe that was an accident.” There is another pause while dark winds whirl above the pulsing light coming up from The Hole like tornados yawning to feed in the bright night.

The Congressman drinks from the canteen, and the Sergeant nods at him. “Go easy on that,” he says. “It’s the last of the potable water we have on site. I have no idea how long we’ll be here until backup shows, if it’s even coming.”

The Congressman caps the canteen and returns it to the Sergeant. He says, “Oh, backup is coming. Don’t you worry about that, son.” Changing the subject, the Congressman asks him, “So, what was it like just after this Hole opened up?”

Later, there is a briefing for the newly arrived. The first man to die in the hole was Oscar Pecadoro, a nationalized immigrant from El Salvador. He was a contract employee with a secured and trusted vendor. What happened here was an unfortunate accident, but there were lessons learned.

The Commanding Officer briefs the small crowd, pacing a path in the front of the room like a panther. He speaks while stalking back and forth through the crowd. His voice grows loud at times but stays stable because these are facts and truths these people need to hear. Loud is for emphasis on the most important parts. “The Hole, as we’re colloquially calling it in this impromptu military base, opened up two weeks ago after the largest natural catastrophe ever recorded by the human mind happened in what used to be Yellowstone National Park, where you’re sitting right now.”

A massive explosion blasted forth from the stinking sulfurous middle of the North American continent. Some titanic underground super volcano had enough of this being one land and severed the Earth for hundreds of miles, as far South as North Texas and further than we have ever dug into the ground or ocean. Millions of Humans died in the initial series of blasts, followed by collapse, which lasted for hours. Entire cities were destroyed in a puff of seconds. And then the fallout rained down on streets, buildings, and homes. The Sun has been blocked for two weeks. It could be months before the ground sees sunlight. The darkest night has descended upon America. At high noon, the horizon has dimmed as far away from here as New York City and Boston, and the Sun is a short-term memory for everyone right now.

The Army Corps of Engineers was the first to arrive on the scene after the public entrances to the park had been shut down. The event occurred in the Norrison Geyser Basin, once one of the world's hottest areas of geothermal activity. This site has been labeled H0. The Rangers and other first responders immediately set up an impromptu military base. This base was labeled H1. This military briefing room was the makeshift quarters of the first twenty-five people on site for disaster response and to lead the recovery of human remains, but there were no bodies to recover. An estimated 800,000 human beings perished in an instant, “Like they were blinked out of this life by a cruel God,” the Commander tells them. “Friends, I’ve been in four wars over sixteen tours. And I’ve eaten lunch in the Capitol Mess Hall. So, not much scares me anymore.” Nervous laughter rings around the room, and the sobering truth comes next, “But what I believe will come up out of this Hole scares me more than anything I’ve encountered yet in this soldier’s life. Whatever this is,” he waves his hand around in the direction of The Hole. “It’s just getting started.”

Sergeant Dickey Simmons commanded the first unit onsite at The Hole before the eruption of light, which scientists projected would be visible as a cosmic light event halfway through the known universe. Species unknown and unimagined, living mind-boggling distances away from the Earth, may see the light that came out of this Hole billions of years from now, very far away from where Sgt. Simmons now sits in a folded plastic chair, leaning forward, arms on a smaller conference room table. This is the meeting after the meeting, and this group is smaller, but not by much.

There are buses on the way. They are filled with people. That is all that is being said about that. The three men talking in front of the room now look the same, dress the same, and use the same words. Bad shit is coming. Sgt. Simmons knows it. He has survived situations he shouldn’t have as if the hand of God had sheltered him in the middle of the many battlefields of his life. After the third or fourth time, he asked himself why that might be. Why was he saved when he watched his friends die, faces crumpled up in agony, while all he could do was bear witness to their painful passings and feel gratitude for the messy, merciful endings of their suffering? A standard alert alarm sounds. The buses are about to arrive at site H1.

Walking to the gate, he takes note of the flickering glow behind him, lit like a science fiction film set. There is a rhythm to the light and hum coming up from The Hole. It’s a thrumming sound rumbling up from the deep planet's core. The human biology of all exposed is being affected, though no one understands how yet, and there may be no time to perform the necessary science. The world could be on a borrowed clock now because this wasn’t just an earthquake but a planet-rupturing event. The gravitational relationship between the Earth and the Moon has shifted. Weather patterns are changing. The deserts are flooding, and the mountains are burning. Beaches are freezing, and volcanos are starting to pop up out of the ice sheets like pimples on the frosted ass of the Earth.

The heavy metal gate slides open, and the razor wire retreats like a dog, closing its mouth after a good growl. Three buses are lined up to enter the processing yard. Sgt. Simmons commands three of his Private First Class soldiers to coordinate the processing of each bus. He wants to know who these people are and why they are here.

But before PFC Chenoweth gets the driver to open the first bus door, a large military presence erupts in the yard, and they are not U.S. Army. His soldiers in the yard are surrounded by superior firepower aimed at their heads. The soldiers pointing these guns are clad in all-black with balaclavas and lightweight field armor and are armed to the teeth. Pistols, knives, high-powered rifles, and clips stacked on clips hooked on belts all over their bodies. This will either be a surrender or a massacre.

One of the men who spoke in the meeting has a bullhorn and speaks to the crowd. The Congressman stands by that man’s side, nodding and scanning the crowd. The Congressman sees him and nods, but Sgt. Simmons knew something was wrong with that Congressman. Weasily fucker. No honor. This is a goddamned coup. Who the fuck are these people in these buses?

Sgt. Simmons never found out who the people were on the first buses. They all died, pushed into The Hole at gunpoint. More buses are coming and won’t stop coming for a long time. When the buses stop coming, the world will be quiet while it dies, and the people trying to survive on a dying planet won’t talk much to each other anymore. Sgt. Simmons won’t see any of this happen, but it wouldn’t surprise him if he were told about it.

