The Stream 2h3r58

The Stream

Nathan Cook

Copyright © 2020 by Nathan Cook.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920837 ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-7960-7933-3 Softcover 978-1-7960-7932-6 eBook 978-1-7960-7931-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 12/18/2019

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CONTENTS

PART I A Man Apart

Prologue Episode I Compulsion Episode II The Exorcist Episode III When the Garden Burned Episode IV Scenes from Customer Service Episode V French Cinema Episode VI The Ink of Cthulhu Episode VII Tomorrow’s Hellfire Episode VIII Binkie Episode IX Kemba Episode X The Great Cincinnati Hunger Strike Episode XI Wemish Episode XII Deus Ex Machina Episode XIII Redemption

PART II The Next Great American Novel

Preface Prologue Chapter I I’ve Got All My Sisters with Me Chapter II The Hookah Shop Chapter III Mr. Peterson’s Opus Chapter IV Apocalypse Soon Chapter V The Great Chicago Migration Chapter VI The Stevie Ray Vaughn Promenade Chapter VII 60 Minutes Interview Chapter VIII Junkietown Chapter IX Iman Kabir Comes to the Stream Chapter X The Holy Tea Time Chapter XI The Tennis Court Chapter XII Venison & Jägermeister Chapter XIII Camels to Mecca Chapter XIV Jahannam Chapter XV Flash Flood Chapter XVI A Month in the Sahara

Chapter XVII Mr. Ewing Goes to Washington Chapter XVIII The Watermelon Patch Chapter XIX Building the Fleet Chapter XX The Klingons are Coming Chapter XXI Once More Unto the Breach Chapter XXII The Final Executive Decision Chapter XXIII The Final Countdown Chapter XXIV Triple E Chapter XXV A New Dawn

PART III Fame

Chapter I Vinyl is the Best Medium Chapter II The Lakers Game Chapter III The Break-in Chapter IV Hutter Revisited Chapter V The King’s Court Chapter VI Parallel Universes Chapter VII Eisenhower/Kennedy ‘60 Chapter VIII Yankees Stadium

Chapter IX There’s Only One Way This Could End Chapter X The Irish Wedding Chapter XI Kemba Returns Chapter XII A Theatre in the New World Chapter XIII Nobody Loves an Albatross Chapter XIV A Game of Chess Chapter XV A Pink Urn Chapter XVI Christmas in San Antonio Chapter XVII Tireless Struggle Chapter XVIII Snowed in Chapter XIX The Art of Failure Chapter XX The Seventh Seal Chapter XXI Eclipse Chapter XXII Goodbye

To La

uren

A poem a day keeps the doctor away Keeps you from being led astray Basic meter and rhyme open the heart wide Byron and Shelley traversing in the wood Coming upon The Modern Prometheus Frankenstein

O’ captain my captain we lead lives of quiet desperation I wish I could drop all and go to the wood Take up my trumpet and axe Work like a soul inspired until the day is one

The diary of a young man deep in the project Comes upon a block of the vein and cannot go far I have to write each day, or I would certainly die I hate myself so much if I cannot get my anguish on the page

Life is so hard, but what can we do But reflect on the sadness of the day, the month, and the year Write inspired about the wind and the willow The red badge of courage, The leaves of grass

And the Pandora’s box myth of hope

Why I bother anymore I am not sure Life is so back breaking I don’t know anymore This is all I have and if I did not type of the captain my captain I would surely be nevermore

Part I A Man Apart

Prologue

The Wedding Bomber

April 20th, 1972:

I talk fast and loose so stay with me if you can. I need to vent my problems in a healthier way everyone says, so I’ll start by writing everything down. That’s what you get for dealing with a prod like me, I’m in the avant garde in the art of conversation. I the night sky at midnight more than anything. It’s raining all the fucking time. It was coolish but not cold. You’d think with light pollution on the locale in Belfast I couldn’t see it, but there it was. Jupiter, the Roman god of war, shining like a green haven in the glowing orange heavens. And I the Jesus freaks, out in the streets, as sir Elton would say, yes? Grade A mystic shite chopped down to a three-page pamphlet. I’m going to hell, repent and all that jazz; King takes bishop swiftly. The only thing I could think of was at that moment I would never want a repeat of 1972 AD. My mumma was really sick when I was born, that explains a bit. Step on a crack break your mother’s back that’s my theory. I have brothers and sisters who are not special, they follow punctuation, make their beds, brush their teeth. Hell of a thing ain’t it? Professional swimmer I am. When do I get to meet this special lady my mom always pried. Can’t mom, got to prep for the Olympics. But there was a day, a day I’ll fondly for the rest of my life. Gold in the 200meter butterfly and I met Tess. I saw her from far away, I was on the podium as the speakers blared The Soldiers Song. I was prepared to blast my way through the crowd, out out out of the way give the man some privacy, but I stood there as the flags came down. Israeli team killed the day before, sad isn’t it? One day we’re bound for glory the next we’re shot down like dogs. I’m a spider, at this moment beginning the spinning of a web of a thousand lies. Do I think I could

survive five minutes without her I thought at that very moment? She was on the side of the angels. I knew right then that I was going to marry her, love at first sight and all that drivel. She was dashingly beautiful, petite, and most importantly, obscenely rich. Doing a little sleuthing from there on the victor’s podium I could see by her dress she was swimming in wealth. I had seen her in the tabloids before. It didn’t take me long to match that Tess there was from the Derbyfield monarchy, high positions in British parliament. I knew right then I would be shedding my medal and strip mining it for a crown. Anyway…what was I thinking? oh yes. The wedding. Well, let’s go back to the night before. She was wearing a rice green bridesmaid dress. The night before I was a naughty, naughty boy. Strip club? No, I was at a pool. When you win the bronze in the Munich Olympics you can very easily get a key. I believe everyone’s an artist in one way or another, that’s what the prod in me thinks. Life is shit but you have art to cauterize the wound. There’s something in culture you enjoy, I bring that, that’s how I’m a national patriot. That’s the thing about being a swimmer, baptized of your sins every breaststroke. Success only comes with hard work, many hours, many days, many weeks, many years. I’ve crossed oceans! Anyway, Kiss kiss, peck peck, I porked her brains out. Sex is best when done underwater. No one out in the big bad world knew about it. Flash forward from the Olympics and my soon to be Mrs. Tess O’Brien is she’s dying of cancer. Why would I do that to her, well, it’s not like a fairy tale down under. So many years in love, then the milk turned sour, the blasted butter won’t come, the flies are buzzing and the coyotes are howling. This wedding between Tessie and I is a gesture, solemn and obligatory. I am a comforter and advisor on the final walk of life. Prod I am, I am a chaplain istering last rites. We didn’t meet by chance. Two wounded people both hurt and confused. It doesn’t hurt that she’s a Derbyfield of the Derbyfield dynasty. I usually hate old families but this time I can make an exception. A real golem I am. A titan of swimming, but a rattlesnake in the heart of the Sahara out in society. Right right, anyway night before our wedding I’m fucking the bridesmaid, just really going to town, her trembling in my arms, our souls leave our bodies, and looking straight up at a bright star that falls into the sky. I’m distracted but I pull out just in time and there’s white on the inside of her dress now you see. It’s so

fucking jarring she’s screaming, and I end up wailing too in this horrific moment, its phantasmagoria! Can’t get it out with the best Clorox in the world, no replacements. Tough to hide too. I get her flowers from the shop and she sods off, leave the wreck til’ tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes. Watch your step on the walk of shame. The truth is I do love Tess. Her parents of course despise my existence, the typical nuclear family they are. Even though I’m an Olympic swimmer I’m also a degenerate. They see me with five vodka martinis at dinner, my sleeves of tats, the blood streaming from my mouth from the rarest of prime rib. But most importantly I’m just another generation of poor prod trash. That’s what they hate the most: The Montagues called for an attack on Oliver Twist, wish wash pish posh. I get home, I start to tell her I have something to confess, then I take out a necklace. My god how beautiful you are or so maybe darling don’t you know I love you so much there’s nothing in this whole wide world I wouldn’t do for you darling. Something like that, it will all be over in a few weeks anyway, my literal angel. She thought I was out for a night at the opera, the theatrical event of the season, a bloody jolly royal revue. And yeah Alexander wept for he had no more worlds to conquer. I have conquered Tess, hobgoblin from the ninth circle of hell I am, but I care not. She thinks I’m a decent man, a quiet man, an understanding man. She thinks this house will survive, no matter how it will, but I don’t have enough to fill a house that big. Paris, Milan, Tokyo, we’d see the world. I could fly from the cheating, it will all be fixed. That night we watched a period piece, Pride and Prejudice, of which I had certainly both in excess. Can you hear the beating of the drums? Revolution comes tomorrow. The blood is on my hands. So, I started the morning of the wedding with a fifth of Jack. A literal fire in the belly. Whoever at the corporate hierarchy said Jameson goes down smooth has clearly never met Aiden O’Brien. My alcoholism is hereditary, with professional swimmers like us we need ten thousand calories a day, a thousand of mine comes from Dr. Jack. Assassinating my liver, it is. Any other man would be dead and gone, but it was just a little pick me up at ten AM. I can handle the offspeed pitch better than any other hitter, and this was a hanging curveball. The wedding was at two, let the boy finish. A little blow for the nose and off we go. Houses of the holy it’ll be all hunky dory after the gold rush. At the Coliseum, that stain was like a scarlet A on the rice green. Only a veteran

twelve years in the majors could see it blended in. It looked like a kidney shape, but it was really the telltale heart. Anyway, there’s my Tess, the veil hiding her bald head smelling of peach blossoms and lavender. I peer over the left, see my papa, pride beaming from his eyes like Superman’s lasers. I when my mother got killed from the same stomach devouring tumor as Tess is getting kicked by. I stare at Tess, I can’t stop looking over her shoulder, that bloody cunt is the bridesmaid. Cheater cheater pumpkin eater was going off in my 11-yearold mind. I’m a control freak by nature, trying to fit the square peg in a round hole. And here the hole was a perfect circumference. Vows go normally, I conveniently leave out thine shalt be faithful. The breeze isn’t busy it doesn’t miss a tree. You may kiss the bride, waiting to exhale. Her teeth were chattering but it wasn’t cold. Must be the hair, the head keeps in all the warmth, but poof there it goes. All the damned candles weren’t helping, blasted Fenians and their idolatry. The Imperial Hotel the reception is at; Its Halloween night and I’m the last of the Mohicans. Champagne is flowing, toasts being toasted. Me and my million-dollar baby. Etta James’ At Last and all that sap. It would be the last picture show for her…at last. We have no secrets, time to eat that corn beef hash of a cake. Go home, fill that void. Make the court of Caligula raise their eyebrows. of endearment really, she’s quite fragile. Oh well, the revolution has come, toot the horn. And then kablam! Typical arrogance to think your nice humble wholesome wedding would not be bombed by the one and only Ulster Volunteer Force. Ears rumbling and rattling, I won’t need plugs for a dip anymore will I, eh? I’m spread eagle I am; I see a little tele set on in the corner. First thought, I must be in shock, but there’s American B-ball, Lakers and Bucks on the tele. I’d love to swim in a lake, but in Los Angeles? They’re all polluted, smoggy and green! I’d like to swim in Minnesota, Minne: Greek for lakes, of which there were thirteen. And speaking of green, I tried to get up, shaky as all hell, and there it is: the rice green bridesmaid gown with the love stain right in me eyes. Dead as all hell shrapnel in her neck, blood everywhere, but there was the milk. You can’t bend the fabric of space and time, and apparently not the fabric of a dress I wanted to crush it right then, but then Tess, who had seemingly miraculously survived based on her proximity to the blast, turned her head, past the big O Oscar Robertson on the tube. My 700,000-dollar watch rang 9, I that moment as her screech, the first in human history to break the sound barrier, blasting what was left of my ears. All coming together now, judging by her face

the car bomb was a real jawbreaker. Our marriage is in shambles before we even started to tango. I played her like a zither now the strings had snapped. But it wasn’t half as bad as I feared it would be. What the bloody fuck am I saying? You’ve got to deal with reality. It was like watching from the balcony. So, what am I to do, move to Senegal, the outskirts of a west African town like a dirty thief? There’s no water there, beware of the water. Leave her alone, just my papa to chaperone her on the road to death. Will he be the bloke to say thou art my sheppard I shall not want, yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death do not fear evil? A moth to the flame. Marriage changes people they say, but would it have changed me? Would we be the couple in a restaurant that everybody feels sorry for or is jealous of? Be the end of an era of filth? What if there was no stomach cancer? We’d grow old, I’d get in a bout with the colon myself. We’d have a couple kiddos and a bupkis, maybe a cat. Would we be the old couple in a restaurant everyone feels sorry for. A mess of anxiety over the car payment, a phobia of the things to come. Leave it to beaver, but me and my boozing? It would never last, why did I want to get married anyway? Marriage is nothing but a honeymoon then fight fight fight fight death. You can’t have a heart attack if you don’t have a heart. But if I said goodbye I’d waste away. It’s a two-way street though I worship Jack as a deity. Poems that don’t rhyme, Mudslingers on the motor way, I’ll waste away. Then the news broke out. I was taking daddy to lunch; I spoil him something fierce in the cuisine department. My father was a weak-willed son of a bitch, always telling me to act like a man though his idea of manhood began with and ended with the Protestant Reformation. I him always saying if you have an issue just confess it to your invisible deity. I asking for more pate. Arts and culture and all that. The bombing was news, Tess and I, our celebrity marriage ruined by the bloody IRA. Eyes bulging and legs swelling when I saw it, did you hear the disgusting vile things they say about me on the BBC? Those vile swine, it was accurate though, its like Prime Minister Heath himself down at Baker Street had caught me in the act instead of Tess. It felt like Pickett’s charge, all the divisions bearing down on me. Fire coming from all sides. Me just the little drummer boy, beating away, I have no gifts to bring. I didn’t know what to do I felt I was in the dark. I wanted to fall on my sword

and give myself up to almighty god. Instead I ran for the bathroom quick as a terrier, quick sniff of the old brain powder. Do you know what this shit does to kids? Oh well no time to consider, just whiff it in by the palm full. My eyes are scorched, I have to go find me dad. I get back and he has disappeared, where has he gone? Where did you go Mr. Robinson? When I left I was swarmed by the media, mics shoved in my face and all that. Get back you vultures! ‘Snap, snap, oh did you get the shot you shod,’ I heard. Where is Tess I need to get to Tess. Down to Sandy Row I go, hopped up on snow. Something about snow is it makes you think all the kings horses and all the kings men can in fact put me back together again. All I feel like doing is swimming, paddle paddle paddle, but I can’t right now. No time left for you, distant memories on a sinking ship. What will I say to her when I first see her? Lovely little village though. I ring the bell, my pa opens the door. It’s like he loves her more than me, I’ll make him bleed I swear it. I see her sitting at a great granite countertop 50 feet long, renovations throughout the kitchen, white plaster and whiter lights. This was going to be our home, raise a couple kids all the live long day. Fuck me, the corn beef Tess would cook, I can smell it now. And looking out back the pond I could swim in every morning a polar plunge at 5:30 AM, and the woods for taking our beast out for pissing. I’m running out of gas, I’ve been up all night in a coke stupor. “Coffee,” I ask Tess? “Sod off you prick.” “Wine?” “You’re a drunk.” “Look I can explain.” “Don’t bother.” I get up to leave, but there’s something more, something else holding me there. There’s a certain liberty I cannot be denied. I might as well have not been baptized, Prod I am, and I can certainly attest those motherfuckers in the IRA, because goddamn me if I do want more. Is it Tess I want, more Olympic medals, or the god of my Irish ancestors? Maybe it’s just a selffulfilling prophecy, life is but a dream. What’s the frequency?

