tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16669650225025892382024-03-05T20:18:28.181-05:00Lipgloss OpprobriumMemes. Fictions. Aposiopeses. Let's rock.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger102125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-6103286922938194802008-09-14T23:40:00.003-04:002008-09-14T23:45:50.909-04:00THE body double's alibi"And then I feel the audience's anticipation and nervousness when I get in the car real late at night, and they're all holding their breath, waiting to see if those two gloved hands come up from the back seat and strangle me, or slit my throat so I squirt blood all over the windshield. And if it doesn't happen? That's okay, too, 'cause it just means it was a foreshadowing shot, and it helps build up the tension and anxiety for a scene coming later in the movie, right? When the hands really <em>do</em> appear. 'Cause every scene in a good movie is there for a reason, right? And, you know, I want my life to be a good movie, like a real Oscar-winner, right?"<br /><br />"Wow, Fitz," Matt nodding enthusiastically, suddenly looking around for a lit joint that wasn't even there – now where did that roach <em>go?</em> "I always knew you were smart, man, but...."<br /><br />Fitz picked up his Schlitz, leaned way back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, put one hand behind his head, looked out the window at the rain, at all the leaves changing colors, and was just getting to feeling good and comfy when the chair broke to bits under him, sending him crashing ass-first to the floor.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-47484918684917290672008-08-09T15:51:00.003-04:002008-08-09T15:54:29.128-04:00MR. piggy goes to marketHe picks her up in front of the Westwood unbelievably promptly. There’s something disconcerting in this. When he’s pulled out onto Wilshire she says, “This is the softest, softest leather I’ve ever sat on in my life. What is this insane -- fucking -- batmobile we’re in?”<br /><br />"It’s a Bentley, sweetie.”<br /><br />She blinks twice. Looks around herself. “It’s a Bentley, sweetie,” she says.<br /><br />“And that’s sheepskin, not leather.”<br /><br />“Sheepskin, not leather,” she says, stroking it more tentatively now. “This is the part, of course, where I express righteous leftist indignation at the very existence of anything as ludicrous as a quarter-million-dollar automobile.”<br /><br />“So go ahead.”<br /><br />“With teachers buying toilet paper for bathrooms in Detroit public schools.”<br /><br />“So go ahead.”<br /><br />“I will, I will. It’s just this seat is so, so soft.”Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-6745004556381549472008-08-01T14:13:00.006-04:002008-08-05T01:25:27.383-04:00RIP me a new oneWhere is the child I never conceived? Does he or she appreciate the oblivion?<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5229614826608498866" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiylM2-rY8o2cOlqMuddJ0QGXq_VUkpMbewcT6E8T9MWRQ9DTbWOTTB_imNcWda2PSutFXJ9_FIdMWARNv0ai2MuYoAqhVuZzbZVeNJMu0_OtPKR41XobAW0RgJsA00fWPxl7eRWsSobVI/s400/IMG_0547.JPG" border="0" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-87058491073869132032008-07-23T13:47:00.004-04:002008-09-14T23:47:32.101-04:00DAGWOOD bumstead rots in hellTara has a pregnancy test in her linen closet. A gag gift from the last woman she slept with, a Packer U media professor who left the school to become Bebe Neuwirth’s personal assistant in Manhattan. She stands in the bathroom doorway, watching Angela unpack the kit.<br /><br />I can’t look, the latter says several minutes later, sitting on the toilet, left hand covering her eyes, right one holding out the stick she’s just peed on. Tell me.<br /><br />Tara steps forward. Looks. Pauses.<br /><br />Oh sweetie, she says. It’s an old test. It’s probably no good anymore.<br /><br />Angela, mouth agape, looks now herself. Then catches a glimpse of her horrified expression in the compact mirror on the sink beside her. I’m never five days late, she says. Ever.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-29421304515164021232008-07-18T21:17:00.001-04:002008-07-18T21:22:39.368-04:00LIKE a bomb you can eatWell bully for them. The man who says this chortles. I mean, what good is what they’ve got if it’s hidden?<br /><br />That’s why they’re in groups, Rob.<br /><br />No way. Every network is visible on some level. <br /><br />Hey, that’s nice. We’ll put it on our tombstones.<br /><br />It’s not a network. They’re insular. They’re forming clusters of three, four, five. That small. And probably the clusters have no idea others even exist. Although of course they can’t be totally insular. Each individual has to keep ties to the straight world, if only to keep the group invisible. So they’re in community colleges. They’re in minimum-wage jobs.