Just after the last person was pushed into The Hole, the Congressman and those three big-mouthed men turned around to gaze into The Hole and behold their work, which was just beginning but starting off well in their eyes. The Congressman smiled at the other men, who smiled back, and this was the moment Sgt. Simmons realized why he’d been saved all those times. No one saw him coming. He plows into those men like his whole life was a kinetic force rushing into this moveable moment, and they all fall into The Hole. The crowd’s gasp is audible over the humming. A short-range automatic weapon fires a burst of warning bullets because there will be no uprising here, and the buses are already coming.

Days later, the next buses arrive, and the work begins. This time, there is nothing to clean up, no ashes to dump, no bodies to bury, and no proof to measure. People are erased like fixable mistakes. Sgt. Simmons would be ashamed of his country right now. He might have reconsidered tackling those men into The Hole but probably still would have done it. That’s who he was, how he was raised.

Then, one night, something changed in the harmonics of the humming coming up from the depths of the Earth. Everyone there felt a shift in vibration before they heard it with their ears. The soldiers moved the operation back ten feet from the lip of the edge at The Hole. A pervasive surge of scraping sounds is audible above the shifting hum, nearly an A-minor now from a G flat. The light of the hum casts a shadow from the first hand to reach above the lip to grab the dirt and pull a body up behind it. In seconds, there are hundreds of pale bodies standing together, animated corpses, empowered by a native light so foreign that it never occurred to the people who sent the buses that it could have been an alternative spiritual energy source that would forever alter Human DNA and create a race of super creatures who would one day sail the spaces between stars and galaxies.

The bullets don’t stop them once they get up here, and these creatures, once people, keep coming up from The Hole.

Cruel Gets Promoted

“Why are you so mean to the people who work for you?” Asking this question to the one person it shouldn’t have been asked would probably get me fired, but it was late, the hotel bar was dark, and closing time was approaching fast. If I hadn’t asked this now, I would never have. It was just him and me left from the large group earlier. He was drunk, and I was sober.

He drew his head back in a defensive posture and pushed his half-empty drink away from his hand, closer to the bartender. His feathers were up now, and it was the witching hour of the post-software conference haze. He defensively asked, “What do you mean by that?”

I said, “Well, it seems you are always sowing chaos and fear everywhere you go. Nothing is ever good enough.” I looked down at my hands, which were shaking now because I was on the verge of telling a Senior Executive exactly how I felt about the trauma they had caused others for years, a cardinal sin that has ended careers for lesser truths revealed.

I said, “People are afraid of you. They don’t respect you.”

He snapped, “Well, maybe I don’t need or want their respect. I have a job to do.” 

I said, “Yeah, so do we all. And you always make it harder for us to do our jobs.”

“How so? Please enlighten me.” He downed his drink and motioned for another. The bartender said it was the last call and poured the drink. I hadn’t had a drink in over a year, and I was clear about what I was saying, but my exhaustion was intoxicating, and my patience was being tested.

I carefully said, “Well, for one thing, in customer meetings, you always talk about yourself. Every meeting I’ve been in that’s involved you has been derailed during the meeting. You’ve never engaged in the planning of those meetings I work on. You don’t attend the dry runs. And then you show up, shit on everything we’ve done, and derail each meeting with your selfish comments, name dropping famous people and companies you’re meeting with, while revealing proprietary details about our company you shouldn’t be talking about or showing in public. Why do you do that? It’s juvenile.” I was getting closer to insulting him.

And now, he was pissed. “This is the first I’m hearing of it. Tell me more because I feel like I always ask engaging questions to the customers I meet with, because that’s my job!” He taps the glass hard on the bar, and the big square ice cube clinks against the thick crystal. Everyone looks at us, but most quickly look away.

My face grew red and hot. I said, “Yeah, but those questions are just setups for you to talk more about yourself.” And suddenly, I was irate. I said, “You may be the most egotistical person I’ve ever worked for and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Do you really think this company a better place by you acting like this?”

Well, there it was. I’d insulted the man with the truth, which is the worst kind of insult one can give. Harsh truths must be swaddled in a soft cloth and handed over like a sleeping baby. But when truth is rubbed on the tips of arrows, it becomes a poison that can easily backsplash on the archer.

I started off giving honest feedback, and it turned into an insult. I was sure I was getting fired for offending him. But I had spoken the truth as I saw it. Wasn’t it more meaningful that this man heard the truth from one of the hundreds of people he’d undeservingly abused in his career? After all, it’s never too late to change our harmful behaviors toward others once we become aware of the damage we do. I have certainly struggled with this in my life. Wasn’t I passing on wisdom to someone who needed it? Alas, there was the insult, and he didn’t hear anything constructive from what I had said. All he heard was the insult.

I was once in a town hall meeting with him, and someone politely interrupted, asking him to speak up because they couldn’t hear him from the back of the room, and there was no amplification. He reacted in a huff by loudly dragging up a chair, scraping it across the floor for theater, and demanding the person sit beside him, facing the crowd for the rest of the meeting, like a cheeky child’s punishment in daycare. Imagine the trauma of that person who was made to sit in that chair for an hour, looking up at him uncomfortably from the side, while he lectured us all on why we weren’t good enough. The whole crowd stared at that unfortunate soul in the hot seat for the whole meeting. Everyone in the audience was thankful they weren’t in that chair and committed to never speaking up or speaking out when this man was in the room. That’s how you run a company with terror, not inspiration, no matter what the core values say on the website.

So, why are the cruel so often promoted in business? Why aren’t consistently kind people elevated to positions of influence and decision-making? Why are the worst behaviors honored so often and the best behaviors usually suppressed and ignored? I think it’s because cruelty is so easy. So frequently, people like this become bullies during their youth to achieve power over others. Eventually, these ambitious humans warp the world around them into a demented set of funhouse mirrors that they laughingly push others through, gleeful over the ensuing confusion and misery. Cruelty, combined with actual power, turns these people into monsters who terrify every human culture they engage in, and it often earns them promotions and pay raises. Soon, they are running entire divisions like hit squads.

Well, the only way to defeat a monster in the dark is to turn on the lights, which happened when closing time hit that night. The lights went up, and we saw each other clearly now. He finished his drink, told me to perform an anatomically impossible act, grabbed his suit coat and left without saying goodbye.