The god of my ancestors knows my destiny. He knows everything that happens because he exists out of time, that’s what they taught at good ol’ Sunday school. I would not want the power of a god, I wouldn’t want to peep into my future. Tess will be gone, yes, so will my dad and soon I. When so many want you dead, what are you to do but love thine enemies? What’s the point of this psychotic diatribe? A confession? Did you want to follow me on principle? Fuck that, I’m a prod. I don’t deserve your comion. And I didn’t fuckin’ ask for it. I’m a boozer, Im a sinner, I’m a cheater, and I’m a deserter. Just because I got a little clipped by the IRA and didn’t get the country clubs on Sundays doesn’t mean I didn’t get what I deserved. I have a rendezvous with Beelzebub in hell, and I don’t need a pamphlet from a jackrabbit for Jesus to tell me so. This is Belfast, a land of inner visions where the lamb lies down on a dead horse lying in the hot sun. There will be no Indian sunset for me; The red sun will just sink at last. So leave now. Ciao bella. What else do you want from me? This story keeps going and only has one ending. What’s the point of seeing The Troubles play out on my home field? Well, fine if you’re going to be that way let’s keep going. Later that night, I went to, where else, the bar. Started innocuously enough: “O’Brien? Well, you’ve been served.” Divorce papers; another titan has fallen. Very brave fellow that bloke, it’s a good thing I’m a swimmer not a boxer or I would have popped him right then and there, furious as I was. Cut to a year and a half later. Divorce is final, Tess took half. It went to her parents in the will. I couldn’t bear to go to the funeral, her parents watching over me, judging me. From what I heard it was weepy. Everyone loved Tess, I even loved her when she was a living corpse. And I did truly love her, I know you think I’m a mad psycho who can’t feel love. I wish I could say it’s a shame I’m so bloody impulsive I cheated on her on our wedding eve, so sloppy I made a lovestain on her best friend’s dress, so crippled I begged her forgiveness after plowing my nose with cocaine. But that would be giving you what you want, right? That’s just the writer’s block talking, I have nothing to talk about. I’m living in Dakar like I mentioned. Senegal, the middle of nowhere, new start. Luckily it’s near the Atlantic Ocean, I’ve often thought about paddling out and never turning back. But I pick up here because its October 30th, 1974 the Rumble in the Jungle, I’m outside the 20th of May stadium. Zaire 74, with a

little B.B. and Brown. A nice little bit of soul power pre fight. Round one, fight is the most brutal thing I’ve seen since my wedding bombing. Long story short, old man Ali wins the fight and a lightning bolt strikes almost perfectly at that moment of the knockout, onto me in the audience outside. I was rushed, put into a medically induced coma or so I’m told, don’t worry I survive. You wouldn’t worry about little ol’ me now would you? I floated out of my body, thinking I was on my way to heaven. Lucky me I’d be. I thought I’d punched a one-way train ticket to hell after the Tess incident, whoo whoo. There were no pearly gates or clouds or a man in the sky, but I did hear the voice of something though, whatever god is out there I’m not sure Christ or Krishna. You’d think the prod in me thought it was Jesus, but I heard many other voices, almost like one commune all the dead from all time talking at once and filling my head. But god asked me a question as I floated higher and higher, do you want to stay or go? And I looked back, don’t look back they told me in bible study always go for the light in the sky. As I started to fly to the outer reaches of our atmosphere, like Yeager must have felt a decade ago in the sound barrier test flights. And then I saw it again, Jupiter, the Roman god of war. This was my god, fighting spirit in me. And I knew at once I had to go back to Earth. Repair my relationship with my father, honor Tess, honor my country. Maybe I’ll get remarried, does the first one count? I’ll definitely consummate this time! That’s the best you’re gonna get.

Episode I

Compulsion

April 20th, 1998

Dear diary It’s hard to be living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I don’t know why my teachers and peers think it’s just like a quirk that after every period I need to go wash my hands with the bar soap I brought from home home home, if my mom checks my backpack and finds my soap I brought from home home home she’ll kill me Summer is almost here. I should thank god I just want to go home and play on my sanitized Playstation. I want to stay home home home and never leave the house again its Pretty funny I can take simulated blood but would never stop Washing my hands if I got my blood or anybody’s Blood on my hands. My body is a temple Tap the floor everytime I finish a stanza, one of these OCD stanzas, home home home I need to Get home, that’s the only place I feel safe, I hate my teachers so much They yell at us every day I’m so scared to go into class I can

Barely get out of bed, why is this happening to me I’m only 8, I shouldn’t be so selfish, Why am I so worried bad things will happen to me? Why did god do this to me, the only other Place I feel safe in is church, but it’s almost as if god is mocking me with this Illness, my life is a nightmare of tics. I can’t stop. Home Home Home. Oh no fourth grade again again I thought I had moved on again Again, it was like I the space shuttle took off a few days before, Colombia, It burned up on reentry on its way home home home. I we Made a mess in the lunch room, the only way I can do this is to Start again, again. I we made a mess In the lunch room, but not me I’m Tidy, I clean up after the other kids if anything. I’m a good boy! I’M A GOOD BOY! Stop again Again, I miss my daddy. There I said it, why won’t he just come home Home, home? I only have one father now in heaven Why wasn’t I raised catholic? I’m an idiot Did I turn the stove off, mom Says that the therapist I’m going to be seeing will help, but the pills won’t make me feel good, I Don’t know my body is a temple it will mess up my center

But I can’t live like this without my Daddy, he’s Not coming home no matter how badly you want Him too, is this centered, can’t Take off my jersey, its filthy but the Jets won’t win, pizza stain and all. They’re 3-3 perfect Symmetry, I hope they finish eight and eight at home versus the bloody Damn it, sorry lord stupid stupid, one two three Four five, bust a rhyme, we all fall down. I Found a new way to kill myself If need be, I can slit my wrists and slip into a warm bath so I don’t feel cold…I bet if you felt cold Your body would feel like it was in hell, which is where you go if you commit Suicide, but I have no other options I can’t live like this I wish I’d never been born, you’ve had Your whole fucking life to think Things through, why don’t you just end it, I’m only eight why oh no not seventh grade again why It just pops in there, just beat myself, maybe if I stay punish myself Things will fall into place. Can’t even talk to you diary I should give you a name

Episode II

The Exorcist

September 20th, 1999

Day I

Dear diary, its 4 AM and I have school tomorrow and I haven’t gotten a wink of sleep. I’m not going to be able to sleep for the rest of the day. When I close my eyes I see her face, eyes rolled back in her head. Clips of The Exorcist were on Siskel and Ebert tonight, my little Sunday night ritual, they discussed it and called it one of the great films of the 1970’s. She crawled down the stairs backward spider style, but what really got me was when she first became possessed or something and rolled her eyes into the back of her head. Every time I close my eyes I see it. The horrible whites of her eyes just staring at me like the devil or something. I tried to sleep in my mommy’s room, if my father saw me in this situation crawling to mommy so desperately because I couldn’t sleep in the same room with the television that had scarred poor little me, he would have belted me. This little family of deer is meeting up outside my room and I look at them their eyes. Are going to roll up into their head? Oh well, I guess I’m going to have to just suck it up and deal with it.

Day II

Dear diary, I told mommy The Exorcist was on. “I can see how that might

disturb you. From now on I’ll supervise watching Siskel and Ebert.” I have to go to my physical today I don’t want to do it I’m still sick. I still don’t know how I’m going to sleep. It will be nightmares and I’d rather suffer from what my mommy calls insomnia. Don’t forget your responsibilities, you agreed to cook dinner for us. Fifth grade science and math and my book report I need to finish. I don’t know how I’m going to write it.

Day III

Dear diary, I’m really starting to lose it. Mommy says my problems are getting to me and I need to let it go it’s just a movie. But I love movies more than anything. Our doggie’s going to die and mommy said we’re not getting another one. What am I going to do without Zuzu? Zuzu, mommy and dad named our dog after a movie. When I grow up I want to make movies, I want to be a big time director, but it’s not going to happen unless I get some sleep. Sleep, three days and I feel like I’m going crazy. I need my eight hours to function but now I’m really losing it. Mommy’s going to take me out shopping.

Day IV

Keep this to yourself diary but I’m going into my parents’ medicine cabinet to get some sleeping pills. I guess a nine-year-old shouldn’t be taking sleeping pills, probably not taking then throwing back a beer he found in the fridge with them. I don’t care if my heart stops I just can’t take this insomnia anymore.

Day V

I slept like a log last night. Those sleeping pills were great.

Episode III

When the Garden Burned

November 30th, 2010

Dear diary, even though I’ve been stable on my new meds for a while I’m going to write about what happened, my therapist says it is the best way to get past my being shell shocked. Yeah yeah, I know post-traumatic stress, but my father says he fought in Vietnam and said shell shocked. Strange since he was Irish he fought over there, but I think if my father was there that night that Madison Square Garden burned down he would be more shell-shocked by what he saw then in Binh Dinh. The Knicks have sucked for as long as I can and so have the Rangers. The hallowed halls of orange and blue had become a bastion of shame and embarrassment. We weren’t a ive franchise like your Memphisis and Miamis, our souls flew to the heavens or sank to the depths of hell with each win or loss. And losses were aplenty. We had more than our fair share of careers and seasons retired in the graveyard that is the New York basketball epicenter. To put it simply, I guess the pent-up frustration of all the fans finally exploded that night. Let me set the scene, tonight we were celebrating the Knicks opener. I worked 10 to 2 down at the grocer so I could catch the subway to 4 Pennsylvania Plaza. Might as well have been 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that night. I should have known when walking in the entrance and seeing a dead seagull next to a belligerent homeless drunk things were going to go badly. The Rangers were off on the road in Ottawa and it looked like another lost odyssey. They botched every opportunity to score, looked like another hopeless season. I’ve put 20 years of stock into them, won’t get fooled again. If that riot had happened at the Rangers opener, there would have been the glass divider to separate the ruffians from the ne’r do wells. But the bullish bears from Boston had once climbed over and started a fight in the stands, but it was nothing like this. Vancouver in 2011

looked like a little bonfire and the Malice in the Palace looked like princess play time compared to this. Because that night I don’t think anybody from Beantown could match the fury of New Yorkers making the garden look like the Twin Towers on September the eleventh. What the hell is wrong with us, raising hell over nylon stockings and peach baskets? Let me give you some perspective, that night at MSG we had a fresh new exciting rookie, Patrick Ewing’s cousin or something, I don’t even at this point after all that happened. All the radio personalities were giving their first takes describing this exciting new messiah for the basketball world. We had traded our franchise cornerstone for that coveted top pick, basically all the chips were on this virginal teen. All the gangs were meeting up in New York. Players from the Mets, Nets, Jets, all at MSG that night. Can you dig it? Life soon turned into Escape from New York. It was the worst of times it was a kick in the knickers. It makes you want to shed a tear. I’m sorry if my writing seems to be a bit distracted but words won’t do what happened justice. You’ll never understand through words what it’s like to see your hallowed home away from home crumble to the ground in a heap of anger and sadness. If you lost a family photo album you’d understand what it’s like to lose The 1970 championship banner and Walt Clyde Frasier’s retired number. After 9/11 you saw the best of New Yorkers, this was the worst of New Yorkers. This was giving into mob mentality and fear, when one person throws a plastic cup of beer that dowses Jonas Jerebko, its okay to dump your popcorn on him when he exits the court. Let’s get down to business, enough beating around the bush, it all started with Ewing Jr. getting the jump ball tip off and he slipped on the court and threw out his back. The Rangers wasn’t cleaned up properly from the previous series. Root root root for the home team but not the maintenance crew. I’ve always wondered how they clean up the ice and put the court down. I guess I could have done a better job. I guess that’s how we were destined to start this era of young phenom Lil Ewing, the basketball equivalent of slipping on a banana peel. They say love it or your money back, I wish we could return to sender. Or maybe big papa Ewing could make a little comeback, that would be better than nothing. Stunned, completely stunned silence when they brought the stretcher in for him. Not moving, flat on his face, we thought he was genuinely paralyzed. But they put the splint on his head and wheeled him off. Now we were stuck with the B-team, a bunch of 7-foot pipsqueaks not fit to honor the hallowed halls of Knicks past. But we had sucked for 20 years so what were we expecting.

But there was still a game to play. If you build it they will come, carpe that diem and seize that day. Three’s rained down like deus ex machina from Golden State and two minutes in we were 12 points down when the coach whatshisname blared a timeout. Praise the sweet lords Jesus and Allah. The seconds ticked down in the time out and honk went the buzzer. It all escalated so quickly like a blur after that. Two minutes in and we were facing down the barrel of another botched odyssey. Dennis Smith, Jr, our sparky point guard we got from Dallas, former second in command to this sinking ship, now elevated to captain once the iceberg hit. And boy was he not prepared for leadership. We got smoked, it felt like the game would never end, the clock mocking us all. But Curry on Dennis Smith Jr. looked like a good matchup. But one, two, three, four, five threes then a halfcourt prayer at the buzzer was nothing but net. I took out my phone at this point, the Zapruder film. Nothing but my phone captured what the local YES! Network didn’t. Draymond flagrantly kicked Smith in the balls. The floodgates unleashed. 20 years of pent up frustration exploded with that shot to the junk. And I was at the eye of the storm. Of course, boos rained from throughout the arena. Smith was writing in agony, I mean who wouldn’t after a block of Nike straight shoots to the baby maker. I have it captured on film, someone threw a beer at Draymond. It spiked him straight in the head, but what really set him off was when someone, whom I assuming was white, shouted “nigger!” as loud as he could. And he was off. It doesn’t make sense though since Smith is black to, but I guess that’s racism for ya. Basketball’s like water, 70 percent of the league is comprised of black men, why would you even bother going to a game if blacks offended you that much? Draymond charged into the stands, stampeded over a kid first in his unbridled rage. Even with millions of bucks on the line for a definite suspension he threw all reason to the winds that would soon be the ash of MSG. Blood pumping red hot, there’s no control over that wild instinctual urge for revenge once a wrong so gross as a racial slur is screamed. He started wailing on anyone in sight, because everyone ed in. Punches thrown one and all. He was engulfed in the crowd, and that was the last we ever saw of him. I the announcer over the jumbotron saying “Please fans refrain from throwing objects on the floor” like an automaton. Spike Lee, who was at the game because of course grabbed the mic, “stop this ya dumb crackers.” Do the Right Thing’s riot had nothing on a 20,000 capacity sold out crowd of pissed off