<br /><br />Why those class affiliations?<br /><br />Think about it.<br /><br />A pause.<br /><br />Are they in church?<br /><br />Someone laughs.<br /><br />If they’re smart. Camouflage is of the essence.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-55575360889534793932008-07-16T13:02:00.001-04:002008-07-16T13:03:35.468-04:00WHAT it takes to be champConfront this: you are God, and you are dreaming.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-18945820841029460562008-07-10T15:09:00.003-04:002008-07-16T13:04:33.968-04:00YOUR advertisement actually made me vomitWhat’s more, I saw that this death, unlike the death of bronze coffins and waxy lilies I’d first encountered at five, spoiled utterly, once grasped, whatever life preceded it, just like knowing the alarm clock will buzz in 47 minutes spoils utterly the last hour of sleep. Every one of the fifty or so years I had left would now, I knew, be that last hour. Every one of those fifty or so years was now <em>a priori</em> pointless, was as good as lived and deleted. Because the next fifty years would go by at least as fast as the last thirty. Because the screaming panic that would be my last experience of the world (there was no way I was lucky enough to die in my sleep) was on me already.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-60673811024654872142008-07-08T16:36:00.002-04:002008-07-10T15:06:28.239-04:00PARAGNOSTIC capitulator<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5tsBMbYqwmKvNtJ9t2e6xZhcrTaI5y_qTT-ASqBDDsQ1Y4p_B46an86eyiLvtE6OT49l30YDj9h3LjQ1HkmOy2q0UbCnLVfN4Wj9xE0BKmWWZXWJIJE9l1VDM8pEM8J0ZT8qt8uhfMwM/s1600-h/palms+1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5220746165161756722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5tsBMbYqwmKvNtJ9t2e6xZhcrTaI5y_qTT-ASqBDDsQ1Y4p_B46an86eyiLvtE6OT49l30YDj9h3LjQ1HkmOy2q0UbCnLVfN4Wj9xE0BKmWWZXWJIJE9l1VDM8pEM8J0ZT8qt8uhfMwM/s400/palms+1.jpg" border="0" /></a> "There's simply nothing left to conspire against."<br /><div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-68055044988167623082008-07-02T21:39:00.009-04:002008-07-02T22:38:19.541-04:00LAZARUS sure can play guitarI'm the guy in the threadbare tight white t-shirt at the carnival with the five days' stubble on his face who pulls the levers that make the twist-a-whirl go round and round. You love those orange, yellow and blue lights, of course, and you love the trails of light they leave in the air when they spin. All this taken into consideration you might kind of love me, too, standing there in my t-shirt and jeans, taking the kids' tickets and pulling the levers to make the big whirlygig spin, watching to make sure no one gets decapitated. Cause I'm the guy who makes it all happen: I am the carnival made flesh, and there's nothing in the world better than the carnival. I mean, this is what we live and work for, so we can come to the carnival, right? You let me know when I get something wrong. Oh you think I'm something pretty special all right, and there's something romantic, you’re sure, about my gypsy carnival life. But let me tell you something, and I'm gonna give it to you straight and true: when I go back to my trailer after the carnival closes up, after all the kids have gone home crying on daddy's or big sister's shoulder, and I eat tuna out of the can with a plastic thing that's half spoon and half fork -- well now, there's nothing so romantic about me now, is there? And I'm willing to bet you don't think I'm so romantic. And I'm willing to bet you ain't in such a big rush to swap places with me after all now, are you?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-6817831510270218912008-06-28T12:39:00.008-04:002008-06-29T23:50:23.541-04:00NEVER get too proud, son, to share water with a plant<strong>21.</strong> Shopping in a “discount” clothes warehouse across the street from the World Trade Center with two Brazilian twins calling themselves Faster and Harder, finding, on the disheveled racks, traffic cone-orange Italian T-shirts reduced from $199.95 to $129.95, razor-frayed French jeans slashed from $499.99 to $279.99, Turkish army sweaters discounted from $1999.95 to $1299.95. Realizing, though I’d grown up in Jay Gatsby’s back yard, that I’d entered some new stratum, that money in this New York was incidental and arbitrary, that exchange value was here usurped by some mysterious symbolic value whose terms could be known only to a seraphic few whose bodily functions only superficially resemble yours and mine.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-52887493201471911982008-06-20T22:30:00.009-04:002008-07-18T21:17:19.168-04:00PARTIAL fish wins!"Look. What you have to get your head around is maybe there are some questions that just don't have<em> </em>answers. By which I don't mean they don't have answers yet<em>. </em>I mean they'll never<em> </em>have answers. 