I wasn’t fired, but I’ve never spoken to that man again, and I never received another promotion in that company. Eventually, I left and found a better job. I suppose he’s still out there, posting on LinkedIn about how much his company loves their people and values their hard work. But I have no doubt he remains a great white shark, circling his next prey and avoiding the harsh light of day.

Waiting for Nirvana

The music is so loud in the fraternity house that beers rattle off the roofs of cars parked outside in the cul-de-sac.

The young man takes his seat behind the fold-out picnic table where he was told to sit and collect door-charge money from the other young men coming here to drink. Young women drink for free because that’s how this is done, where everyone is magically twenty-one.

He keeps standing up to scan the crowd, looking for her and, finally, he sees her coming around the corner smiling at him. He hopes tonight is the night when two years of pining pays off since they broke up because he accidentally cheated on her the same night he told her he loved her. High school shit. In his defense, he had no ride home because his ride was making out on the other couch in some girl’s parents’ basement. And the girl next to him started kissing him and rubbing on him. The rest was gravity but didn’t amount to much. He felt guilty, told her the next day, and she dumped him. That was two years ago.

Since that loss of integrity, he had become utterly dumpable but he also felt fuckable. Some girls look at him that way now and she looks at him like this when she slides in beside him, both of their asses hanging off the edge of the curved plastic chair they share.

The music is suddenly removed from the atmosphere and now it is quiet while one of the active members of the fraternity screams something at someone in the other room because a small drama has unfolded and is being handled. The silence is immediately filled with an explosion of many conversations, but our young couple can hear each other now.

She snuggles in close and turns his face to hers. She stares into his eyes and smiles until he smiles back. They kiss and suck each other’s tongues lovingly like they used to in his waterbed after school. Dudes are stuffing money in the cash box, grabbing their plastic cups, and walking away.

She tells him she remembers what he likes and her hands go to work on him. He falls in love all over again right here. A few girls stare at them and hate her out loud because they wish they were her in this moment, inhaling a boy without shame.

She takes her hand away from the work and grabs his wrist. She gets up and drags him to the stairs. He fixes himself with his other hand while running to catch up, but his jeans are still unzipped and unbuttoned. He catches up to her and the noise is ridiculous again because the music is back on, louder now.

She pulls him up the stairs and screams something at him and she is smiling with a look in her eyes like she could devour him where he stands. He can’t understand what she’s yelling and gives her the face and head shake to convey this, so she cups her hands around her mouth and bellows at the same moment someone bumps the DJ table downstairs, knocking the needle off the record. The whole party hears her scream, “I WANT YOU TO MAKE ME CUM TONIGHT!”

The shame he should feel standing here in his unzipped trousers with a publicly declared demand on his sexual performance could burn a lesser soul into a scorch on the Earth, but the shameless are often the last ones standing.

The crowd around them oohs and claps while she drags him up the rest of the stairs and then kisses him in front of the party. She has abandoned reason for lust and he follows her with joy. They kiss for a long time until the DJ finds the groove again and the loud music makes the crowd forget their spectacle so the young couple can exit this party without leaving.

In a bedroom with a shut door, they roll around and shed their clothes. They lick each other’s necks and shoulders. He kisses her hand and forearm. Soon they grind their bodies together until fluids stir to simmer. She’s taking her bra off when the door opens violently. The brother whose bedroom this is wants it for entertaining a young lady friend and the young man of our concern, along with his lovely young lady, are both banished to the top of the bunk bed. They’re up there now, skin to skin. He’s trying to figure this out because he’s only done it twice. He understands a woman’s body has a language that he barely knows how to speak. He aches to learn that language but trying to do it in this place and time is not a wise investment of the sexual energy between them.

A few minutes later, she starts moaning and soon she gets a leg cramp that causes her to jerk away from him, kneeing him in his balls, and scratching his chest by accident, drawing blood. She falls out of the bunk bed and crashes naked to the leather chest serving as a coffee table. It’s a hard fall and he calls her name to make sure she’s okay. She is okay but whatever mood there was before she fell is no longer the mood they feel. There is laughter in the room now, but neither of them is laughing.

He wants to be out of this place and away from this noise so he can tell her things in his heart. She should know that he holds his breath every time he sees her and he makes a silent pledge to win her back every time she walks away. But instead of telling her these things, he walks her to her car and waves as she drives away from the party. He thinks about stepping in front of her car while she’s accelerating toward him now. He thinks about what the weight of her car would feel like driving over him. Instead, he takes a long walk away from the party, off-campus downtown where dirty people play and pay for it again tomorrow when they wake up. He gets into another adventure, like he always does following a good failure.

The next day he calls and asks if he can take her out. She says yes. When he arrives at her house, she won’t come to the door. Her mother finally asks him to please leave. He shouts at her mother and then up at her window. It is the next to last time he’ll speak to her.

Driving home, the song playing on the local hard rock station is interrupted and the DJ is crying and talking. A punk musician on the other side of the country tried his best to be a good artist. He made a perfect pop record that ended up killing the music he loved by accident. That young man with all that talent committed a gruesome suicide. Our young man turns off the radio and drives in silence with the windows down. He cries the whole way home.

The Pepper Tree Meeting: When Joseph Campbell Met Krishnamurti

In the year 1924, aboard a steamship crossing the Atlantic from New York to London, a chance meeting occurred between the future mythologist Joseph Campbell, twenty years old, and the young Theosophist Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, twenty-eight years old. No one knows what was said during that meeting.

It is nearly noon when they meet the Hindus. The steamship passed under a massive cloud system that had obscured the Sun for nearly two hours, and the railings of the great vessel were moist with condensation from the atmosphere and ocean spray. The kitchen staff was a flutter of activity preparing for lunch while the ship lurched.

Alice Campbell puts on a fuss face when the fingers of her glove grow soaked, running over the ship’s wet handrail. She verges on vomiting. The Atlantic Ocean is more treacherous today than when they left New York the day before. But now a dark brown hand is next to her wet white glove and a scratchy high voice asks, << Might I offer you assistance, Madam? Would you care to sit down and rest? >> 

Alice whirls around to look at the man who owns such a dark, beautiful hand. Her brother Joe approaches nonchalantly, trying to look handsome and worldly with his new pencil fuzz mustache. Yesterday, he joked with her that he would shave it into a toothbrush like the European men in Bavaria are wearing on their faces.