white trash. Sal’s pizza times 50. I won’t be the one ending up on his knees they all thought. If you could see it it was live breaking news on CNN, chaos in New York. But what really tipped the scales that day was when someone, and lord knows how security missed this one, took his cup of gray goose vodka and made a Molotov cocktail, chucked it at the jumbotron. Smash went the pixelated massive television. Hanging by a thread, the fire crept up wires holding it up and crash it went down. I don’t know what the last reaction of security and players and coaches was when it fell. Many certainly did not get out of the way very quickly as that monstrosity came crashing down. That’s probably not the way many people would think they’d kick the bucket by having the bucket fall down on them. Some of them had their feet sticking out like the wicked witch in Wizard of Oz. Now the thing is if you stare down at a dead person long enough it looks like they’re still breathing and that’s certainly what I thought of Smith, first lying in pain and just when he thinks he’s good, bam his legs are crushed and he dies from massive internal bleeding. Many on site EMTs grabbed fire extinguishers trying desperately to put out the jumbotron inferno. Evacuating the garden was a complete nightmare, it was a traffic jam of nice, decent fans trying to escape from the sieve in the loge seats and balcony seats onto Broadway. Then the jumbotron exploded in a blaze of glory. Everyone in the first 20 rows who hadn’t gotten out were either instantly vaporized or had horrific third-degree burns. I looking to the north star on dawn of that day. A red sun rose that morning, blood had been spilled. It was a perfect storm. Smoke rose in the distance, now the majestic Madison Square Garden was dust. Was this the glorious new era you thought you had coming old New York, New York? ESPN asked for my camera, I gave it to them no questions asked. I couldn’t even take compensation of which I bet I could have gotten a sizeable sum. There was no way I could bare to have any reminder of that night. I even burned my jersey and jeans from that night in a backyard bonfire. My intensely personal footage from the bowels of the Garden would be replayed over and over again on not just 30 for 30s but CNN and FOX. Madison Square Garden was of course rebuilt but it was never the same. The great Oscar Robertson once said that the Garden was the Mecca of the world but what would Muslims do if Mecca was destroyed in a riot. It wouldn’t be rebuilt I’ll tell you that much, it would just be a hollow clone. Soulless, lifeless. And of course, it wasn’t called Madison Square Garden anymore, it was Goldman Sachs Center;

another corporate takeover. I look in the morning in the mirror at what I see, and I am disgusted with myself. I will never forgive myself for what happened. Just being there was enough to ruin your soul. Again, you’d have to see it, but I hope I articulated it alright. Time to ride the northern railroad or hitchhike to the southern forests where the real fans are. But I guess it’s only a matter of time until the same happens to the Boston Garden.

Episode IV

Scenes from Customer Service

July 5th, 2012

Dear diary I’m going to start to write about my problems again because my therapist suggested it, that it would be a great way to soothe my depression. In fact, he thinks this might be my last resort seeing as talking and new meds aren’t helping at all. And honestly just starting writing for the first time since college, I can what it feels like to type on a keyboard for any other reason than Netflix.com. But I need to stare into the black abyss of sadness to get my best art. So here it goes: everything, all the shit in my life, all my problems begin and end with my job. I know that sounds like a bad joke straight out of Office Space, but it’s such a brilliant film for a reason. I spent my first two years out of college desperately trying to find a job. I was getting close to being kicked out of my mom’s house, when I went to a local job fair. I found a job pretty easily, the recruiter seemed pretty desperate in trying to hire people, and I would soon understand why. Once I was immersed in spending my first three years in the job sector out of college, I was working in what I in all honesty thought at the time was the lowest form of debauchery: customer service. And I’ve hit a wall already, what the fuck do I want to say? God this is only bringing back bad memories and horrible trauma. First, I only wanted to work in my field: art. I wanted to be an art history professor at my university, but of course you can’t do jack shit with a bachelor’s degree these days. I personally love pointillism and Van Gogh in particular and Renaissance sculpture, but you probably don’t care, sometimes I feel like I’m the only one in the world who does. I also speak French, German, and Italian fluently, but what good is that going to do me? But anyway, let me ask you this reader, when you call Best Buy about your

android smartphone, do you even recognize the person on the other end of the line? You know as well as I have found out that he/she is just a means to an end. Get my shit to work and fast you would say in a nutshell. Fate would have it I did indeed work over the damned phones of customer service, and later at a hotel in person. If you needed a job beware them both, but especially the hotel, because then you have to deal with jackasses in person. When they yell at you, you can’t just end the connection. But the urge to punch them in the face, no matter if it meant you getting canned, rages within. I have to it more than anything that once you are in the bowels of customer service you see what a horrible failed experiment the American dream really is. Snarky narcissists brilliantly call this satire the American nightmare, but it’s true. The shocking ignorance and annoyance they can inflict on you is enough to want to drive me to want to kill myself. Make bathtub toast, go swingin’ on some rope. I play the violin as a hobby, have since fourth grade. I was in high school band, college band, not very talented though. Couldn’t read the notes. Musically illiterate, just playing along with the band hoping I wasn’t off. But Jesus lord I could conduct a masterpiece on par with Mozart to the symphony of complaints I got over the phone. Maybe like Sherlock composing when he is frustrated, but I would have to play for eight straight hours, and I would get disgusting calluses and bleed to death. You know Joe, the first year in customer service on the phones at the Visa Credit Customer Center honestly was not that bad. It was kind of like life in general, it sucked and you just wanted to get through it one piece, and every now and again something not so heinous happened. I was eager to do my best at whatever was my first job, and day after day I gave 100 percent. 90 percent of people are nice, or at least putting up the façade of being nice. When we were kids we were taught manners, but after all there’s a certain anonymity to talking on the phones, like chatting on the internet. If there was one silver lining to my eight-hour torture sessions it’s that when someone got egregiously snippy and went “fuck this fuck that,” the glorious drop button was next to me. Beep, bye bye, take care now asshole. I had a number of incidences in that second year of working on the phones thinking of a scene from Fight Club. I saw that same dystopia Jack was living in. I woke up at 5:30 to go talk to people at the asscrack of dawn about their

pathetic problems and just like Jack said ““Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.” I am truly working a job I hate so I can buy shit I don’t need: like medical insurance, a roof over my head, heat, electricity. I wish I could go live in a boxcar like a hobo, rolling on from Virginia to Cali. My job makes me often wonder if there is any meaning in life. We were made for better things than talking to insufferable jerkoffs, we were made to enjoy life, not torture ourselves getting up in the morning knowing the horrors we are going to have to face, why not just lie down, head buried in the sand like an ostrich and pray for death. Am I being overdramatic? It’s only having 90 horrible conversations over eight hours. I could be a Syrian refugee in contemporary time or maybe a soldier on a forced Bataan death march back in World War II. Maybe that’s just a sign of how horrible the human race is. They can be horrible cruel, psychologically scaring over the phone, or in person with a gun in their hands. I am in a prison of my own making. I chose this, I chose these shackles at the cubicle. I feel like I’ve lost the will to live. Wah wah wah. Even the break room is a nightmare, there’s just nowhere to escape! A cesspool of bacteria, people are so messy they can never clean up. What the fuck is wrong with people, leaving their coffee ring stains on the wood table. You’d think when Larry David said “you don’t respect wood” I wouldn’t actually get mad at it. That it’s just satire, and you must have pretty thin goddamned skin. It literally smells like dead fish, rotten decaying lobster. Who the fuck buys lobster and brings it to work? Its not even like its good lobster, it’s like the shit from Red Lobster. We live in New York, not too far from Maine; how can you not get it fresh locally? It doesn’t help that I haven’t gotten laid in a year. I might as well be a virgin again I have completely lost my mojo. Who the fuck am I Austin Powers? I tell you I used to shag like him. What a funny word “Shag,” it’s funny, cute. But of course this is America where something beautiful is angrily called “fucking.” Fucking is like the ugliest word. Maybe it’s better to just stay away from the sex, be a monk. The only affection I get is from my dog, who only wants to lick my face when I eat peanut butter. It’s like customer service, they only use you for their own gains. One end gets to shag, the other end gets fucked. One of the worst things that ever happened to me at my job was when I had a little accident. I’d dress like a fine upstanding private citizen. I’d dress in a suit and tie but the other schlubs and slobs that work at the credit card center don’t.

But I had to unbutton the clasps and zippers, and I didn’t make it in time. It got everywhere, I tried to mop it up with paper towels the best I could but it smelled terrible. I had to run out, I wanted to run two thousand miles straight to Canada. Why bring this up? It was one of the worst days of my job experience at the credit card center, but not the worst. I shit my pants, but it continued to get worse and worse. I guess the real thing I have to ask is why is this so hard? Why does life have to be so hard? Why can’t I just get what I want. I’m not usually a crier, and that’s a bit of a problem. I’ve got a lot of pent up anger and frustration, and the best way to get it out is through tears. I one call where someone was so offended by my trying to help them they asked me to be a little fucking professional for once. Tears are stress toxins you know, my urge was to go through the wireless phone and strangle him with my bear hands. Go off on a psychotic rant against this useless piece of white trash using a visa card, like he had any money in his trailer park lifestyle. Christ, look at what customer service has turned me into, a shallow, racist asshole who can’t control his bowels. Maybe that’s what I always was on the inside, maybe I just needed a little push to bring out the darkness. Try not to think so much, if you haven’t figured it out yet this is my suicide note. There’s nowhere to go and I’m not going back. I know when I go to the pearly gates I will be accused of throwing away god’s greatest gift. And you know what? I don’t care, I’ll be damned, because I’m a coward. The end began that Sunday as I sat on the dock pondering the eccentricities of life, of which there seemed to be fewer and fewer with the doldrums of work. Even on my vacation, the deadly monotony had so thoroughly seeped into my marrow that I couldn’t enjoy the NASCAR hall of fame the previous day, I knew I would have to go back eventually. There was no delaying the inevitable. It was a cold winters’ morn, at least as cold as it can be in North Carolina, but warm enough for a polar plunge. I could hear the argument in my head: I nonchalantly said I’m going to end it all tonight. “Why?! Why would you do that that’s insane. But was it so insane? How should I do it? I was going to use a gun, but I didn’t have one at the present moment, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find a gun show down the street. “Why don’t you just get a new job if that’s what’s bothering you so much, it’s not worth risking your eternal soul. You can put a down payment on a new house, you can get a job somewhere else. Customer Service is all I have at this

point; the sadism is real. So I attached bricks to my shoes and floated to the bottom of a small lake. I hoped no one would find me, I wish my mother had just had an abortion on me so I didn’t have to suffer so much in the first place. I wondered when I would finish drowning, when would everything go black, but time had seemed to be stopped completely. I saw the sun floating there, refracting off the water but still so crystal clear. In a voice that sounded vaguely French, a touch German, and had a hint of Italian said ‘it gets better.’ No, it doesn’t, you don’t understand me, stop trying to make me stop this. Too late anyway I already put on the weights on my feet.” Then the voice, neither man nor woman asked what have you done with your life in the last quarter century? Have you seen Paris, Rome or Munich? You can speak the language, but have you ever gone under the Arc de Triumph? Have you ever tried to break through with your own art, or do you feel weighed down? Can you really play the violin like a maestro? Or the piano? Can you play the guitar? You always wanted to play the guitar you were always jealous of your classmates who were in the rock band. I’m giving you a second chance. I don’t want a second chance; I want to end all this suffering. Life is suffering but what doesn’t kill you makes you ten, a hundred, a thousand times stronger. Not only is life suffering but art is suffering. So your suffering at your job will make for better art. So my bonds were lifted, I did not drown. Upon reaching the surface I went to my brother’s house and his lovely wife whipped up a glass of sweet tea that tasted better than any caffeinated beverage I had ever had. I flew up from North Carolina first class, already burning through what I had saved up. And I marched into my boss’s office and immediately quit my job, no two weeks’ notice, fuck you and fuck your mother I believe I said. Burned every possible bridge, because that’s what I had to do. I told my mom and she kicked me out officially. Going back to Appalachia North Carolina, I worked on a sculpture made of mud, a cell phone, and the phrase “Customer Service,” I’m trying to sell it to the Met. Now I live out of a tent out in the woods, a gigantic Grizzly Adams’ beard, working on a textbook on art history off an old typewriter I found in my parents’ attic and eating berry roots. Go to hell sun, you shall mock me no more. Well, that’s all I have to say and will ever say about customer service. Ciao bella.

Episode V

French Cinema

January 10th, 2013

Dear diary, my success at the Met with my mud sculpture (“Servicing”) has paid off, I am taking a well-earned vacation. I don’t know if I could call it well earned since I was already living off the reservation. I need to re-adapt to civilization now that I’ve got my shit together and I’m going back to grad school to get my master’s degree. I’ve decided to become a creative writer, all these diary entries I noticed need to be fleshed out. The power I felt looking over Paris, where Fitzgerald and Hemingway brainstormed their masterpieces incapacitated (extracapacitated?) by the strong wine and absinthe helps a bit. Long, boring, indecipherable, no story, I can do that! No that’s just later Hemingway; moral of the story: don’t go overboard with the booze. I feel like before I go back I need to find my voice. I don’t want to get bounced after round one. All I have are college essays. I need to crack my knuckles and crank out some writing. Sometimes the best therapy is to go to the window and scream to the world “I am a hackfraud!” The real question I’ve been mulling over on these Parisian streets the last few days is am I a misanthrope? Do I hate all mankind because I’ve seen only the worst in them? I mean they did burn down Madison Square Garden in a fit of rage; we’re all neurotic. Me with my OCD and god knows what else. Did Hemingway hate humanity? He was very detached. I think F. Scott Fitzgerald grew to hate us all too, just read Tender is the Night. I look on these streets that suffered under four years of Nazi Occupation where so many died and so much was plundered, but with all the collaborators you’d think there was something redeemable. Can we get to something less embarrassing; how can they live with themselves?

I wasn’t expecting a shit show. But that’s a box I fear Pandora herself would be loath to open. That’s the key to writing, to allow myself to explore all these feelings. How far down the rabbit hole must I go, possibly all the way back out onto Hong Kong. There may not be much original to say anymore. But when I die and am sapped of my earthly juices, go up to the mansion in the cosmos, dancing around the rings of Saturn and ping ponging off the moons of Titan I want to have a strong portfolio to bring to god. My father was a protestant and religion was a big part of our lives, he was very pious. Even said he had a meetup with god once. But my father was an Irishman first and foremost. He would not take sides in the Troubles that were tearing apart the country in the 70’s. My grandfather was a priest who served in the war, even though Ireland was neutral he felt he had a duty to help those about to die. He led prayer before the troops stormed the beaches of Normandy. I wonder if he felt like a coward not ing in on the festivities, hiding behind his frock and peaceful god as a shield.

All throughout London went the war whoops But none throughout Dublin. We’ll not fight for our oppressors We’ll not fight against yet again Soon there was a dance Amongst the English and in Tyranny has been defeated Freedom has won V-E, V-E, V-E, V-E Whatever, I just want to sleep all day I just want to lay my weary head to rest

Like 35 million other innocent souls in Europe It’s the worst feeling in the world To see them have the best feeling in the world In 1916 when we followed Collins And lost Belfast the Union Jacks were as bad as a Swastika Freedom for Europe Freedom for Palestine Freedom for the Soul But no freedom will reign in Dublin It will just be the Troubles.