'Cause the answers aren't out there anywhere to be had. Not even when you die. You beat your brains out asking is there a god, is the universe real or computer simulated, if a bear shits in the woods and no one steps in it does it stink. Look. There are<em> </em>no answers to these questions. It's just the language you frame them in tricks you into thinking there should be. Find something else to do with your time."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-31212509352408316972008-06-14T14:28:00.008-04:002008-08-01T14:24:04.330-04:00WHERE'S this going, anyway?helped C_____ out of her jacket. He found two plastic champagne glasses in the cabinet above the sink -- the same ones he and Laura had used two New Year's Eves ago. He peeled away the foil on the bottle and twisted the cork. When it exploded like a gunshot, C_____ bolted head‑first into the door beside her, then fled to the corner by the closet. She shrank into a crouch, holding her nose.<br /><br />"Oh, shit," Will said. "I should've warned you." He went to her and took her wrist and pulled her hand away from her face. She ducked his hand at first, then relaxed and let him touch her. Her nose didn't seem hurt. He touched her cheek.<br /><br />She followed him into the living room. He filled one of the tall plastic glasses and she swallowed the champagne down in a few gulps. Her eyebrows raised and her lips pursed. He smiled and drained his own glass. He said, "I thought you'd like that grape juice." He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and said, "Wanna watch some tube?"<br /><br />The TV didn't interest her anymore. She sat on the floor with her back to it, her empty glass on its side by her knee, drawing with Will's Parker on the sheets of paper he'd given her. She drew only one thing: circles. Unnervingly perfect circles. Her hand never moved faster than a clock's second hand. He sat watching, bleary eyed, following the motion of the pen. The news was on TV. A blonde woman was doing the weather. Clear and cold tomorrow.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-24734179379214379942008-06-05T19:03:00.010-04:002008-06-28T13:00:43.617-04:00YOU will make it; i will love itAt the appointed time, I left. Within two hours I was checking into a Marriott in a small city in Pennsylvania. I chose this city because there was no reason on earth I should be there. I chose it too for what its name elicited in me: nothing. The thing I was approaching was not to be approached directly. If I got too close too fast it would scamper. What’s more, my powers were such by now I could, I believed, if I positioned myself at the thing’s periphery, make it approach me. What’s more, such things as what I was approaching are where they aren’t, not where they are. What’s more, I had only the vaguest notion what it was I was approaching. The attractive 45 year-old woman behind the check-in counter at the Marriott was needlessly rude. This was reassuring. This was one of several reactions this new version of me, one year old, regularly provoked from strangers. Another was fawning adoration. Another was determined indifference. It was this last reaction I prized above all others. I asked the woman at the counter for a bellhop to carry my single suitcase to my room. She glared hatefully at me, nostrils flaring prettily. Within several minutes a buck-toothed but otherwise attractive teenage girl in a red Nehru jacket arrived to wheel my single suitcase to the 14th floor. She demonstrated my favorite of the aforementioned reactions. When she got to my room, I told her at the door I wanted a kiss on the cheek. This, after two initial refusals and as many indignant snorts, was finally given. I gave her a twenty. Word of me, I knew, would spread. This was easy. This was not the difficult part.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-65270614236072322662008-05-27T15:14:00.006-04:002008-06-28T13:04:04.468-04:00OUR selfSilence. Then:<br /><br />Nuh-uh. That’s not what I’m thinking. Listen. Just a few of them get together. A handful. The usual grist for the usual mill. Charismatic. Young. Energetic. Intelligent, as far as it goes. Freakishly attractive. Of course. But the thing is, they hide it.<br /><br />They hide what?<br /><br />All of that. All of it.<br /><br />A pause. Which lengthens. Someone sighs.<br /><br />All right. They hide it. But there’s always been X percent of the population that fits that description, Carol. I’ll go one in ten thousand. Maybe fifteen. Baggy clothes, shit haircuts. They eschew cosmetics, keep their mouths shut. Maybe some nun scared them shitless when they were nine. Maybe they’re --<br /><br />No, I don’t mean they quash it. I mean they <em>hide</em> it.<br /><br />From who?<br /><br />From everyone. From us. From everyone but each other.