But all his pretense is put aside when he sees his sister swoon and nearly falter. With the speed of Hermes, Joe rushes to her side, as he will always rush to his baby sister’s side, but this time, before he can reach her, she collapses into the handsome Hindu’s arms. This causes a stir amongst these passengers who have never seen a white woman embraced by a dark-skinned man on the First Class promenade. 

The Hindu seems embarrassed by his part in this situation, and he gracefully and graciously offers Alice’s weight over to her brother, who easily assumes it with his muscular frame and tightly knotted muscles, carved over an intense championship season of track running at Columbia.

Together, they move Alice to a comfortable repose in the vacated wicker chair facing the other Hindus. A beautiful American woman inserts herself between Joe and Alice. She tends to his sister like a lifelong friend, wiping Alice’s forehead now with a cool, wet cloth she procured from nowhere like a magician. The woman turns up to look at Joe, smiling and squinting because, finally, the Sun has broken through the clouds and is now in her eyes as she looks up at what may as well be a statue carved in marble. << Hello. I’m Rosalind. >>

Joe stammers hello and looks away quickly at the Hindus smiling at him. Before he can speak, Rosalind says, << This is Krishnamurti. You may have heard of him. >> 

Joe says he’s sorry, but he hasn’t. He walks over to the silent but observant young man, bows his head, and offers his hand. << I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Sir. We’re well met despite the circumstances. >> Joe nods at his sister.

Krishnamurti says, << It’s nice to meet you. I see your sister is recovering now. >>

Alice opens her eyes like a thunderclap and sits straight in the chair. The color has come back to her face. She’s embarrassed but the group rapidly puts her at ease, each expressing concern and support for her present comfort.

Joe doesn’t wait for Rosalind’s next introduction. He introduces himself to the other two Hindu men. They smile, nod, and shake his hand. The man on the left was the man who caught Alice, Krishnamurti’s brother, Nitya. Now that Joe sees him outside crisis, he looks unwell. The last man introduces himself as Rajagopal, Mr. Krishnamurti’s personal secretary.

Joe’s face betrays his reaction to the man’s title. He looks again at Krishnamurti and bows his head curtly. << Well, it’s very nice to meet you all. We’ll let you get back to your conversation. >> He turns and says to his sister, << Dear Alice, are you able to walk? >>

Alice starts to rise, but Krishnamurti’s voice cuts through the performance. <<No! Please sit with us, and let’s talk. Let your sister be calm and recover. >>

Joe acquiesces. He sits in the empty chair Rosalind has procured from another hiding place. He places his hand on his sister’s and pats it for comfort. Then he pulls his hand together with the other in a praying position between his knees, a pose he learned early in Catholic school. Joe says, << Alice’s constitution is affected by ocean waves. She’s been this way since we were children. >> He smiles at her, and the rest of the group also smiles. << It took miracles of persuasion and sometimes outright deception to get her out on the Hudson when we were little. >> 

Alice finally speaks, << I was more of a Coney Island fan. >> They all laugh. She looks better, laughing, and healthy. Full color has returned to her normally rosy cheeks.

Krishnamurti asks, << And what do you do, Joe and Alice? >>

Joe says, << I’m a student, or rather, I just graduated from Columbia. This Fall, I begin the quest for a Master’s degree. >>

Krishnamurti smiles and says, << A master, is that right? >>

Joe laughs and clarifies, << No, no. Just a degree. I’m no master. >> He reflects briefly and adds, << I don’t think I ever want to stop being a student. >> Krishnamurti leans forward and says, << Quite right, Sir! That’s the path. >>

Joe seems taken aback by the man’s sudden energy directed toward him. He’s clearly excited, which electrifies the group. Perhaps people walking by can feel it as well. Something gathers in the coming rain. The Sun is removed again.

Krishnamurti looks Joe Campbell over and notices a large scratch on his right arm. << What happened there, Sir, to your arm? >>

Joe looks at his arm and seems surprised to see the scratch. He smiles << We have a house in Woodstock, New York, and I was clearing scrub near the barn. I noticed a beautiful red pepper tree had sprung up there, but it was thistled in behind some really nasty thorn bushes. I paid for those peppers with my arm here, but Alice, they were worth it, weren’t they?” >> She nods and affirms, but something has shifted in the conversation.

At the mention of the pepper tree, Krishnamurti leans back, looks at his brother, and gracefully nods. His brother, seeing the sign they had agreed on years ago, gathers the rest of the entourage together, including Alice, and quietly tells them, << Krishna would like to speak with Joseph alone. Shall we get some food? >> They all agree, and Alice goes along but looks back at Joe, who is looking at her. He shrugs his strong shoulders fast and shows her a goofy smile he used to give her just before he convinced her to do some dangerous stunt, like when they jumped off the high rocks into the river as teenagers. It was a face that said, I didn’t expect this, but let’s see where it goes... Joe has a wild spirit and the kindest heart. But before she can think further, Rosalind pulls her into a hug, and they amble off down the promenade.

With the activity settled, Krishnamurti waves a finger across the speaking space. << Now, Joe. Tell me more about this pepper tree. >>

<><><><><>

The girls stand next to the deck telescope. Rosalind wheels it around to point back down the promenade. She taps Rajagopal on the arm and asks for a coin. He provides it without question, and she places it in the slot. The covers lift on the lenses, and she wheels the view into focus. She steps away and invites Alice to take a look. Alice leans in and observes for a few moments. She asks, << What do you think they’re talking about? >> 

Whatever it is, Joe is fully enthralled by what Krishnamurti is saying. He is leaning forward, nodding over and over. << Oh, he looks like a damn fool. I hope he’s not embarrassing himself. >>

Rosalind laughs, << My dear, very few people get time alone with Krishnamurti at his request. He saw something in your brother that he is going to dig out. >>

At that, Alice breaks her gaze and looks at Rosalind, who smiles sheepishly. << What does that mean? >> 

Rosalind says something that can’t be right. Alice must have misheard her because it sounded like she said Krishnamurti’s come to Earth to save us all. That is what she said, but she continues, << He calls all good people to his aid. >> Rosalind looks out at the ocean and asks, << Alice, is your brother a good person? >> 

Alice says, << My brother is a gift from God. He’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. And I’ll kill you if you tell him I said that. >> Both women break into giggles. Rosalind ends this part of their conversation by saying, << Krishnamurti has his reasons. >>

Alice looks back into the pay telescope and sees that Krishnamurti is wildly gesturing with his hands, and Joe is leaning back in his chair with his hand on top of his head, looking exhausted. What could have been said in the last 30 seconds to make him look like he does when he finishes a race? The time is up before she forms the next thought, and the shutter of the pay telescope clicks shut, startling her.