What the hell was that? That was my first poem, I didn’t know I had it in me I’ve never written a poem before. I thought I’d never be able to write with all these bloody distractions. All right, time for a break! I’m going later tonight to the arthouse cinema, that should boil the kettle a bit more. I thought I’d never be able to write with all these bloody distractions. I’ve picked out a Faulkner book and a collection of Philosophy by Sartre, I guess that’s the best has to offer me.

9 PM:

I’m going to see the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film The Conversation at an arthouse cinema. Why I couldn’t watch it back in the states is beyond me. However, it is a masterpiece of Hollywood cinema and dare I say the finest film in Coppola’s lexicon, he didn’t even make it for wine money. I bought my ticket for three francs and took my seat. The floor was a little sticky, but that’s not

much different from my hometown theatre. I have had a song stuck in my head all day long “hokey pokey” the fast paced one they are using now in commercials. And a woman’s smoking next to me, I forgot its totally fine to chain smoke inside where we can all get emphazema. I hope this film will break the cycle of these intrusive thoughts I’ve been having. But any way, onto the film. There’s no logo at the beginning which I find strange. I the part of “when the red red robin goes bop bop boppin’ along” and I was expecting it, but this started differently. It was a man walking into an office with a woman. And it’s not The Conversation but Le Conversation. Kiss kiss peck peck, oh my god this is a skin flick, and there’s a man crankin’ it behind me! I’ve got to get out of here. Suddenly a woman puts her hand on my thigh. She asks if I was alone, clearly I was, which at least is what I thought she said. The moaning from the flick was a bit much, so I couldn’t hear her very well. I figured it was just me, her and Mr. Tugs-Mcgee who were the only ones in the in the theater, so I spoke up a bit to get some of the transmission through. “Do you want to get out of here?” I asked her. Of course, I meant this in the meaning of ‘I legitimately can’t hear you over the fucking in the skin flick can we go talk somewhere else?’ And she said sure. At this I took her hand all gentlemanly like, struggling to get the stickiness off the floor. I feel as if for a moment I will never escape from it and nearly hop out of my shoes. But I led her tenderly out of the porno theatre, selfishly afraid someone might catch me and I’d be on the evening news like it was a big murder case. Then she turned around and said those words that thrust me into a crossroad “I’m a hundred dollars an hour.” At that moment I wish I could have stayed stuck to the ground forever. I had never been loved before, but I didn’t know if I could go forward with this. At least this lovemaking session will spruce up my writing.

9 AM

Zero hour, nine am. I was sitting this morning not an hour ago in the tiny bathtub considering slitting my wrists. I put on the scorching hot water and sat there for a quarter of an hour debating whether to finish myself off or not. I’m back at the café, ashamed of myself. For my first time having sex it sure was deflating. In

fact it felt like I landed in Bosnia under sniper fire. I thought for my first lovemaking appointment there would be candles and flowers and perfume, but there we were, the hotel was brightly lit staring daggers at me. I couldn’t look away and I was scared to death. I was so scared I was impotent; I didn’t even get close to off in any sense of the word. Getting to home but feeling like you were barely tagging first on an errant throw. Some people would say I got lucky, but it raised some red flags on me. I didn’t know if it was epilepsy or if my long dormant OCD was taking over. I had enough anxiety to have three triple by surgeries. I wish there was a stagehand on duty who could’ve taken over, tag team. I’m glad that wasn’t on film I would never want to leak that kind of sex tape, I looked like a little punk ass bitch. All I wanted to do was watch The Conversation after all, I didn’t ask for sex. Its yet another situation where I feel like a robot. Anyway is there another poem in me?

I am a failure, my pain on my sleeve It is not just a woman’s touch that deceives This is the end, beautiful friend People are strange, when you’re a stranger It’s all a frivolity of which I cannot linger

Episode VI

The Ink of Cthulhu

December 20th, 2013

Dear diary it’s me again. I’m going to write what happened to me because, honestly, at this point, there’s nothing else I can do. I’m now an author by trade, I’ve abandoned the art field since working toward my master’s degree in creative writing. And there’s nothing better than getting on a mental run and putting my thoughts on paper. I sold my abstract art to the Met like I wanted and was living off the recurring checks but more importantly I was at this point a struggling penman. I could not put pen to paper. Writer’s block was destroying my psyche, crushing me under a deep depression that I couldn’t shake until I had something to say on parchment. My keyboard is staring at me, mocking me, daring me to press the keys down and trying to be creative. If only something could give me that spark! I’ve always been a talented writer, when my mother snuck in and read my diary after the incident with The Exorcist when I was a kid she said I talked well beyond my years. Looking back on my diary I don’t feel like I’ve grown much. Cynical, sad, mommy issues; it’s all there. I do it all started on a beautiful early spring afternoon, not a cloud in sight. I tried to unwind by going to the beach, wrestling my toes in the hot gold sand in frustration. Aggressively making fists with my toes and squeezing my eyes tight just begging for a lightbulb to spark above my scalp. Barely a single other fellow swimmer was there, seeing as how it was early April it was neither hypothermidically freezing nor particularly warm from the Atlantic current coming from the east, and the wind was a bit drafty. I went in for a quick dip. I swam about six feet out to the point where I couldn’t quite touch my toes to the sea floor, little realizing just how freezing it was until I was at drowning level. I dunked my head down in a sort of baptismal pose under the surface as a wave was about to crash on my skull and when I came up, I was surrounded by a

school of jellyfish. They came out of nowhere, and I was petrified beyond belief. These bastards had nasty stingers on them and ing the death of Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter a few years prior I went under again. I looked up, desperately trying to avoid the jellyfish, not having much time to escape as the water was still bitterly cold and I didn’t want to catch pneumonia and have my heart give out. Looking down on the green sea floor I saw a vial with some sort of black goo inside, possibly a junkie threw their heroin into the seas as hard as they could before getting a shakedown from the fuzz. Whether tempted by the possible narcotic or to clean the beach so no innocent children would come across it will forever be unknown, but as I grasped the vial the jellyfish exploded in a mushroom cloud of purple in the water. Then the sun died behind a black cloud. A veil of black ran up through my veins of my arm though I did not feel it at the time due to the sub thermal temperatures of the ocean and also due to the fact that the sun was gone. Reaching the shore, I put the vial away as incognito as possible fearing reprisals in case the beach police saw me with what they would assume to be black tar heroin and then I left the shores promptly as I noticed it felt suddenly like the middle of winter. But that’s for you, you could easily have four seasons happening at once. I thought nothing was particularly suspicious. Upon arriving home, I took out the black vial. Opening it up and smelling it I realized it wasn’t a drug but some sort of gelatin resembling ink. No smell, but I knew ink as a typist. I went to my computer to type, putting the ink down, planning to just dump it down the sink, a pitiful discovery. But suddenly, the vial, vaguely shaped like a USB port, miraculously synced into my computer. My angelic white MacBook was now jet-black, and as I cautiously typed, the jet turned my cuticles into a darker shade, and looking into the mirror a little while later I noticed my hair had turned from an oak brown to jet black as well, all goth like. I pressed the letter T, and it was nonstop going from there. Immediately I felt a creative surge just flow through my brain as if all the blockages of writer’s block were undone and the levees broke. I started by typing “it was the best of times,” a tried and true test. I felt like although this had clearly been done previously by Charles Dickens in Victorian era London my using it was part of the Avant garde, a brilliant contradiction to the postmodernist view of thought that dominated the literary landscape. Then I typed “it was the winter of our discontent;” again my subconscious thought thinking that this was a bold sentence reflecting the landscape of New England as well as the literary landscape, although uttered five hundred years past by the great William

T. Shakespeare. That night I had a fever dream, drenched in sweat, my temperature feeling like 110 degrees in my head although it probably never went beyond 99. Various sensations, some sort of octopus man I couldn’t quite , slithering and walking just the same from his palace. A previous writer had written about Kubla Khan’s palace at Xanadu I wish I could do that, but the images were so apoplectic. Now normally when I awake I am groggy as all hell, barely making it downstairs by 9 AM to catch Good Morning America with my black coffee. When I awoke that morning at three AM, I felt a sensation of an extra-large red bull, cocaine, crack, meth and all the other stimulants combining together to make a wonderful euphoria. My face was flush red, I should have dunked it in some ice water. I felt like I had a fever of a hundred and six. But no, off to more pressing matters: I had to get to my computer. I had to write my story about, oh no, what was it again. Damn this is so frustrating, I don’t know how much I can take of this. I don’t mind almost dying in my sleep, but for the love of god if you’re going to wake me up from an eternal slumber at least give me a good reason. I honestly wouldn’t mind dying if I could escape my writing blockage just don’t tease my creativity in that way. Then like Christmas, I was gifted with brilliant ideas, playing the keyboard like a concert piano. My writing is like experimental jazz, testing the waters while also building new lighthouses. It would come in waves. One minute I would be impatiently sitting at my workstation for some inspiration then a great shock went down my spine and I had 10,000 words written in 10,000 seconds. I apologize I’m drifting all over the place the ink hasn’t left my system, what the hell am I saying this is my diary. Oh dear its coming on again, now it’s like an LSD trip, I can see the colors of my writing as a distinct reality. This must be the last hurrah, the charge of the light brigades’ final run of the ink leaving my system. That’s the key to writing, you need to have the energy to do it, because when you have the energy you have the drive and the creativity comes after. Maybe this is a narcotic, a super stimulant. We are creatures of emotion, and we can’t do anything devoid of it whether you’re a teacher or construction worker. Put everything you’ve got into it. I’ll write an essay now that’s what I’ll do. What is the best William T. Shakespeare work? I’m partial to Titus Andronicus, just because I like the story that he cooked his son into a pie as the ultimate act of revenge. I think I love it because of its conception of vengeance. Why must wrath be mute and fury dumb? It’s so easy to fall into temptation, can’t we all just get along? If Kurt

Cobain studied Shakespeare, I bet he could make a beautiful album, probably call it ‘Titus.’ But his candle was snuffed out, I’m burning mine from both ends, what happens when I reach the middle? Time to write my novel, I feel like I can pound it out in one sitting, but I’m going to have to pull out all the stops. Here goes, shit I’ll be right back, I have an idea, a modern vision of Hamlet! I’ll be back in a sec. What am I talking about? Where am I? OK, I’m back. I could barely watch the Branaugh adaptation, I felt torn from my beautiful laptop. You know what I need to do, I feel like Mary Poppins I need to go fly a kite, what does it matter that it’s 4:30? Suns close by on the horizon, time doesn’t matter anymore, I am one with the universe. My printer was unable to connect with my black MacBook, the laptop had transcended the boundaries that even Steve Jobs would never had guessed Apple could achieve in a hundred years. Even artificial intelligence and virtual reality could not compete with what my computer had become. So I have no proof of what I had written. And even so, I cannot reproduce it now that the vial of ink is gone. Nevertheless, I thought I was a great thinker of antiquity with that ink of Cthulhu. That’s who I knew I saw in my vision, that horrific monster from the pages of the great famed horror prophet Lovecraft. Liberal or conservative, black or white, it all faded away in a genius stroke. I was the greatest writer of all time and I knew it for an undisputed fact. They say you can always edit a bad page, but I never had a bad page. Say everyone has one story to tell but I had millions, and I could see them all in that state of nirvana. All I had to do was get more ink, that’s what I have to do. Plug it into my smooth typewriter, I can’t afford a new MacBook, and besides scientists will probably need my black one to study it for the Smithsonian anyway. OK, I’ve been stone cold sober for three days. I’m back to suffering from a stigma of blocked imagination. I can’t live like this; I need more of that sweet sweet ink. Now one thing I was thinking of was the amphibian with wings I saw in my dreams. I swam back out to the beach and dunked my head in the same baptismal pose. Whenever I think of baptism in this sense I think of the end of The Godfather when Michael says he will reject Satan and all his evils. I was Michael in this situation. It was almost like my Spidey sense was tingling. The jellyfish became sentient, come with us they said. They carried me off like Jesus in a mosh pit, took me to the place of R’lyeh where Cthulhu dreamed, myself or no other able to comprehend its very being. What would I say? Cthulhu, I have come to bargain. What could I possibly offer

to the great old deity, created into being long before the time of humans? The tale of H.P. Lovecraft must have been the last time a prophet and closet worshipper came upon this land. How did he comprehend the land of R’lyeh? But before I could finish the thought, I was stung by one of the Jellyfish right in the leg. I worried that I had not been istered last rites yet, but where was Christ when I was going to spend an eternity with Cthulhu? At this moment when we arrived at the cave, the jellyfish stuck their tentacles around my stomach, killer stingers out. They produced a blindfold that they put around my head. In the total blackness, a pencil and pad were put in my head. The jellyfish held me hostage and floated me into what I can only assume is the realm of Cthulhu. What’s next? What exactly did it tell me? It was a loud blubbery screech that seemed to go on for ages, but here’s what burned in my mind:

“I am Cthulhu, destroyers of worlds. I have granted my scribe here to tell you beware of R’lyeh. I will tolerate no more intruders.”

Episode VII

Tomorrow’s Hellfire

February 14th, 2014

Dear diary, I am going to have to have you bear with me here. I have a piece to write for my class and I need to pound it out here, you will be my rock which I build my church on.

10 AM:

So where do we start? Well for one it’s another hundred-degree day. “I looked at the sun”, and on this hot day it’s just a round circle. “A scorching sphere in the sky. I could not the last time I saw a cloud up in the heavens. The star in the bright blue sky beat down relentlessly, and as I looked at the thermostat, I thought the mercury in the thin strip would pop out the top.” Sounds good, sounds good. So we’ve got a story with a global warming angle; excellent. I wonder who’s affected by it now, probably farmers there will probably be another dust bowl in the near future. “I didn’t think it was possible I, nor my crops, could bake any worse.” Perfect! Break time!

10 AM The Next Day:

So where do we go from here. I wasted all of yesterday. Binge watched Star

Trek, my procrastination’s like a tribble, it multiplies nonstop. My writing I feel is like a Frank Gehry architectural piece just winding thought after thought. I often don’t know what to write about but I just go along with my thoughts la la la. I’m going to have to try it that way. Wind on down the river and see what’s waiting for me just around the riverbend. “It’s not going to cut it this year,” Well that part’s obvious. “I told my wife, referring to the wheat not growing in my field. I took one desperate last sip of water from my bottle, which I thought would evaporate as I squirted it onto my lips. I feared of what I heard on the horizon.” Denigrated screams on the outskirts of his brown, crusted wheat field.” Hooray we have an opening paragraph.

10 AM The Next Day

I really fucked myself over on this one. It’s due Thursday I only have two days left. I can’t keep pushing things back “Pack up the kids… I said, already knowing how she would respond as to their destination. You already know… said my wife Martha, also spitting out sweat as it dripped from her scarlet forehead.” Okay we have an article where Jonathan and Martha Kent are struggling to keep their farm afloat with no help from Clark. Are the Superman references a bit too on the nose? Is it too biblical, global warming, end times? I feel like we’ve already accepted this fate of global warming and maybe in the deep south it is already like this. This won’t be prophetic at all. I have to scrap this one.