<br /><br />Well why? No, don’t tell me. Anarchists again. They want to wear bandanas over their faces, burn SUVs. Throw trash cans through the movie screens that would otherwise, what. Steal their souls.<br /><br />Those are just the religious again, Mike. We’ve been through that. These aren’t anarchists. They’re thieves.<br /><br />Another pause. The second hand sweeps a considerable ways around the face of the Swiss clock over the door.<br /><br />They’re stealing from us. From the system we created. That’s essentially what’s happening here. If it’s happening.<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5205139695718204978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokgCHicpIH8hT2tQ7M5fPteinZVtsP3SSOl_cLTdRpW2KrhlfsQH29LxvTb76WnSce4l8RZLUz9TEtUwPe4sJC9HUxmRNaLAYPkCFrtBXcaQLJzgvagC5FduXvoOq-bfI0xT7Jz1hwzw/s400/ghost.JPG" border="0" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-23547049628264753582008-05-22T23:07:00.013-04:002008-06-28T13:05:29.614-04:00IF you need me, just holler into the sewerThe next evening, Rob and Angela meet at the local brew pub for dinner. Neither wants to cook, and Angela can’t be in her own restaurant a minute longer. If she’d known -- <em>really</em> known -- what she was in for with this restaurant shit --<br /><br />They sit in a booth near the bar, the Friday-night crowd coalescing around them. Rob scans faces, battling the uneasy feeling he’s being watched. Half an hour ago he found a business envelope under the Land Rover’s windshield wiper, the inscrutable sentence SOMEBODIE’S GOT SOME EXPLAINING TO DO magic-markered on it in big, childish letters. In the envelope, judging by what he could see through the paper, a stack of photos. He didn’t open it: his cohort, Dave Duvall, whose E-Type was in the garage for the second time this month, was a few steps behind him, needing a ride. Then, as he was dropping Dave off at the brand-new condo building catty-corner to the brew pub, Angela was pulling up in the Jetta right behind him. So the envelope had stayed under the Rover's seat.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-9687737154206256602008-05-16T11:34:00.005-04:002008-05-16T12:02:41.548-04:00MIMETIC justiceOrphaned comets. Preheat condoms. Demon arts epoch. Manhood scepter. Torpedo a mensch. Damn crepe so hot. Resonated chomp. Chomp Senator Ed. Democrat phones. Poached monster. Anchored tempos. Modest chaperon. Smoothed prance. Cad smother peon. Anecdotes morph. Compared honest. Demon heats crop. Postmodern ache. Toned ham corpse. Corpse doth name. Creamed photons. Demon corpse hat. Poached mentors. Corpse had me not. Damn speech root. Demon heat corps. Specter manhood. Methadone crops. Mooched parents. Cohered tampons. Death once romps. Porn death comes. Oh demon spectra. Demon roach pets. Tampons echo red.<br />Semen odor patch. Hotrod spacemen. Demon tears chop. The nomad corpse.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-42772221853400214002008-05-12T16:59:00.017-04:002008-05-27T15:12:34.901-04:00THEY want to give you the hornIt was the most depressing thing she'd ever seen: a sagging gray horse standing in a fenced-in field, alone, kicking, at regular intervals, with the weariest of gestures, the empty steel drum to its aft, for no other reason, clearly, plainly, obviously, than that the rusty-gong sound so produced helped fill the sun-baked hours here on Earth. It was an awful thing for a city girl to realize, that even a beast could suffer the hot whips of bone-aching boredom, and it made the universe seem an even crueler place.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-10764957838085233612008-05-08T18:08:00.010-04:002008-05-16T11:47:16.392-04:00ALL is mindOr this one: I'm driving through the mountains of Southwest _______ on my way home from college in the Spring of 19__. In the passenger seat beside me is a pixie of a girl who speaks with a German accent, has dyed jet-black hair, and who has just, in a nut-achingly lurid gesture, taken down one side of her black tank-top to rub lotion into a brand-new tattoo on her left shoulder blade. I can't tell you how this chick impresses me, being, seemingly, all things urban, all things worldly, talking, as she incessantly does, about nightclubs in cities I'll never see, records by bands I'll never hear. The Honda veers wildly as I watch those fingers of hers rub white lotion into that blue crescent moon.<br /><br />I ask her if she has others of those -- those --<br /><br />She says yes.<br /><br />I ask what of.<br /><br />She says a rose.<br /><br />I ask where.<br /><br />She smiles, looks at me, and says -- you have to hear it with the German accent -- "Ze rose is on my ass."