Rosalind laughs and touches her shoulder. << Friends, perhaps we should gather our two men before the sky opens. >> They all look up and note the sparse raindrops now splattering on the deck. Behind them, a man opens an umbrella, and another coughs phlegm.

<><><><><>

The approaching giggles break the intense gaze both young men share in their chairs. The women soften the moment with their affection and news of the promenade. It is time for lunch. The food is ready and grows colder by the minute.

Joe doesn’t respond to Alice when she calls his name. He looks like a man in a trance. Krishnamurti is looking off to the ocean now. The Sun breaks through again. For a moment, a ray of light settles on his face, and he closes his eyes to receive it somewhere inside, where ancient forces churn. Joe says, << Well, we all have that inside us. >> Krishnamurti opens his eyes, looks at Joseph Campbell, and smiles, nodding once.

Krishnamurti looks at Rosalind, and she leans in to hear him whisper something inaudible to the others. She nods at him, stands, and addresses the others, << Krishna is very tired and will retire to his cabin for an afternoon nap. He wishes you all a wonderful day and hopes to see you at dinner tonight. >>

Joe and Alice stand and nod to the others, offering hands and shaking them. Joe looks at Krishnamurti one final time and half nods, holding his gaze down in what he doesn’t yet realize is a gesture of deep respect and gratitude. But Krishnamurti understands and nods back likewise in return.

They are halfway up the promenade, approaching the dining room entrance, when Rosalind catches up to them. She carries a book, and her hair flails in the salty wind. She looks like a sea nymph and is twice as beautiful as when Joe first fixed his gaze on her. This is a woman any man could love.

<< Joe! >> She calls from feet away. He smiles at her. << Krishna wanted you to have this. >> 

He accepts the book, looks at it, and thanks her. Then he asks a curious question, << What will I find inside? >>

Rosalind smiles and tells him, << It’s the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha. >>

Joe looks at the book and speaks the author’s name and title out loud. << ‘The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold. >> He nods his head several times in interest and gratitude. << I don’t know about Buddha but look forward to learning. Tell Krishna thank you. And Rosalind, thank you! >> They grasp hands, and Rosalind reaches for Alice’s hand. They stand that way for several seconds, smiling at each other. Finally, Rosalind releases them and tells Joe, << We will be traveling from London to Paris over the next few weeks, and Krishna wants to keep in touch with you. I hope you’ll be available. >> Joe and Alice both say they will. 

As Rosalind departs the dining room vestibule, the clouds pass behind the ship, and the sun shines strong, reflected in countless water droplets on the rails of a steamship traveling through time.

---

Author’s Note:

Joseph Campbell and Krishnamurti saw each other a few more times during that trip, in both London and Paris. And they connected a few more times over the years, but never like that first time. Joe sometimes said that the trip felt like it was in serendipity's hands. The next year, he began a Master’s Degree program in Comparative Literature, initiating an academic hero’s journey that would unite Eastern and Western Religions with History, Anthropology, Psychology, and Mythology under a single scope of study and influence. Joseph Campbell’s work continues to inspire generations of artists and lovers of ideas and Humanity.

Five years after this meeting, Krishnamurti, then hailed by thousands as a living God on Earth, walked away from sainthood, divinity, and the luxury and comfort such a lifestyle often assumes. Instead of seeking power and wealth, Krishnamurti gathered his followers together and disbanded them with a single speech in which he said the following:

“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path.”

A Cheat Code To Time

Hold on, you’re stepping on my toe! Now, listen. Listen up, goddammit. I have worked for twenty years to be here at this place, in this moment right now. And you are not going to fuck this up for me. I hired you to do a job, and it was to stand next to me while I do some complicated shit. I need you to focus only on me for the next..seventy-six seconds.

Now what’s coming down that hallway at us right now is bad. I can’t lie to you. Those creatures howling and growling are coming right at us. They were put here to prevent us from doing what I am about to do.

Now pay attention. I’m going to put this key in this lock. And the way time keys work, see, is that in the past, thirty-seven years ago, I also put this key into this lock, but from the other side. And doing that started a process that has led to this moment. It will be the same second of the same day at a time of year and revolution where the Earth is in the exact same stellar position as when I put that key in this lock thirty-seven years ago.

Christ, they’re getting closer now. Hear ‘em growling like gators? Nobody knows what they are. We’ll be the first to see ‘em. That ain’t nothing. Now, don’t distract me. I’ve got... fifty-nine seconds left. And all this temporal alignment of physical objects at multiple points in time adds up to a second shot. If these keys enter the lock from both sides and have the same relative positions in physical space but originating from different points in time, the person holding these keys in both periods will merge into a new persona that will be awarded a third key.

It’s a cheat code for time. The third key is a choice. Go anywhere in time for all the time you need. The keyholder chooses. And I’m going back to the night I first made love to my long-dead wife. I want to fuck her one more time and fall asleep in her arms, and tell her I’ll love her forever because I do. And I might repeat that night forever and ever, over and over, a pulsing beacon of my love that will never fade in intensity.

Okay, seven seconds. Now, I need you to go stand in front of that door and slow down what’s coming through. Give me a chance to get this done.

Three seconds.

Two.

Here we go.