10 PM

I was watching the midday news and the sports section showed one of the Knicks players severely twisting his ankle. “What, do you want to go back to Vicodin?” Ok, ok now, we’re going with an opioid crisis angle. “Rachel knew very well how it would work out. She had already been down that road. Since twisting her foot 180 degrees at the 2012 London Olympics she had experienced so much pain she thought she couldn’t bear it.” That’s probably what Patrick

Ewing Jr. or whoever feels. I would personally send him flowers while he’s in the hospital. Bet he gets hardcore drugs. I bet in the future they invent a new perfect drug, it will be like from that book with ‘Soma.’ Flashlights shine in your eyes but there’s no reaction. Like what happened with Cthulhu but mellow as well as euphoric. It doesn’t seem that far off, but it’s probably the government trying to keep us down. No overdose, no panic attacks, no mania, no heart attacks. I bet the pharmaceutical companies already have made it. “The drug, which was dubbed “Amos” for short by the pharmaceutical company Charles worked at, shut down the pain receptors without causing the euphoria that led to addiction in other opiates.” No that’s way too on the nose. God I’m getting some bad writer’s block again. One step forward and abracadabra three steps back, how can you go back past where you’ve started. I work best when I can just get my thoughts on a page. Think, damnit think why won’t it just come to me?

10 AM

Foreign language sounding country, right we have to move out of the United States. Don’t be so American centric try to be a xenophile. Look at me with all my words. Teleporters. Small lifestyle changes. I feel like I am falling to the ol’ science fiction genre. I like working with wood I should have just been a carpenter. Can I write a story about a carpenter? Jesus was a carpenter; they wrote about his carpentry exploits in the greatest story ever told. So that’s already been done. OK, here’s a premise. An idea where the government uses a teleporter as a weapon. I want that award. Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award I don’t care. I guess that’s the reason I’ll never win one is because everything original has been done, there’s nothing legitimately original anymore there’s just amazingly twisted evil mashups now. There’s a pandora’s box in my head and I just need to wrench it open, but it feels sealed shut with titanium and there’s only one thing in the world that ever can open it. But it’s gone, and even if I had it my writing would be inaccessible to mere mortals.

10 AM The Next Day

I’m tempted now more than ever to just quit. I’ve been up all night watching Netflix trying to find some inspiration. I’m pushing up on a deadline for the first time since my undergraduate studies and I’m getting so scared and desperate I feel like I’m on the verge of tears. I think back to that hotel in , I was sitting in the teensy little bathtub, prepared to slit my wrists. I just want my mommy and daddy. I want to go back to the way things were, sleeping in the pews in the church this time of the day. I never asked to be a writer, I didn’t ask to be given this gift. Jesus maybe sometimes just wanted to be a carpenter. Just like the crucifix it’s like a weight too heavy on my shoulders and typing only makes it heavier. I never asked to be Cthulhu’s pet. Let’s just try some freewriting. Run run Rudolph. Go Johnny go, go, go. But that’s the problem, or is it the solution? My OCD is always trying to force a square pen in a round hole, but if you push enough eventually it will go in. Get a hammer and saw make it at least a rectangle, it will get in there no matter how hard you try. I need a cigarette; Whenever I smoke I feel like the angel from Wings of Desire trying a cigarette for the first time. I don’t know if I could be an angel hovering for all eternity over people. Existing out of time, putting my hand on someone who was going to commit suicide then they jump, there’s something beautiful yet horrifying about being a human. Not that I’d know I’ve never been a real human, I’m just a little bit off. My obsessive-compulsive disorder is a real hamper as well as god knows what else. I wonder if I was a species what it would be categorized under. Don’t tell me there’s no hope at all. Rain Man may have been a low functioning autistic man who couldn’t function without Tom Cruise and in many ways I am the same. But he counted those cards and won the jackpot at the casino. I am in line for a more obvious jackpot, a golden plaque to put on my lectern. It will just be another brick in the wall.

12 Noon

Here’s one from the heart: “The anxiety was relatively under control. Going into eighth grade was more daunting a task as going into seventh grade because seventh grade was nothing

to worry about too much, it was a calm before the storm. He should have been in private school, not just with his gifts, but with his disabilities. Public school was no place for a boy of his talents who was destined for great things. Boy Scout camp had been a living nightmare that summer. He would have done anything to escape that week from hell but his mother made him stick it out, even if it meant coming out under false pretenses to his scout master. It wasn’t necessarily the woods and camping out in tents, he loved that in Cub Scouts. But now there was no parents to help, it was like preparing for the military which he could never do. But the Boy Scouts seemed like just a small hiccup on the road to the final jumping off point to high school. Sixth grade had of course been a nightmare, middle school generally always was. The transition from elementary school where the teachers generally showed you love in easy subjects like basic fractions and the kids were still kids and not horrible monsters. Lesions and scaring in the heart, despair and darkness were the name of the game. But that’s just public school for you, you either have the coping skills to deal with it or you don’t, and he didn’t. But he was lucky, he seemed to be adapting better by seventh grade. The teachers weren’t so cruel and the kids not so bad. Sure there were outbursts that frightened him and he wanted to bury his head in the sand if there was only sand under the desk. Going into eighth grade there was no way he knew he was about to enter a horrible yearlong prison sentence in the depth of hell. He was not prepared for one math teacher by the name of John Hutter. Day one there was immediately something off. Our eighth-grade class gathered for an introductory assembly, and he counted down from five on his fingers, and the class did not get any quieter. He stopped at one and his eyes bugged out in warning. His temper wouldn’t reach peak rage and explode like the top of a thermometer for a couple months yet after we had pushed him too far. That was the thing about him, he wasn’t a rage-oholic. The anger simmered, and when it was extremely egregious these crimes against the school we had committed that’s when he let loose. We had trashed the cafeteria after lunch: ‘YOU PEOPLE ARE SLOBS, IF YOU WANT TO BE FED LIKE PIGS WE’LL GET YOU A TROFF. WALK BACK SILENTLY!’ It was a yell that broke the sound barrier. Chuck Yeager would be proud; boom goes the first ring in the blue sky. It hurt his ears, it scared him to death. All from around Thanksgiving with the first flare up (he couldn’t even eat Thanksgiving dinner without feeling sick to his stomach knowing he had to go back on Monday and face another potential screaming fit head on) to next June, every day was agony.

He tried out for the track and field team but he was so tired from running mental marathons trying to escape from the horror he couldn’t run even 100 meters. He was in the band, violin he played, not very well. Every day he scraped by, literally because he was so tense he ground his teeth and mashed his violin in warmups because he knew he had to go back to class after that period. An eighth grader with an ulcer, quite a sight to see. He always tried to silence in vain his classmates, but they just mocked him and called him a loser. Look at yourself. Eventually he got into that private academy for high school. There were only a few more outbursts, and on that last day he bolted out of the middle school hallway as fast as he could to get to his mom’s minivan and bolt off to the promised land. So why now was he thinking back to that hormone rich period of his life? He can’t stop thinking how much he was scarred. Hutter knew he had obsessive compulsive disorder, crippling anxiety and he just made it worse. His father might have been a Protestant and gotten down with the turn the other cheek jive, but there was no way he could forgive his mortal enemy: a middle school teacher. If he had the ability, if he could go back in time to do one thing, with all respect to saving Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, he would kill Hutter.” This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Fat chance. Burn in hell Hutter. Bring on the libel bitch! Its settled, I’ll submit this to my class. It’s the best I can do.

Episode VIII

Binkie

May 30th, 2014

Dear diary, they say put one foot in front of the other and put your pants on one leg at a time. But I’m having a really hard time following those simple instructions as usual. I was tripping over my tros and falling face down on the concrete and banging out my teeth. No really, this morning I chipped out my tooth on a glass of bourbon on ice and I wasn’t even drunk. I SportsCenter was on and thinking UFC was barbaric and was choking on an ice cube when something especially violent happened and I recoiled in disgust. I was bleeding and as I looked around for a cotton ball the only think I could find to stop the bleeding was an old pacifier from when I was a kid. I don’t know what compelled me to put it in my mouth, it wasn’t dusty at all it seemed perfectly sanitary. I guess that’s just a sign of what a freak I am. But I put my old binkie in my mouth and sucked on it to stop the bleeding coming out of my mouth. Suddenly I felt a rush of nostalgic euphoria for my childhood came roaring back. I my father before he died taking me to Shea Stadium for a ball game even though I was only two and a half, I ed going to the magical kingdom when I was three at Disneyland and meeting Belle and Goofy. I’m afraid of the dark and I’m claustrophobic and generally hate to go outside. I’m terrified of my own skin, afraid my fly is always down and that I’m not going to make it to a bathroom and piss and shit my pants in public again. But sucking on my binkie, I ed the good old days. I’m far from home now but this sucking of my binkie reminded me of being in my crib my parents looking over me. I’ve wanted to scream and cry out at my job and even at home just typing because I feel trapped all over and that’s there’s no escape, I can’t even. So now, I sanitized it with some of the water from the ice cube and dabbed it in some

bourbon like I was teething. I guess you could say it was just a license to kill. I decided to put on a childhood favorite of mine on: Pocahontas and just sit there on the couch cuddled up in the fetal position imagining my mommy stroking my hair while I sucked on my binkie. For glory, god and gold. Maybe this is a sign I should move down there in Virginia, get away from this god forsaken struggling metropolis and stop being such a city slicker. I felt like a Roman emperor being fanned by palm trees while being fed grapes. I didn’t want to have to go face Achilles though, I just wanted to stay in the coliseum. It’s been three months now since this has happened. I find it harder and harder to take my binkie out of my mouth, and I do have it in my pocket at all times, sometimes stroking it like Frodo stroked the one ring. When I’m on a subway in the city feeling super shut in I just want to take it out and put it in my mouth. That would make everyone laugh at me. But what do I care what anyone thinks? Apparently a lot judging by my heart palpitations and closing in my throat. The only two coping skills I have now are drinking heavily and having the pacifier in my mouth, and I can’t just drink heavily all the time, I’d be an alcoholic. Mom told me dad quit though after his so-called near-death experience. So many factors in a case like that. I bet he just took something a little more potent, I will not be demonized for my drinking habits, will I quit no. How am I supposed to quit drinking if I’m 27 and can’t be weaned off my binkie? Cthulhu called me in the night again. Acid flashbacks to a bygone age, I’m still suffering from writer’s block and my thesis is coming up, I’m considering dropping out I don’t know how I’m going to stretch out my creative writing project to 90 pages. I need to try to generate some ideas again, I don’t want to go to the beach again with my anxiety going nuts lately. I can’t even drink away my problems. Speaking of nuts, I’m dabbling in that amber gold known as coffee, but I’m so sensitive to caffeine it makes me feel weird. There’s pros and cons to it, it’s like being a Jets fan. We’ve had a long stretch of losing seasons, so even through the sting of multiple consecutive losses, run back interceptions and fumblerooskies that obviously hurts each and every time they happen. Every sparse win feels a bit special. That’s like coffee: you get a buzz but it also makes your anxiety reach maximum overdrive and you’re so jittery you feel like you can’t sit down, but at least I got that buzz. The lights shine brighter but that’s not the sun. Red Bull ion: you think what you’re doing is great but it’s just a drug induced euphoria, a living fever dream.

I’m trying to get cache with my writing, I want to get it to a larger audience. But I don’t care about money, I just care about my art. What a hipster thing to say. I do want to just make a name for myself. Is that so much to ask? I’m not a coward, I’m not afraid to go to the gas chambers. I just want to be famous, there I said it. My idol Stanley Kubrick was the same way, he wanted total creative control over projects. Envy is my sin. My friend is a super talented musician, he can play four instruments, and here I am with my thumb up my ass staying up til three in the morning staring blankly at the computer begging for something to come. He moved to Memphis near Graceland to pursue a musical career. He has a girlfriend too of course, very serious, unlike me. Isn’t everything going just swimmingly for him? And meanwhile here I am I can barely play violin, I need more coffee. I’ll have to stay up all day if I’m going to sleep at night again. I shouldn’t be such a vampire. Reading a book from William Faulkner, indecipherable. I have no idea how I was able to read As I Lay Dying in high school. Trying to get some inspiration from the so-called literary greats but I legitimately have no idea how they became so great in the first place. What the fuck makes them so great in the first place? I guess it’s like the later Hemingway I mentioned it just has to be long indecipherable and most of all boring. I think about the word freedom and what does it truly mean? It’s great to live in a free country where you can pursue your endeavors, but sometimes I want to live in a communist nation where we’re all equal. If I can’t have everything I ever wanted then no one can! Now I’m on Amazon buying things at a rapid pace, blowing through my paycheck, but these are things I need like a microphone. I need to record my thoughts that may be the problem. I’ve got my tickets for Memphis, I hope that July 4th won’t be an inconvenience, maybe that’s what I need to do write a musical about an American hero. A President, Henry Polk, was that his name? He burned the midnight oil didn’t he? I that from high school, where else I guess it wasn’t all so pointless after all. After I finish my magnum opus I guess then I’ll be on par with Jim from Memphis. Why in the hell haven’t you gotten out of here, you should have done that on day one of turning 18. Graduate and get the hell out of dodge if you had to go to college why didn’t you go to Stanford and not Ithica. This deals like a manly version of PMS. I’m being pulled in a number of directions. I know it’s because you have an Oedipus complex, do you even know what that truly

means? I can’t even type properly, scratching my head and my chin. If I could go back in time, what would I do?

This is Cthulhu, destroyer of worlds. As my scribe I grant you one opportunity to go back in time. Think and you’re wish will be granted.