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-64308063899288713112008-05-05T17:13:00.011-04:002008-05-12T18:06:16.575-04:00THE hole the jackrabbit lives inThe afternoon was spent in quiet contemplation of shambling, malnourished spiders high up in corners, of cigarette burns in the linoleum kitchen floor. Jay struck yoga poses on the threadbare living-room rug while the sun sank, the blinking yellow light over the intersection down the street winking hypnotically through the window. At eight o'clock, when the footsteps came up the decrepit wooden stairs outside, when the knock came on the aluminum kitchen door, he was there in his metal folding chair in the kitchen, loafered feet on the collapsible card table, sweaty bottle of Bud Light in his hand. He called: "Get in here."<br /><br />In walked beauty through the squealing screen door, faux leather bag on her shoulder. She stood there, hand on hip, coatless, grease stains on her uniform. "About time," ventured Jay.<br /><br />"Howdy, baby," the waitress replied vacantly, eyes scanning the apartment as if she'd been expecting somebody else.<br /><br />"I'd sure like to know your name."<br /><br />"Well," she said, "they call me Terry."<br /><br />Jay nodded thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. "Now what kind of girl," he wondered aloud, "comes after dark to the room of some strange man she doesn't even know, Terry?"<br /><br />Electing, apparently, to answer with a gesture, she withdrew a snub-nosed handgun from her purse. "Did you say something about wanting a gun?"<br /><br />"Well, I guess I did."<br /><br />She cocked the hammer on the thing, pointed it at his head in such a way he figured she knew how to use it. He began to stand up. "No no, don't get up," she said. "No need for friends to play polite." Her other hand was procuring something else from the bag: the fifty-dollar bill, of course, he'd left on her tabletop. This she crumpled like she'd done his address that morning, then chucked it across the kitchen into the corner by the stove.<br /><br />"You get down on your hands and knees," she said, "and crawl and get that money."<br /><br />This Jay did, feeling the grime on the linoleum floor under the heels of his hands. Having fetched it, he sat there on his knees, holding it hopelessly. "Now you eat that fifty," she said, a vaguely insane warble in her voice -- and this he did, too, tearing the bill into bite-size pieces, gagging now and then as they went down.<br /><br />"You got anything else," she said when he'd finished, "you want to say to me?"<br /><br />Jay swallowed repeatedly, struggling to get the last piece down. "I'd say we've talked enough," he said. "Now get those fucking clothes off."<br /><br />She crossed the kitchen, slapped him once stingingly across the side of the head. "You little slut," she said. "I swear to God. Get on that bed in there or I'll kill you."<br /><br />When Jay's tongue was in her navel she said, "I reckon my husband ain't gonna like this."<br /><br />"Fuck him."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-73623763219201380672008-05-01T23:37:00.004-04:002008-06-28T22:07:02.867-04:00MISCEGENATE meWhen he sees her spot the turd on the roof of the Lexus, he smiles. Didn’t even expect to, really. Thought he was putting it there perfunctorily, dutifully, just because something should mark the six-month anniversary of their divorce. But when she finds it and curses a tiny thundercloud into the cold air, he smiles involuntarily and broadly, watching himself in the rearview mirror. It’s a reminder: Don’t ever underestimate the peevish, childish pleasures. The pleasure of pulled hair. The pleasure of Indian burn. The pleasure of smashed toy. It’s so good, in fact, he follows her home, staying well behind her (he doesn’t want that turd on his windshield), seeking some further shabby gratification. Hey: Six months is an accomplishment. And he’s got an hour to kill before he picks up his niece anyway.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-13462539737718572822008-04-29T22:58:00.000-04:002008-04-29T22:59:17.488-04:00WE received your prayerIt's a horrible fantasy. It terrifies me. But I come to sometimes, my attention having slid off the book in my hands, and I know I've been thinking about it. I know I'm moving towards it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-27003763736813652862008-04-27T22:44:00.014-04:002008-06-20T23:02:12.754-04:00MOST of the rest of the deadparking place in Georgetown, and they walked to a crowded bistro on M street, one of his old girlfriend's favorite places. The hostess sat them by the window up front, and immediately C_____ leaned over and pressed her palm to the glass. People standing on the sidewalk outside looked in at her.