This Fuckin' Town of Odessa (A Twin Peaks Flash Fiction)

Today is a good day to be someone else. Carrie Page wakes from a pill nap. What time is it? She looks for the clock on the wall and finds time missing. The clock has been moved. Roy took the clock with him when he slammed her down into the bed and forced her to drink the beer with the pills crushed in. 

Sunlight streams into the bedroom through broken slats in the cheap window blinds, all she could afford at the Walmart after she moved in...What year was that now? It feels like she’s lived here forever. But she did show up broke without much memory of where she came from and who her people were. She remembers the feeling of being in the room with her father. There’s some fear there. Yelling. His close face whispered in her ear. And terror because she can’t see his face, but she smells him, and his voice sounds like someone else. Her mother is a mystery. No name. No face. No feeling.

Carrie stumbles into the bathroom, adjusts her undergarments, and selects the cleanest dirty shirt from the hamper, a flowery blouse with cling stitches on the shoulders. She looks at herself in the mirror and recognizes the void. Her lucky horseshoe necklace is gone. She’s had it around her neck since she arrived here in this fucking town of Odessa. The sight of her naked neck without it induces a panic that fills her body, the house, all of Texas, and then...

She runs into the living room and stops cold. Roy is dead in the chair, shot through the forehead. What was once his brain has become an abstract painting on the drywall behind the lounger, something a demented artist would compose and seek to frame. A glint. It’s her horseshoe necklace swinging from Roy’s dead right hand. She composes herself and creeps to retrieve it. It’s intact, and she puts it around her neck like an amulet. She already feels better.

There were voices muffled through the Pharma haze Roy put her in with that hillbilly roofie brew. Raised voices. More than two. She remembers Roy was in a panic, shouting instructions at her. Men were here. They came in. There was a fight, and things broke. Then silence followed by loud voices speaking in short sentences. Yelling again. No clear words, though. No intellectual explanation for this situation. There were men here, and now they are gone. There was a shot, but no gun remains. She looked for it.

And where did that horse come from on the mantle? That’s not hers. She would never have put a white horse up there. Carrie stares at the horse for a long time until a knock at the door breaks her trance. She walks to the door but, before opening it, stops and asks, “Who is it?”

A kind but strange voice responds, and it makes her feel better.

Smash The Glasses

We’re gonna have to grow our own food now.

I say it, and they hear me.

Gotta secure our own water.

I nod at them, each one, and they nod back. 

We’re gonna have to work with people who aren’t like us, who don’t think like we do. And we gotta get along with them. Right, because it takes all of us to create safety for each of us. Now, we’re good people, but the necessity to survive may call upon us to do nasty things occasionally.

I fill my wine glass and hold it up to the group. They fill and raise their glasses. We drink slowly, sipping the wine. I breathe through my nostrils and close my eyes.

The necessity to survive is what we’ll tell ourselves for years and brutal years to come. We’re all sober now, despite being chemically drunk on the last of our neighborhood wine. This was supposed to be a celebration. Instead, it became a funeral for the world that passed us by. The one we threw away.

I drain the last of my glass and hold it up to my neighbors who, months ago, were just people I waved to, driving by to get back into my own life inside my own house. And now, they are people I will be trading vegetables with, each growing and killing food to feed us all. So keep us with a bounty of choices inside a world where choosing died in the dark. Didn’t even scream.

I fill and hold up my wine glass again to the group, and they do theirs. Finally, we toast to each other’s health and smash the glasses on our lawn, but they mostly bounce.

The Ice Harvest

It is before dawn on a Tuesday in the deep Winter of 1891. Sven Jaros is awake, pissing steam into a snowbank on the side of his rented property's outhouse while he plans the best way to murder the man who raped his daughter.

Today is the first day of the Sangamon River Ice Harvest. The rage inside him is snug against his rib cage like an insulating blanket. The glacier water runs deep into the Sangamon beneath the forgotten fourteen inches of ice that five days of four-degree clear sky weather has brought to Decatur, Illinois.

Despite his blood lust, the labor sentence of the next twelve hours looms large over Sven. The only thrill he feels more resounding than the rush of prospective murder is this nervous urination into a world so cold that it freezes yellow seconds after hitting the ground.

Most of the Decatur Ice Company's employees look forward to the work of the Ice Harvest, despite the freezing cold. There will be little heat to the labor that lay ahead of these men, and the weight of waiting doesn't make the prospect any lighter on Sven's immigrant sense of work pride.

His sixteen-year-old daughter, Sophronia, is still sleeping when he leaves, the moonlight painting her face silky blue through the sheer curtain of their crude cabin. He kissed her on the broad red birthmark of her right cheek, the same kiss he'd given her since she was an infant. A fire of shame and fury flares up his cheeks while he remembers what he let happen to her the last time it was warm outside.

Sven docked in New York City as an expatriate of Czarist Eastern Europe in 1885. He came to America the same year that the internal combustion engine was patented and produced. This new world has only accelerated in forwarding motion since then.

The seventeen days he dragged his eleven-year-old daughter around the muddy streets of New York City were desperate ones. He sought passage West, acting out a fable he dreamed of telling his grandchildren one day while they bounced on his knee. He will say these things a long time away from this freezing Ice Harvest at the cusp of a new century in America.

Many of those who work with him during these Ice Harvests will come to worship the Sangamon River's harsh wind and muted roar in their memories of these Winters gone by. When their smears in time run thin, many will cherish these years of labor more and more, each of them written by sweat and blood in the snow. 

This Central Illinois Winter has turned everything a brilliant, simple blue that chaps every face red. The Ice Harvest has almost become a religious event here in Decatur. When Spring breaks in late April, many ice farmers get on their knees beside their beds for an extra round of prayer. Some will cry tears of gratitude that they've made it through one more harvest with their bodies intact, their rent paid, and a few dollars for next Summer's stretch.  Many of them couldn't read or factor simple numbers, but these men lived like Lords of Illinois for three seasons of the year because they worked like the lowest slaves during the coldest one. When the fire goes out in the world, the Devil gets paid upfront.

Every year, at least five men lose one or more of their fingers, and a few lose their whole hands. A few of them will make a mortal mistake and leave their families without fathers and husbands. Every year, the Sangamon demands sacrifice. The others are left with gruesome memories to resurface years later in their loneliest moments, usually when alcohol overwhelmed apathy.