I found that scrolled on my yellow legal pad. I guess I’ll have to call it Cthulhu Legal. Thank god I got a visit from him, I thought I’d have to live with obscurity and never live up to my own personal expectations. The butterfly effect says that each event would dramatically alter the events of the present. I know I said I wanted to kill Nutter but going back to save Presidents Lincoln or Kennedy might be the route to go, they can save us from the horrors of war. Or maybe it would get worse, maybe it will make it so I’ll never be born. Come on why are you even typing this out this is time travel 101. Gas is $2.45 a gallon, do I have to fire up the old DeLorean. Maybe I’m powered by coffee and my own imagination. Then it came to me, in a dawning amazement, that lightbulb above my head I’d always been striving for: go back in time to go to California like I always wanted. Alright deep breaths, I put Zeppelin on the vinyl record player to set the mood. “Cthulhu, I want to go back to when I was 18, I want to get out of this forsaken hellhole, I want to trade the Jets for the Raiders, I want to go to the city of surf instead of the city that never sleeps where I’ll be the true king of the hill. Take me to California.” Then I opened my eyes, I was outside a cave/temple that seemed not too far off R’yleh. I swam not too far off the beach, I was somewhere near a forest of redwoods, I could not have been more giddy or excited. Stanford had to be just down the street. I wanted to walk right into the school and just apply right there on the spot. All the self-doubt I had felt, even almost with a master’s degree evaporated. I felt like I could conquer the world and bend it to my will not unlike the great tentacle god of R’yleh. Maybe I could take up a second job, suddenly I smelled that enticing aroma of the devil’s lettuce, Mary Jane herself. I floated toward the beach as the aroma of the pot wafted my way. The surfers on the beach had the longest of hairs, but there was also a number of afros. What was this 1977? Then I saw the discotheque on the side and a sign “Jimmy Carter for President” next to a movie house showing Rocky I realized

that it was actually 1976. It was a good thing I was wearing my Joe Namath throwback jersey and jeans so that I didn’t look too out of place in this retro universe. I saw a man walk out of the discotheque, from the distance I was at he sounded like he had an Irish accent. From the distorted view I had he was doing a line of cocaine. “Dad! Daddy!” I started to run at him, what a strange world I was in. Then I realized he’d have no idea I was his future son who he would take to first grade and never see again. But maybe he was so coked out of his mind he’d think it was part of his fever dream. That’s how I approached him, “Aiden O’Brien, I am your son. I’m here to warn you about your future.” “My future?” I decided I might as well go for broke no matter what happened in the future. I wouldn’t be able to rest if I couldn’t take advantage of this situation, no stopping halfway: “You will die and leave us all behind if you don’t quit your habit with substances. Repent and believe in the gospel” I threw in at the last minute and walked away backwards while not breaking eye . And soon as it started it all went by the by. Then I went to go see Taxi Driver at the local art house cinema down the street to decompress from this life changing scenario. I wonder whether he would follow me, but just as soon as the film started it ended. I wondered throughout if would he snap out of his addiction? How was I even to get back, should I stay and enjoy the groovy 70’s? It was a great time in my opinion although others say it wasn’t America’s glory days. Should I partake in the mountains of blow? I probably would just have to walk back into that disco. Or maybe just close my eyes and drift off to sleep in these comfy theatre chairs. I’m outta gas…When I opened my eyes I was back in my bed. I checked the computer for the time, present day indeed. When I walked downstairs, I just saw mommy per usual. My Ebenezer Scrooging apparently didn’t work.

Episode IX

Kemba

November 28th, 2014

Dear diary, I have written myself into a corner. I don’t have a conclusion to my story, which isn’t good. I probably should have plotted out my story from the beginning, but that’s just not my style. Maybe I’ll have to go back to the beginning, I feel like it might have worked better with an endgame in mind. There were so many possibilities, but I didn’t know where to go. I feel like with each chapter I’m pulling teeth just to get it done. The New York Times says my work is dead. Could do a few equations of trigonometry.\ No I’m just bored and trying to avoid the topic at hand and that’s that. I need to finish this narrative. Why the fuck would I ever do trigonometry I’m an artist I don’t use that side of my brain, or I’m autistic. Because that’s what I am a poem that doesn’t rhyme I’ll waste away. I need to stop ripping off great artists. What shallow and pedantic work I do. What a waste I am, I’ll waste away. Maybe I should try longhand. Or maybe rip off great artists: “He had finally moved to Los Angeles, the so-called city of angels, or fallen angels. A real change from the horse whispering of Montana in the big domed sky of Bozeman. The smog was so choking but he heard of a mutant named “Razorface” roaming the streets. A razor face and an eraser head, a real aberration. The Bay in San Francisco may have the most jumpers, but they say razorface can cure whatever ails ya. Traffic’s a nightmare in this city. Soon this garbage mound of cars will be wiped away. Clutching at straws hoping to find Razorface, it would be my luck to only get the fallout from the radiation. This bomb is going to make a landscape of fallout.

How far he had come from AD 32, that fateful day lugging his cross up the hills of Golgotha, Christ on a cross next to him. Even with spikes in his hand and the life affirming blood draining from his body he still would not die. The stories of Dracula and Nosferatu were grossly exaggerated; not today, the line must be drawn in the sand. His immortality would come to an end, no sickness could touch him but Razorface with one swipe of his head could end it all. The endless road had finally gotten an ending, he could disappear into the acid of LA once and for all. He was sitting at a pond, the trees drooping in a southern gothic motif style which he found strange for Los Angeles. He looked out at the distance toward the sunset, the landscape shrinking as he felt he was becoming one with the spirit in the sky. And the New York Times said god is dead, what a load! A deep bronchitis like cough enveloped his lungs of which he feared there was no escape. Razorface came and sat on the bench next to him. He knew it was him, no words needed to be spoken, he was wearing his lucky Charlotte Hornets jersey. Tattoos of a biblical nature wove its way down its sleeve. It was like seeing a reflection looking at him again in the great big green sky of Southern LA, vampire that he is. He hadn’t seen an entity like this in a long time, not since the horse he had to put down two years ago. He had that puppy dog look in his eye. “You may call me Kemba” “Am I damned to hell?” he asked “God loves you, but you have rejected him.” “I was there and saw god’s love on the cross, I shared in it with him.” “I have shared in his love too, I was once an angel named Razorface I became human to save you, I am now Kemba. And what have you done since then? Lived off the fat of the land. This world, choking of fire and brimstone is your doing.” “I feel the eye looking down on me. I give my soul completely to god.” “I can’t guarantee you will meet god, but you will receive the rest you need.” “You will not shake your razorface on my head?”

“I have not the power anymore.” Then a mushroom cloud appeared in the distance, this was the end. The Black Plague could not end him though he coughed up a lung, battles could not end him no matter how much gas he inhaled, and famine could not end him no matter how hungry he was. But now being vaporized, even though he had seemingly lived forever, he was going to the same hell as everyone else.

Episode X

The Great Cincinnati Hunger Strike

March 29th, 2015

Dear diary, yesterday I went to McDonald’s and stuffed my fat face with not one, not two, but three Big Macs and a large fry. Mr. Hutter was right I’m a disgusting slob who should be fed from a trough. Jesus fasted for forty days, Gandhi fasted for a month, I hear after a while your digestive system just shuts off. I wish my brain would just shut off that’s the real enemy here. My grad school page has emails that I for the most part ignore, but I saw an interesting one that offers “alternative spring breaks.” Instead of students going to Laguna Beach and getting shitfaced off booze and molly, they go out of their way to make a positive impact. There were a few destinations: New Orleans, Savannah Georgia, one that really piqued my interest was Cincinnati Ohio. Maybe it’s just ing the song from that Christmas movie “I come from C-I-N-C-I-N-NA-T-I Cincinnati! They wanted to call it Cincy but Cincy was too Nati!” I’d been to the excesses of Paris, going to New Orleans around Mardi Gras would be too glutenous. I needed in my hunger strike to find a very dull place, and a Midwest city would be perfect for my abstinence. I signed up, last minute as is my style. Off to Cincinnati for the great adventure. If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, it’s up to you Cincinnati.

Day 1:

Dear diary, today is the day. I’m using the last of my Met sculpture compensation on this trip, it turns out you can’t even volunteer without a fee. We

had a long trip, stopping off at Niagara Falls on the way there. I could feel minor hunger pangs on the way, nothing too out of the ordinary. I decided not to give up coffee, liquids being a good loophole. If I gave up coffee I would never get out of bed. At Niagara Falls I honestly just wanted to get in a barrel and fall over and not even for the novelty, just to straight up commit suicide. My hunger strike seemed like my last hope to clear my mind from anxiousness. There’s no doubt I have tried everything: religion, booze, meditation. None of them work, especially meditation, the modern meditation being a complete joke; how am I supposed to empty my mind. I’m hoping turning off my brain by starving it to death will be very helpful. Can’t run mental marathons if you have no shoes. I don’t know what made me think of this. My starting weight is 205 pounds, I’m hoping to get down to 135. I know that’s grossly underweight, but I’d rather be underweight than overweight like I’ve been the last few years. It was the prescriptions for anxiety I’m pretty sure. They’ve made me balloon and I’ve had an insatiable appetite. I honestly don’t care how fast I lose the weight, patience has always been my strongest virtue.

Day 3:

Dear diary, today we went to the Great American Ballpark to see a Cincinnati Reds game. They’re generally basement dwellers in the national league, all I really know about them is they beat Billy Martin’s Yankees team in the 70’s. The food was very tempting: hot dogs, beer, bratwurst, they even had a lobster roll that smelled like it came straight from Maine. Just a peanut, one little peanut or a cracker jack. I haven’t even lost any weight yet I’m pretty sure. I just sat there baking in the hot summer Ohio sun, hunger pangs clobbering my gut. Joey Votto hit a homerun that landed only two rows behind me. I was too distracted by my hunger to reach up. I felt like if I did my stomach would rip apart, my starved entrails bleeding out, blending into the maroon bleachers. Other volunteers on this trip are becoming a bit worried, I just tell them I’m not hungry at the moment.

Day 4:

Dear diary, we went to the Cincinnati homeless shelter and did some soup kitchen work. I feel great that others less fortunate then me are getting the food they need. My head is becoming clearer, I’m sure I’ve lost a couple of pounds, there’s no way I can’t have. Everybody should give up food for a couple of days, really cleans out the system. My dreams are merging with reality, I’ll it I’m having a tough time concentrating. Imagine where I’ll be on day 24! Staring at a blank page in my thoughts, I don’t know where to go from here.

Day 5:

Today I met at the morning soup kitchen a man named Zod. “I come from the planet Krypton. A dead planet, I tried to stop them before it died.” I’d read my fair share of Superman comics so it’s not like he’s making this shit up out of thin air. I knew he was a fraud; a plagiarist. He’s trying to be a subdued, quiet type. I could picture him on that weird roster of criminals like Lex Luthor. Maybe he is the great General Zod, I’ve met Cthulhu on a number of occasions so it wouldn’t phase me. I’m not afraid of anything.

Day 7:

I feel like I’m floating. I’m out of my body. Everybody has become very concerned for me. Normally at a time like this I would get a pizza for comfort food. It’s only a matter of time before my digestive system finally shuts down like Gandhi. Gandhi, what a guy! Who knew that through the power of abstinence he could do something like get India’s independence? I walk down the street I can’t take my mind’s off women’s behinds, they probably eat a lot even someone with a bony butt probably eats at least an almond once in a while. I’m shaking all over, I can taste the salt in my tears, that is something I never thought I’d notice before. I could end this all very easily just go down the street

and get a burger. It’s been a week I don’t even know why I started all this. Was it to gain independence? Independence from what? Being a fat fuck that’s what. I hate myself when I look in the mirror, but is that from trauma from eighth grade, did Hutter do that much damage? Do I eat as therapy? Then I should keep going till I’m skin and bones that’ll be the only time I’m happy. Happy, what does that word even mean? I feel like I want to go to bed, I feel like I’ll become one with the bed pretty soon, it takes all my effort just to get out under the sheets, and I feel like soon I won’t be able to generate body heat because I have no energy. What am I talking about? I’ve been fasting for a week, I’ll never be Gandhi. I should just quit like I have everything else. But it’s good to quit all these worldly things because then I wouldn’t have quit the one thing that matters in the end. Food is so bountiful, it’s a sign of god’s love. Maybe I’m rejecting it.

Day 9:

Large venti cold brew from Starbucks. That is my nutrition for the day. Caffeine is the only supplement I truly need and the sugar in the cold foam isn’t too bad either. Worked at the food bank again today stocking shelves, I felt like I had no energy though to lift me so I asked if I could just load the boxes. Everyone on my trip is worried about me, I haven’t eaten a morsel. Drank a morsel yes. Tonight there’s going to be a drinking game, it will rev up my blood sugar and I’m going to get the booze munchies. Under the influence you’ll just stuff your face with no consequence. I saw my papa in my dream today, snorting coke he probably didn’t have an appetite. I’m going to run out and get a pack of fags. I really don’t want to start smoking again to be honest. I’ve barely even discussed Cincinnati, but that’s because I can barely what’s happening these days. It’s all one gigantic blur. Cincinnati, I’ve got you under my skin, what’s left of it. Today we worked with the homeless selling newspapers, that’s their only means for making a living. Could’ve been something, came from nothing. Lost it all one way or another the means didn’t really matter. I gave one guy twenty dollars for a paper, more than the full monty I had saved up from food. But I didn’t need it anymore, my pants are starting to fall, my belt is tightened to its max. It’s not

anxiety that’s wearing me out, like I said you can’t start a road trip if you have no gas in the tank. I guess I feel a little less guilty because I’m not eating flesh from a cow. I would fall in love with it if I saw it on the farm. Savages we are eating the flesh of animals. I might have gone too far with this fasting business.

Day 11:

I was staring at a woman’s heels. I couldn’t balance on those shoes at all. I would probably fail a DWI test. When you get hungry you’re mind goes to the most bizarre places, not like it doesn’t normally anyway. Like here’s a little piece of my heart: I find Janis Joplin very shrill and listening to her suppresses my appetite because she hurt my ears with her banshee screech. When you get this far without food that’s all you care about, trying to get food. This is against my nature how did Jesus go forty days without food in the desert?

Episode XI

Wemish

April 20th, 2015

Dear diary, my father was a protestant, or “prod” he would say in his thick Irish accent. That’s the only thing I ed of him, before his untimely death. I wonder how much the snow powder contributed to that. Jim had finally invited me down formally to Memphis. I was the last of the many in a long line of visitors to his brand-new house. I knew before I went to the bible belt I needed my fix of Jesus. I often said “he’s my king,” “he’s my savior” but when I say it I feel like I’m not saying it with all my heart. I feel happy in church, but I can’t live a life in this world and be devoted to god, the two things are not compatible. My father often said when I was a child to do everything for the glory of god, but I think god would think I’d be pretty pathetic if he saw the inner workings of my life. And after what happened in Memphis I wonder if I have a one-way ticket to purgatory. Anyway, Jim could afford a house down south while I could barely afford to move out of my mother’s basement. I rubbing my stubbled face against his aggressive stubble, “wemish” we called it. More than a hug, maybe one day I’ll grow a beard. I was excited more than anything to go to an authentic vinyl record store. I bought a new turntable at home for this occasion. I got off the plane and he was there to meet me at terminal C. At that moment I started to cry, I cry all the time, and I can’t stop crying. They say tears are stress toxins your body forcibly ejects, and that’s why I often feel better. I know of a woman who cries 50 times a day, I wish I could do that because I do love crying. There was a baby crying the whole way on the plane, I wasn’t too far off. How can that couple possibly deal with three kids, I could barely deal with these kids wailing next to me from across the aisle. I also sleep but find no rest: 8 hours,