<br /><br />Figuring she could use some protein after whatever trauma had caused the faded bruises, Will ordered her prime rib. But when the waiter set it, two Molsons for Will later, on the checkered tablecloth in front of her, her expression was instant and violent revulsion. Then she was sobbing, wailing, tears running out of her eyes. The whole place was silent as Will leapt up, telling the dumbstruck waiter they'd take it in a bag.<br /><br />Outside, C____ seemed afraid of the Saturday-night crowd. She looked up at Will in what he thought was a pleading manner. Every few dozen yards she turned and walked blindly into his side or leapt mysteriously, apparently startled. When they reached the corner of Wisconsin and M a man with no shirt was jumping up and down, screaming, "Yeah! Yeah!" Two kids with half‑shaved heads and Harley jackets stared unapologetically at C_____, and she stared back, animal dumb. Will hurried her away, noticing how her hands were swallowed up by the sleeves of the sweater he'd put on her. The bottoms of her jeans dragged on the sidewalk.<br /><br />There wereUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-37024284805037342782008-04-25T13:57:00.003-04:002008-04-25T15:16:04.197-04:00I thought i told you to shut up"I used to be person. Human being. Now, I am American."<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlw3kq_MB6FksFaDdiVt4BUHwm6wKcfxpeigDMqWewEePjLse0TojBxnJCyP68iGEZ6Ivo0XxPmsxULPicBri-YSHADDlNMTXjDMgeotBGMNoR7arnaJmhr_kfIqKOMNsyY1sg7rSxSuE/s1600-h/TV.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5193243876415025650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlw3kq_MB6FksFaDdiVt4BUHwm6wKcfxpeigDMqWewEePjLse0TojBxnJCyP68iGEZ6Ivo0XxPmsxULPicBri-YSHADDlNMTXjDMgeotBGMNoR7arnaJmhr_kfIqKOMNsyY1sg7rSxSuE/s400/TV.jpg" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-74570309464394117892008-04-24T00:09:00.004-04:002008-04-24T23:26:28.788-04:00SLOW train to paraguaycollege town whose name you’d forget even if I told you. Nothing from my first two years there warrants comment. In the third I befriended the newlyweds who’d moved into the apartment under mine in the creaky Victorian house I roomed in. The husband, Perry, fresh out of grad school at Santa Barbara, was the school’s new philosophy professor; the wife, Sarah, was a soon-to-be psychotherapist. A nice couple in the throes of culture shock. Not only was there no good Thai food in town, but hubby and wife were woefully unaccustomed to brain-baking boredom. Geographic or romantic.<br /><br />We spent evenings in our building’s lush back yard, drinking screwdrivers, grilling burgers and corn ears, rehashing this or that movie, book, or sitcom from childhood. I surprised myself, going on and on about Smurfs, Willy Wonka, Doogie Hauser. I hadn’t really spoken to anyone in two years. Occasionally husband and wife would give me heavy-lidded looks, but I couldn’t tell if it was sexual interest or sleepiness.<br /><br />If you’re standing on an infinite plane, do you see a horizon? Or does the ground just seem to fold upward and enclose you?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1666965022502589238.post-37172518515237732162008-04-19T16:14:00.006-04:002008-05-12T18:11:27.864-04:00ENOUGH to kill a rhinoJackie Newman has Mr. Valentino right where she wants him: in the girls’ room. Maybe she’s done it to see if she could get a full-grown man to do something so stupid. (It was easy.) Or maybe she’s done it to test her friend Holly’s claim that it’s way more exciting doing it somewhere you might get caught. And she <em>is</em> pretty worked up, truth be told, even though Mr. V is kind of old, even though she’s got a larger agenda tonight, even though the chances of their getting caught are pretty much zero: The only thing going on in the building at this hour is cheerleading practice, which she got out of early, telling Coach Taylor she had cramps from hell. And that’s a quarter-mile of dark corridor away.<br /><br />Her ass -- no longer a butt, but an ass -- is on a sink; Mr. V. is between her knees, rooting into her neck, making these funny grunting sounds that almost crack her up. But then she sees her face in the mirror on the opposite wall, sees the scene playing out as in an mpeg clip on some porn site, and it suddenly feels serious. She watches her eyelids droop, feels herself smile into his collar, feels his -- his -- thing pressing now against her -- her --<br /><br />Is it true, she whispers hotly against his ear, you’re gonna be hosting that new Bethel sports show every Saturday?<br /><br />When, after a moment, he registers the question, he smiles, sucks her lower lip. Nods.<br /><br />I want to be on it too, she says. Every week. Right there with you.<br /><br />He grins expansively. I can make that happen.<br /><br />Really? Promise?<br /><br />Promise.<br /><br />To reward him, she lets out a little gasp -- a tiny squeak -- when his fingertips brush her inner thigh just inside her sweat-damp gym shorts.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com