When the ice breaks and the Sangamon starts singing against the roots and rocks of its reedy banks, the ice farmers will find their places again in families and the city, like worn puzzle pieces, once lost, now found.

Carl Broker is the Cutter Foreman of the Ice Harvest, and the thumb of his left hand is missing. His job is to make sure the ice houses are filled and that the ice lines are cut straight.

Perpendicular lines are cut in the ice and then sawed through so the plowmen can move in with the horse team to detach and pull the sawed ice squares from the river's greedy hold.

The thick ice squares are then hauled by horse to the water channel, where Roscoe Bufford's drift team comes in to pole them downstream from the cutting shelf to the banks of the first ice house.

Henry Sifalees's team pole hooks them there onto the squelching cold mud. There, they get roped and harnessed to workhorses that haul dozens of sheets up the giant hill to a spiked conveyor belt.

Three four-foot ice squares are stacked on top of one another, side by side in layers, insulated by sheets of sawdust. Once filled, the Ice House is shut up for the Winter until the city's Summer comfort demands the ice, depleting the supply near the October harvest.

Eleven ice houses line the banks of the Sangamon, and all of them will be full by late March. Today is January 4th, and they were starting on the first house. As they fill, the production moves further upriver, and the men's muscles will grow carved and knotted in the stinging cold.

Harvest employees are a mix of Black, Irish, German, Slavic, and Nords. Many were dismayed to find they fled lesser persecutions than those they faced in this harsh Illinois Winter wind. 

Sven Jaros is the only Eastern European in Broker's crew, and he sticks out amongst the men like a whole potato in the stew. Sven has bundled himself up with every layer he could find in the cold cabin. Several hundred feet of the river have been sectioned off by monthly targets, each marked with bank flags to measure progress hourly. Carl Broker walks these sections every morning and picks up the flags blown out of the bank mud by the wind.

The company's production goal is three hundred fifty paces of river ice a day, yielding several hundred tons of ice each week. This speed and pace will fill all eleven ice houses on schedule by the end of Winter. 

Sven stomps his way through this dark Winter morning in his heavy boots, cracking bare branches and stepping down frail fallen limbs that lay moored between the reedy trees. He makes his way to the river while snow swirls around him like stinging dream fragments, and the river pulls him in like a magnetic attraction. The Sangamon looms in his thoughts constantly. It became the backdrop of his life while he's planned murder over the Christmas holiday, praying to the river every day, deepening faith in its cycle.

By nine-thirty, the sun has risen boldly into the Eastern sky for the rest of Decatur. However, it feels low and glazed to these Ice Farmers like the watery leftovers in a soup pot. In one half-hour, Sven will get his first fifteen-minute break. During this break, he will set his plans in motion.

He wipes his forehead with the back of a gloved hand and looks North up the river. It is a hell of a thing to sweat in the freezing cold. Still, the sensation has become second nature to them over five seasons. This crew has carved the Sangamon up into squares of ice, robbing the river every year, paying by the mile with their health and lives.

Break time has come, and Sven moves North through the frozen brush like a high plains panther, looking behind him every few seconds to ensure he isn't being followed. He stops when he sees the bank flag marking the end goal of today's cut. Sven scans the tree line, lost in thought, then walks three hundred paces beyond the day's goal flag and sits on the cold, muddy ground. His boots squelch in the thin bog slush. He boils in memory and schemes for tomorrow.

A few minutes pass, and he hears cheers from half the men playing their never-ending break time game of Slide Stick on the river's ice. Years from now, people will call a form of this game Hockey. Still, it is now a feud played for its own purpose, where victory drifts from side to side every day like a wind-whipped in their faces from every weak point of exposure. Slide Stick is played with branches, and whatever small object is big enough to chase and crash into one another over. It keeps the men from fighting and killing each other, mostly.

Sven surveys a spot on the river bank where the shallow ice meets water less than six inches down.  During his afternoon break, he finds the site again. He's brought a filched knife shovel, a spade sharpened on both sides, brought to a final point, the reaping tool of river harvest. Sven looks back down the river again to ensure he isn't being watched. His chosen spot is a good one, lying in a small cove, nestled between the hill banks of trees that hide the view from anyone downstream walking up. But sound carries long waves over this ice, so he waits to strike with the blade until the Slide Stick players score and yell. Sven draws up with resolute purpose, feet planted square in the frozen mud of the riverbank, and he strikes down with a fissure of fury that never seems to leave his heart anymore. He is sick from the spirit, and murder for him might feel at first like a preserver thrown to a drowning man; this is what he hopes for most in his life right now, to be saved.

Two more blows against the ice, and the hole is now the width he needs to jam the freezing shovelhead into the frozen water of the Sangamon. He lets the handle fall to the winter grass and kick-covers it with fallen branches.

Carl Broker surveys each day's cutting in the dark of the morning. He meets the river every day before any of his men do. It is the kind of ritual that a man with many enemies could find more than inconvenient. But unfortunately, Carl Broker has made many enemies during his thirty-seven years of life, most of them during the last ten.

Broker taught himself to read and factor numbers at age nine, never shying away from a hard day's sweat in his father's cornfield, unlike his younger brother. The latter turned out to be a bookish prig, now locked away in a vine-covered classroom of an upstate New York University.

Carl had bedded dozens of women by the time he reached thirty, some of them wives and daughters of men he had taken into his confidence. He is a quick wit with a keen eye for figuring out the actual state of things. He knows where a man's heart is by his gestures with his hands and how his eyes change shape when he speaks, by the intonation the man uses when his voice fills with emotion. There are signs on the trail to every human heart, easy to read for a man like Carl Broker. The Preacherman says that the signs we don't read in the hearts of others are why we walk blindly into the errors of terror wrapped around human Love and Hatred. He says that where one exists, the other cannot be.

When he was twenty-seven years old, Broker had an epiphany that destiny was a thing to be seized and never granted by providence. So he learned to watch what people do. He ignores what they say. He makes his stand only when forced. Instead, he seeks to think like the people around him, mimic what they say, and know what they feel because he reads their emotions like a map of the constellations inside us all.