12, 16 it doesn’t make a difference because when I fall asleep I’m not getting the rest I need. I only get up because I have bed sores in my legs. The weight on my shoulders is crushing but it’s tough to be Sisyphus and push the rock up the hill when you’re beat tired before you even start. If life is a 26.2-mile marathon I’m dying of cramps, and the water checkpoints are of no help at all; I feel like I’m having an ulcer. I often want to die these days, just fall asleep and not wake up and I think the reason is because I’m a total waste of space. Everybody wants to be somebody, and I’m going nowhere with my writing. Sometimes I think the only thing to work for in this life is get into heaven, and I don’t know what heaven is anymore. That’s what I thought as I neared him, his crown of success emanating from his Atlanta Braves cap. I wish I had never come down here, I just want to go full out agoraphobe and never leave the house. I’m a bit of a coward about sleeping pills but that’s a mortal sin that will send you to the seventh circle of hell. It’s a very selfish thing to do, I don’t know what my mother would do without me. But maybe I’d drink myself to death Leaving Las Vegas style. At this rate I’m going to be scared to death. Why the hell do I feel like this, I went to Paris not too long ago. But maybe the traveling has taken a toll on my psyche. There’s only so much sitting at a ninety-degree angle you can take. Security checks, where you’re terrified there’s a speck of weed in your pocket. How it got there you don’t know you haven’t smoked in years but now you’re getting buttfucked by the TSA. I also had enough legal prescription drugs for anxiety that they looked at me very suspiciously, even when I produced my prescription. Tarmacs and layovers. Airplane books that are real page turners but hollow inside, like me. I think the one I read this time was about some sort of murder investigation. I need to get away from all that, why can’t I just get an escapist romp? Then there I was walking out of baggage check into the muggy air, the overhead speakers humming “Walking in Memphis” cheesily like everyone coming to New York sings Sinatra. When did we all become so unoriginal? Can’t we behave like humans for once and not robots. I wanted to break out of this inhuman routine, the rut I’m in, but I feel like I’ve tuned into the classic hits: 80’s, 90’s and today station that plugs my drive time. Don’t stop me now cause I’m havin’ a good time, except that I’m not. Except none of us are. But again, as I was saying, we wemished each other, that preposterous word we had made up back in high school. We kicked the hackey sack whilst reciting poetry, our favorite being Hemingway and his Whitman-esque new word “wemish.” Basically, just a hug using the neck not wrapping around with arms

between two friends who had beards. We were close friends, but Jim was talented at the guitar which made him chick magnet and eventually a sex lunatic. Meanwhile, I had to lose my virginity to a French whore. He was on the track team and consistently won the 1600-meter dash. I could barely finish the 400meter dash. He could grow a dashing goatee, I had peach fuzz. I told you envy was my cardinal sin. We of course bonded over things like the horror of Knicks, Jets, and Mets games, the trifecta of losers in the tri state area. We bonded over Hemingway and Faulkner, we loved Bill Murray comedies and Marvel cinematic universe films (we never missed one). But I harbored a severe hatred deep in my heart he never would see. It all came down to very simply to the fact that he was a dashing sex god and I was not. In my attempts to be a devout Protestant I should forgive him, even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. He is certainly one of the nicest people I know, I’m the one who needs forgiveness if anything. God’s forgiveness; that’s the problem being a Protestant though, there’s no confession, so I have to just go out on a whim and hope my invisible god forgives me. I’ll feel it in my heart for sure. Envy and all the other deadly sins will be lifted from my conscience. I should rank the seven deadly sins because I suffer from them all to varying degrees. I suffer from gluttony but am not fat, so I don’t know how much that counts. Sloth is a big one because I feel handcuffed to the bed every morning, eyes glued shut. “So, what’s up?” he started “Oh nothing just trying to finish my graduate thesis.” I replied “How’s that going?” “OK” I said, a blatant lie I feel like I’m going to become the professor from Animal House who says he’s been working on his novel for four and a half years and that it’s a piece of shit. Speaking of shit, Memphis is a shit town. Why would a professional basketball team want to put down roots here? If I were them I’d move to Seattle, now there’s a real city. His car stalled when he put it in the ignition, my heartbeat was pounding, I did not want to get stuck in the ghetto. But we were barely out of the airport, how could we already be in the ghetto? It wasn’t too long before I almost stepped on a needle. Burned tobacco filling the motorway I’m tempted to start smoking again but what I really need is my binkie, but I can’t take it out in front of Jim, I don’t want to show any sign of weakness. I don’t need him to change my diapers. I don’t want him to know I’m

still a baby. This place is scary and I want my mummy. I feel like I’m emotionally regressing and soon I’ll be back in my mother’s womb. I have mommy issues, what would I do if she died suddenly too. I’d have no back up, no . Don’t think about that right now, just focus on a having a nice vacation in the ghetto. I feel like I need to adapt to my environment. Maybe do a bit of Gonzo Journalism that will help my piece of shit thesis. If only my teacher taught me properly how to write a thesis, I have so much untapped potential I feel inside. “Razorface” got a B-, barely on the cusp because you can’t get below that in grad school. I feel like there’s a lot riding on my thesis. I still have classes after this, but I’m going nowhere with my thesis. Winners don’t do drugs, but maybe some ink from Cthulhu would help. We ed a lady of the night; no I have debased myself too much already. I need a sober mind to continue with this feat. But inspiration needed to come to me and fast or I would be fucked. Stay on point. When we got the car started and made it to the record store, I was shocked by how much the records cost. Twenty- and thirty-dollar LPs wouldn’t be too much for someone who has a master’s degree normally, working a job with a suit and tie, but I’m still running on my mud sculpture pension from the Met. Some used ones for a dollar, and then I found it: Highway 61 Revisited. We took it to his house (three bedrooms, are you shitting me?!) and listened to it that night, a low-key kind of night. Then it began skipping, and I got frustrated. “There’s no need to yell.” he tried to in vain calm me down. Do I have anger issues? Probably, from my piece of shit Protestant father and his coke habit that I got all these damn issues. Anxiety, depression, paranoia. But I always push it deep down. It’s all too much; why does Jim get everything he gets in life and I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel in shitty jobs. He was always more popular then me in school, he got better grades, he was more athletic. He was tall and dashing and I was a hunchback. He blazed new trails in the musical Avant Garde, but I chose the path of writing even though everything original has already been written about. God blessed him and damned me. In my fury I ripped the “Highway 61 Revisited” album off the turntable, broke it in half and began cutting myself. I don’t know if I meant to go for the wrists or not but I made a rookie mistake and went horizontally. I don’t know what tempted me to do that, I was not a cutter. It was just a sudden burst of resentment, all the envy deep in my heart burst out. How could I lash out at my best friend? Blood came out, I got deep, I didn’t

think I could get that deep with vinyl, but I guess that’s why they’re so tough to break. My father once left an old collection of Irish hymns on vinyl in the car and they melted into black goo not unlike Cthulhu’s writing ink I found at the beach. Is this it, is this the end? Blood was coming out in a thick maroon velvet, and my friend was terrified. “Why did you do that?” he asked. He went to go call 911, but I stopped him. I know what those hospitals are like, I’d seen enough movies. I could only imagine the cages they’d throw me into to rot for eternity. I grabbed the phone after 9-1 was dialed, so close but you won’t get me this time you bastard. You’re the one that gets to live the blessed life, this would obviously be your first option. I have to find ways to cope internally, I can’t let anyone know how I really feel. Everything’s got to come off as just peachy. So I grabbed my bags, called an uber and was on my way to the airport. I saw from the end of Jim’s driveway he was in tears, and I knew this would be the end of our friendship. Ten years down the drain. Another wemish I’d never feel. New record: I’ve ruined friendships and relationships that lasted a year or two, but this is one that could be read on the SportsCenter ticker. “O’Brien-Perkins friendship terminated after 10 years.”

Episode XII

Deus Ex Machina

April 30th, 2015

Dear diary, so there I was, leaving on a jet plane. I wish I could say I didn’t know when I’d get back again, but I knew exactly when. Flying back from Memphis, arm in a makeshift cast from Bob Dylan vinyl slashing my wrists, I’d be home in about two hours now. Minor turbulence, the plane began shaking a bit, but I was asleep so I wasn’t dying of panic luckily. Have you ever woken up from sleeping and for a split second you are in reality but not cognizant of where you are? Then you do realize where you are and you get that pit in your stomach anxiety having to face reality again. Like clockwork I was blissfully ignorant then boom, terrified of being on a plane, having to face my life again. I looked down, I had been reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for what felt like the umpteenth million time. I looked out at the atmosphere we were hovering in, wondering if this is what heaven is really like. It says in the acts of the apostles that Christ ascended into heaven on a cloud, I wondered if he was hiding out somewhere. I’m sure someone on a plane somewhere in the world would look out and see Jesus looking back at him or her. It was said it is not for you to know the times the father has fixed by his authority. But it seems like always there are massive threats signaling the possible end of mankind. Right now, as I write, we are threatened with the collapse of our ecosystem with global warming although no one’s taking this threat very seriously. End times seem to be on the horizon; Fear and Loathing: that’s life perfectly summarized. Hunter didn’t even need drugs to find the heart of the American nightmare after all. I hate myself and I’m scared. I got up to go to the bathroom in the back, if there’s anything worse than sitting at a 90-degree angle for hours on end its pissing at a 90-degree angle in cramped quarters. We hit another snag of turbulence; this time so severe my bodily

discharge went flying out under me. For a brief second I was absolutely terrified. Although if we were to crash right now I wouldn’t be so sad. It would just be the crash making the roller coaster like emptiness in my stomach that would be hard to deal with. I looked out the window, clouds shaking violently with the airplane. I buckled myself in, everyone’s complementary pretzels and drinks flying throughout the aisles, knocking me in the back of the head lightly. I might have wanted to die but not by choking on a pretzel. I’m shocked looking back I didn’t get scalded by hot coffee either. The oxygen masks deployed at this point. I had no idea what was wrong with the plane; the weather outside in the stratosphere seemed perfectly fine, maybe Cthulhu was making an entrance? He may be an amphibious creature, but maybe this was his entrance to the world, out of his natural habitat. But then I saw we all saw a light; from my window seat it was coming at a horizontal angle. The pilots in the cockpit must be blinded like this, not even staring at the sun head on was quite a bright as this. Fiery sunlight streaming from a cloud then we were sucked in and then silence and darkness. Was this death? If it is it must be hell, stuck forever in pitch blackness with just your thoughts. Ninth circle of hell if I correctly from Dante. Then I heard an old timey baseball game being called, they announced 42 which I recalled being Jackie Robinson’s number. Brooklyn or Los Angeles Dodgers I wasn’t sure of the era. I awoke and saw sunlight. It was a beautiful day in Brooklyn, clouds dotting the sky, kids out in the street playing stick ball. Almost too good to be true; A simpler time. At the exact moment I turned on the 60’s era television box with a long kerchunk twist my idol President John F. Kennedy, in staticky black and white, alive and well, was giving his famous inaugural speech, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The timing seemed almost too perfect. “I bet your wondering where you are” President Kennedy looked to me. “This is the afterlife. I know this is where you would find the most happiness in the afterlife.” “Does that make you god?” I asked “This is the closest I can come to communicate with you. I am so great and glorious I cannot come down from the heavens as your father.” Responded President Kennedy

“Did the plane go down?” “In a way, that light you saw was me bringing you home.” “Why? “Look where you were. You had cut your wrists in agony, consumed by envy. You couldn’t go on with your life.” “Why didn’t you let me end it my way?” “It is not for you to know the times or seasons he has fixed by his own authority.” “What happened to all the other people on the plane?” “They’re in their own version of the afterlife. Now just lie down and watch my inauguration.” “But I know how this ends already. A couple years then boom you’re gone, just like me. You might as just well send me back.” “I thought you’d be happier here. Why would you want to go back?” “I want to see my mommy. She’s the only person I truly love.” “Love thy god with all your heart.” “But I don’t love you, I might go to church a lot but I don’t even know you. You should have never created me in the first place.” That was me, an eternal Debbie downer, unable to escape the darkness even when literally in the presence of god. I closed my eyes and leaned down onto the bed. What would happen when I woke up? Would I be somewhere else in time and space? I thought heaven would be like in the clouds I was looking at out of the airplane window at. God works in mysterious ways. I woke up in my own bed. Getting off the plane, going through baggage claim, driving home was all a blank.

Episode XIII

Redemption

Dear diary: “This is the life you have chosen for yourself and will continue to choose for yourself.” God didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew this is what he meant through the actions of my resurrection. Or at least that’s what touched my heart. I realized this was the one true apostolic god I had studied so many times in Sunday school as a kid. There had been other false idols like Cthulhu, but I knew in my spirit that this was god revealing himself truly to me. This was the crossroads I was at: be of the world or of the kingdom of heaven. Lead all souls to heaven especially those in most need of thy mercy. My whole life had been leading up to this, funny how time moves when you are truly awake. I will go to church again and again, every Sunday mass, every Good Friday, because I know that god loves me. He was testing me, and I heard straight from the horse’s mouth I had ed the test. Hunger strikes, riots, horrible jobs, art, all lead to this. Now to get writing.

Part II The Next Great American Novel

Typing like a maestro at a piano, clickity clack Charging the unknown alone like Hannibal at the gates of Rome Custer’s last stand, I have to get it all out Purge, purge, purge, and if I don’t I feel like I’m going to snap Snap a chair, take the wood and die of a nasty splinter Blood on the floor, blood on the wall I was meant to be a writer, I have to finish that novel I’ve been working on Over caffeinated, trying to make something out of nothing Can’t type to the beat of the music on the Starbucks speakers Unlike drugs or analysis This is my therapy, and I must trudge on Do not go gentle into that good night Just type, type, type like there’s no tomorrow

Preface

“I dedicate this book to my beloved mother, teachers who helped me learn to write, and my lord, savior, and father on high who saved me in my hour of need. My best hope is this book helps someone who was struggling like I was and to know that it gets better. Because in my experience, it does, and I know it will for you too, even when the world is burning down around you.”-Connor O’Brien

Prologue

The Stream

“I stood on the bridge ready to jump off. I was hypnotized by the stream of the river, a brisk Milwaukee spring made chunks of winter’s ice flow down with the cool water jet. I could hear the din of Bob Uecker calling the Brewers from a car ing, strange that would be the last thing I’d ever hear. The fact that they’re still playing major league baseball at Miller Park just down the street is simply astounding to me. ‘Two balls and a strike on the centerfielder.’ I had already swung at strike three. Never a big Brewers fan, always more a fan of the Milwaukee Bucks even though my father hated other ethnicities, especially the blacks. I had to stop pretending; I was my father’s son. To be honest after what happened I wanted to end it in my home. Suicide may be a mortal sin in the eyes of Allah but I don’t care about eternal damnation at this point. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve come here, staring at the stream, sometimes gushing, sometimes frozen like a brick but still flowing under the thick layer of surface ice. Certainly my first time as a Muslim. This is the last time I’ll see the stream. I’m going to jump in and finish it, I wonder if this is terminal velocity though. The only thing that could save me is if this bridge wasn’t high enough to die on impact. Then I’d be paralyzed, and I would be easy pickings. Even if a guardian angel came right now, I would insist I wish I’d never been born, even if he showed me what life would be like without me. 45.7 million abortions have happened since Roe V Wade, I wish I was lucky enough to be one of them. What are the odds I am not aborted, 15.5 per 1000 to be exact. God hates me so much he put me through this hell called life: born and raised right as the earth was going to shit. Look at me, the world is burning down and I’m still being this selfish and self-loathing after the billions who are dead, dying and are going to die. Am I being too overdramatic? I guess when you’re staring at your hour of death as the end of the world is happening around you can be a tad dramatic. Time to get more realistic. Let’s go back to the beginning.