Carl Broker has been in love a few times during his life but never felt consumed by emotion enough to alter the course of his ambition until now. He came to Decatur, Illinois, from the Western Coal company late in 1883—a reformed company man. He was an inventor, patenting the conveyer belt that first carried coal and later Decatur ice sheets to the third stories of the filled-up ice houses.

During the warm late summer of 1882, Carl fled state tax debt and charges of lewd and indecent behavior from the cuckolded husband of a young debutante he wooed into intercourse and then left her with a shattered reputation in the middle of a scandal. That was a fateful exit for Carl Broker, a fateful press of luck that would be difficult to replicate.

He drifted to the coal mines of Eastern Ohio that Winter and then left them after losing his thumb in a blasting accident in the early Spring of '83. A friendly telegram from the mine owner to the owner of the Ice Company in Decatur started the bidding process that brought him to Central Illinois as a Foreman for the Ice Harvest. Since then, Carl Broker has gained and maintained a reputation for acting in the owner's best interest and his men, a valuable reputation to possess in these salad days of manmade empires of American wealth. 

Carl Broker blew into Decatur in September of 1883 like a trumpet blast. He came into town a man at the mercy of his passions, with no convictions carved in granite, a growling cat on the move to mark its next victim to hunt in the night. Sex was a thing to be seized for him then. Now, he thinks that sex is something to be won together every day, like the games his men pursue on the ice during their breaks. The purpose of the sacred act is to continue for as long as it will last. The Preacher would recognize this revelation as the merciful light of God pouring from the holy heart into a world of darkness and pain.

Carl Broker met Sophronia Jaros at a library function. She caused him to straighten his posture when he spoke to her. He started reading the Greek classics because it's what Sophronia constantly talked about, attempting to impress her instead of seducing her. Love was no longer something abstract for him the first time she touched his hand and let it linger a moment longer than politeness allowed.

Broker is a man in love walking in the frozen moonlight in the early morning Winter, planting flags for today's cut. He stops after sticking each one in the ground and pulls a glass engagement ring out of his pocket to admire how it reflects in the Moon.

Broker will slip this ring onto the finger of the most beautiful girl in his world, Sophronia Jaros. He will speak to her father today about her hand in marriage. Broker has been planning this for months.

And here it is, their secret spot, where her hair first fell from its pinning, floating down to cover his thumbless hand on her shoulder. The moonlight painted the wide crimson birthmark on her cheek like a target for his lips, and his lips found new places to bless her body. She opened up for him like a budding flower in the sun of Spring. He opened up for her in drips and pools like melting ice in the sun of Spring. They became one together that night, right here on this ground, far enough away from the city of Decatur and their other commitments. Marriage would be a sacrament for what happened here that day. He stares down at the ring in his hand, now falling to the ice, now soaking up his blood.

Carl Broker's decapitated head falls from his body. He is pulled down with greater gravity than he's ever known, drowning in a whirlwind pyramid that dissolves space and time, spiraling out into absolute black.

Sven Jaros stands over the beheaded body of his foreman, holding the knife shovel in both hands, blood dripping onto the ice from its blade. He walks around the corpse to pick up Carl Broker's head and drags his body to the water's edge. Heavy snow is falling now, and Sven must work fast. He hasn't slept well in so long.

Looking for a place to dump the body into the river, Sven sees one of yesterday's bank flags in the moonlight. He imagines Carl Broker placing that flag into the mud with his dirty hands. Those same hands were tight around his daughter's throat, behind the Mud Hen stall, between the empty beer barrels, in the waning hours of last Fall's Macon County Fair. Broker's thumbless hand pulled and hoisted the petticoat under Sophronia's dress, his stubbled face pushed into the hemline of her neck. Sven Jaros saw all of these things, and he remembers a waxy, stretched grimace frozen on her face like a smile of terror. What bothered him most was that the look on her face could have passed for pleasure instead of torture, which is undoubtedly what it was. Carl Broker assaulted his daughter, and he had to die.

The last memory Carl Broker moves through is Sophronia's looping curls pouring off her shoulders in the moonlight. Here is where they built a secret that they hoped would become a life together. Here is where that dream dies for them both.

Sven Jaros hid in the brush for two hours with the thick rope he is now using to wrap Carl Broker's head to his gut in a gruesome girdle. Sven waited for Broker to arrive and walk the river while his stomach made hungry noise that echoed on the ice. His stomach is rumbling now while he drags the headless body of his foreman across the frozen Sangamon. 

Neither Carl nor Sophronia saw Sven seeing them or suspected that he knew about what they were getting up to down by the river last Fall. The stilled pond of his silence and inaction stings Sven despite the satisfaction of taking possession of this corpse he now holds in his hands.

He pushes Carl Broker's body into the Sangamon water channel, fed by frozen freshwater from the Bloomington Moraine. He uses an ice pole to steer Broker's corpse a mile and a half upstream where the channel ends, but the river still flows underneath a foot of solid ice.

He pushes Broker's body under the ice sheet, where it carries away into the frozen roll of the river. Broker may be found later downstream, half-eaten by some slithering thing, one more corpse rising from the belly of the Sangamon.

Jaros returns to scrape the blood from the ice, covering it with a thin layer of hand scattered wet snow. It will be a brutal day for cutting because the wind is picking up.

The Sangamon rushes under him for the first time in months. The ice will break soon. The weight in his heart has lifted a bit, and the blood-filled Sangamon River inside him slows to a trickle. He will now prepare for a great forgetting and a long day of good labor. Surveying this scene of murder for the last time, Sven thinks about Carl Broker's body turning white from blue, now pushed under and rushing up the Sangamon River, bleeding out the neck into black.

He looks up to the moonlight and then scans the riverbank at the spot of his justice, looking for the knife shovel. Finally, something catches his eye, a sparkle on the white. He walks over, bends down, and brushes his fingertips across the ice to pick the object up and sees that it is a beautiful ring. He dusts the snow off it and holds it up to the sinking purple moonlight, arrested in the beauty of such an odd thing to find here on the banks of the Sangamon River at this time of day.