Chapter I

I’ve Got All My Sisters with Me

They say you look back on your childhood fondly, with rose colored spectacles. Mine were more like dirt brown, there’s no nostalgia; I saw everything for what it was crystal clear from the getgo. My father was a Polack, even though he hated that slur. Funny seeing as he could say without blinking that Milwaukee was being taken over by the chinks and spicks. He was like Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire. The only other thing he needed was a wife named Stella. But I guess a racist Polish immigrant was par for the course in this part of Wisconsin. My pops once told me he wanted to become a priest, but chastity was certainly not his forte, double the pride double the fall. But he had the biggest heart he was very lovable even though he was a complete fuck up. How many sons have said that about their fathers over many generations? The problem with my dad was he was too damned handsome. For a Polack he could pick up any woman he wanted. Soft blonde hair and a chin that could cut steel, he looked more Swedish to be honest. ‘Ring the bells’ my mother said on her wedding day ‘no more women for you.’ In jest. But the harsh reality was he’d never struggled so much in his life. Something was wrong when he porked her brains out on the wedding night then got bored. At the start of this they should have had a conversation about polygamy and promiscuousness. But my only memory of my mother unfortunately was that she was not assertive in the slightest, the prime example of meekness. He was a Milwaukee beat cop patrolling the streets, and just like he was as a father he was pretty terrible at it. Milwaukee may be home to hundreds of thousands of people, but he was basically a glorified security guard all his days. His lieutenants gave him orders but he wasn’t very good at instructions. I’m shocked he went thirty years on the force and got that cheap gold watch. My father never played catch with me, skateboarded around the city with me, or even played soccer with me. It was definitely frustrating as a kid coming home from school every day, doing my homework, doing my chores, shootin’ hoops in

the yard then waiting until around 8 PM still gitty with excitement. Then he would crash on the couch not saying a word to me and I would feel deeply disappointed. On good days he complained of being too tired, lying his ass off because he was just a lazy sod. By the time I took up an interest in cooking it was a bit too late to kindle an interest in me and he lost me forever. Thank god I had three sisters: Mary Jane, Annie, and Alice (Annie and Alice being twins). They were my rock, providing a womanly affection my father never could, and especially since my mother was always gone. My father, although lovable, was also cold as a snowman. Sorry to be grim, but middle aged and low on testosterone that’s the best analogy. I was an emotionally fragile little boy. The worst part of this is you don’t have a shoulder to cry on, but my sisters were never put off by this. We bonded over cooking dinner every night, my Polish grandmother had the best recipe for spaghetti with the key being just the right amount of sugar. Pasta, kielbasa, veal, it was the highlight of my weekends. I don’t know how as a glorified security guard he could afford to take care of the four of us let alone get decent food put on the table, but he did god bless that lovable oaf. I also played baseball, America’s pastime. My father wanted me to go into football, but it was too violent for my taste. Something about the simplicity of it, I didn’t have to be super athletic pitching. I could really toss some heat; I don’t know where it came from though. A little wild but with my lenses I’d settled down a bit. Plus if I didn’t my father would think I was some kind of a housewife faggot with my cooking and gossiping with the girls. I one day, and bear in mind I could see just fine, I beaned the right fielder who was hitting. I got thrown out for the one time in my career, and I often think back to it if I was trying to impress my father. And I think if he’d been at the game he would have been proud of me for being assertive for once. I went home and overcooked the burgers, the well-done meat also a sign of aggressiveness. If you can’t tell I have daddy issues. I honestly don’t know where they stem from, he’s not the kind that drinks and hits us, but there’s something beneath the surface for sure. I think it was the deep seeded notion that I knew for sure that for the rest of my life I was going to be a working class schlub. I looked at my father and I hated what I saw because I knew that was what was in store for me.

Chapter II

The Hookah Shop

Two of my three sisters are drug addicts. One kept it on the down low, with the other it was getting out of hand fast. I almost was consumed and escaped this fate by the skin of my teeth. My father was shot in the line of duty when I was 15, my sister’s stole his prescribed oxycontin, which had just burst on the market courtesy of Purdue pharma. More people back then died from overdoses per year than causalities from the entire Vietnam War. Some people looked worse than zombies. I’d be lying if I said it was easy to write out of thin air, but I kept a log of my oxy trips when I started. It was after looking over all this that I decided to kick my habit, if I didn’t, I would have overdosed in a matter of time, maybe get hooked on black tar. Here’s some excerpts:

April 9th, 2012

It’s been a month since dad was shot. It was his own fault waltzing into a chop shop like that with no backup. Even a 15-year-old with an acne breakout knows that! I’ll never be a cop and it’s probably because I’m too smart. I didn’t want to do it initially, but Annie and Alice convinced me. Short of begging me on hand and knee to sneak into the medicine cabinet to get my father’s Oxy, I almost did it out of pity. It was just sitting there in plain sight on the second shelf, shouldn’t he have known better! What if a junkie broke in then he’d be in some excruciating pain having to go cold turkey. Only a half-bottle left so I could only grab one for each one of us. I started to put it under my tongue, but Anne ground it up and snorted it raw through her nostril. I did the same; this weird dripping feeling going down the back of my throat. I had heard this was what cocaine was like, but this was like something different. This was like 10 bottles of Red Bull but without the jitteriness. We cooked for what felt like hours, doing no wrong

with the kielbasa dish, just the right amount of seasoning. It tasted just like heaven and by the time we got to dessert the high finally wore off.

April 26th, 2012

I sneaked back into the medicine cabinet, the label almost in exactly the same spot. My dad may have been an idiot but I was terrified he was counting the pills and was going to find three gone. This was the last time. This time it was just me and Alice so what harm could taking two more do? This is just me being paranoid because I know my dad and he’s too absentminded to check. So I grabbed them and Alice crushed them again and bam up my nose again. This was a similar but not one hundred percent cloud nine like the first time maybe only ninety eight percent because something was a bit off. We went down to the spirits shop and bought some shisha. I get the distinct feeling the cashier is a Mormon or something her collar is done all the way up like she is wearing a suit, sans the jacket. I still accidentally sneak a peak at her breasts. We smoke the hookah, but the high has worn off quicker this time, I try to reconcile with inhaling the cooled tobacco at a faster pace.

May 4th, 2012

My dad got a refill today, he still has no idea. I felt the need to steal three this time, only one for Annie but two for me the selfish dog. This time we watched a movie on Netflix, Vanilla Sky. In my inebriated state I could still tell it was a pretty trippy movie. I didn’t know where the weirdness of the movie stopped and where I was floating on Oxy. My trip was at about 90 percent from the first time, I’m really starting to chase the dragon even though I’ve only been popping pills for a month.

May 10th, 2012

My dad is definitely catching on. I can feel it; I’ve only been taking Oxy for a month but I can already feel myself becoming a zombie. I’m trying to wean myself off oxy by smoking cartons of cigarettes. The withdrawal is so harsh I wish I could get cancer from cigarettes now and kick the bucket.

May 20th, 2012

Alice today got a bottle from her local drug dealer. There are dozens of dealers just in our neighborhood. Should I go with her? The temptation is enormous I can feel the pill calling me. We could make pasta dishes til the worlds end and feel good about it. I didn’t realize the temptations. I told her no on it, but I saw her take five, a fistful in her mouth. Never tried heroin though, always felt that was a bridge too far.

Chapter III

Mr. Peterson’s Opus

Around this time I entered high school. Again, I don’t know how my father managed to swing this, but he was able to send me to the same private academy Alice was in at the time. I had pitched as far back in my childhood as I can and immediately made the junior varsity team, bying the usual freshman team altogether. I of course had some freshman year jitters but most of my fears were alleviated because I was now in the same school with Alice, who had become my favorite sibling. It’s not just because of the times we shared while high, but when we cooked and talked and watched Friends we shared a deep connection that only bloodline siblings could. I could look into her glazed eyes but behind the murkiness I sensed a deep pathos that she cared for me unconditionally like a mother. It’s probably not very motherly to pedal drugs to their son. But I digress, she was only 16, an affable teenager. No one that age should have to take on the responsibilities of motherhood. On my first day a hulking man who seemed to be 7-foot-tall came bounding up, pounding his fists and eerily chanting “frreeeeeshman.” I looked completely shocked and frightened in my footsteps before he laughed and introduced himself as one of the teachers, Mr. Peterson. He even introduced me by his full name Larry Peterson. It looked like we were immediately off to a chummy start. He was the head of “Ethics,” an interesting semester long course that I heard was especially engaging for 9th graders, especially in light of all the weak academic work I’d be taking like Geometry and Geography. “You might be thinking we’re going to study Plato and Aristotle, but we’re going to do something else that won’t leave you all lost.” We chuckled at this. I could think of nothing worse than starting the day dredging through irrelevant ancient times burrowing through incomprehensible philosophy. “We’re going to instead study the Nazi regime and the ethics of those in the empire.” My typical day in my freshman year was a strict routine. Wake up at 6 AM, eat a

spartan breakfast, go for a quick jog. Annie dropped me off at school right before the 8 AM bell, 1st period was luckily Mr. Peterson’s ethics class, a great way to start the day. Too bad I then had to slog through garbage classes like English studying Romeo & Juliet. Totally useless, like most of high school. In ethics we studied the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, how those fascists were able to pull the wool under the eyes of the populace and get away with horrible things in the name of nationalism. “Mr. Peterson, can I talk to you?” I said one day after an especially brutal class. We had just watched Schindler’s List and I was shaken to my core. The sign above Auschwitz said “Work Makes You Free” and I felt with all the hard work I must be like a Nazi. I knew my dad would never sign the permission slip to watch the film, so I had Alice forge it. “Absolutely, I always have time to talk to you” one day when I asked to talk to Mr. Peterson. I always felt like I was his favorite student, a freshman who truly touched his heart. Was it simply for my phenomenal baseball skills (he was a massively diehard baseball fan), or the fact that I gave 100 percent in his class? Either way he seemed to enjoy my presence in class more than any other student in a long time. “I’m scared. I feel as bad as if I were a Nazi killing Jews” “Dear lord! What makes you think that?” “I just feel like a terrible person. Seeing the liquidation of the Ghetto and how there was nothing I could do to stop it. Mr. Peterson furrowed his brow “Think about it this way: Jesus died for your sins, even though you were born after the ion, you are still responsible for his death. But he still loves you and will show everlasting mercy toward you.” He was usually a rather freewheeling guy, but this was said in the utmost grave seriousness. I didn’t get a good night sleep for weeks. I kept imagining the ashes of Holocaust victims falling on Liam Neeson. I could never forgive myself for the death of Jesus and everything was just haunting me. I didn’t want to have to resort to taking sleeping pills (again, I knew for a fact they were just sitting there in my father’s bathroom cabinet.), but you have no idea what it’s like to get no sleep for a week. You really start to lose it. Two days on you feel sloggy and

struggling to focus. Three days on you can’t focus at all. Four days you feel trapped and there’s no escape but the sweet embrace of death. I was out pitching and thought I saw Mr. Peterson and Alice there in the stands, probably my two favorite people in the whole wide world there while I did what I loved. I couldn’t throw a strike to save my life that day it was like there were three batters in my insomniac haze. No one who is 14 years old should have to deal with issues like this. I came home same times as always, dad toiling away at his meaningless occupation. I went upstairs to lie down (or try the best I could) and swore to the point of literally double taking that I saw Mr. Peterson defiling my sweet Alice on her bed. But I shrugged it off, there was no way that was possible. That night I slept like a baby. When I awoke, I shrugged off the idea that my sister was sleeping with my mentor from my head as an insomniac delusion or hallucination or something. I went downstairs for my morning black coffee (14 is not too young for coffee, I don’t care what you say) and Wheaties and saw Alice, wishing her the customary good morning before cramming my last homework on Romeo and Juliet I hadn’t bothered to do the night before in my haze. Ethics was coming to an end with the conclusion of the semester, but I was looking forward to the next semester’s course on World Religions. I saw Alice pop a pill but honestly didn’t judge her in what had become my liberal mindset. We read Night by Elle Wiesel throughout the next week. Thank the lord this wasn’t visualized like Schindler’s List or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep for another week and I just couldn’t deal with that with the state championship coming up. I needed to be laser focused. Alice’s 18th birthday was coming up soon, I busied myself with what to do for the momentous occasion. I was going to bake her a cake from scratch, my finest creation. I hoped she would at least eat the cake because she looked like a skeleton lately. Finals were just around the corner. I didn’t have to study much for Ethics because I was so absorbed in the class and many images were seared into my memory. After taking the exam (and finishing in the fastest time in the class) I handed in my paper and was about to take off when I noticed an engagement ring on his finger. I felt happy for him and wanted to talk to him about it but needed to stay silent as others were still taking the test. I pitched a gem of a game in the state finals on my home turf, hit the showers, grabbed my gym bag and got on the bus, a long night still ahead of me needing to study for the

Geography exam the next day of which I couldn’t give less than two shits about. I tucked in Mary Jane and went about stirring a pot for the chocolate cake I was going to bake. I saw Alice had a ring on her finger, I assumed it must be some novelty. “Goin’ to the chapel to get married, eh Alice?” Alice did not respond, it suddenly dawned on me even though I couldn’t even fathom it. Anger exploding with violent frustration, sadness, shock, and dejection all at once. Emotions began swirling, feeling almost like each possible feeling colliding at once. Alice was engaged to Mr. Peterson. “Tell me it’s not true!” I almost pleaded. A small, weak bow signaled in the affirmative “Why?” Every why begat another why. Why marry a teacher in his mid 30’s, why get married at such a young age? I saw a pill bottle on the counter and the gears began to turn. He seduced her but was plying her pills. “Is that it? Is it because he’s feeding you pills?” Alice began to sob at this and ran out of the house. I went into her room, found two more bottles of oxycontin, tempted to flush them down the toilet. I saw on her computer monitor a rough version of their wedding invitations. It disgusted me seeing my favorite teacher there on the lake with my sister, him with a goofy grin like everything was alright in the world and he had found true happiness. I was tempted to punch the laptop incurring the anger of Alice and probably bleeding all over her carpet. And besides, if there was anything to punch it would be Mr. Peterson’s face. Obviously, I enjoyed my time at the academy, so I wasn’t insubordinate enough to punch a teacher. I got an A on the final, and luckily didn’t see him again in class studies or I would have been sitting in class with a white hot anger, wanting to get my vengeance.

Chapter IV

Apocalypse Soon

We go about our day to day lives with the world burning down. It’s only when a zombie is actually biting at your neck that we try to do something. Nazi is trying to build a nuclear bomb, well fuck ‘em we’ll build one first. “No Nazis No Nukes” that’s my motto. I when Alice died. It wasn’t too long after I scared her away that she inevitably overdosed. I was thinking about the coroner; how could she flush out her cheeks when she was all skin and bones? We were at the funeral parlor and I walked into the wake. I was set to give the eulogy, my pathetic father knowing and caring so little about poor Alice. I chugged the rest of my steaming coffee, foam and all as quick as I could. Too young to drink still I needed a boost before going in and seeing her corpse. I was a little scared for Mary Jane who was going to see a dead body for the first time in her life. I ed my grandpa’s funeral and how startling it was to see him lay there with the life sucked out of him. “Alice and I loved to cook, that was our sacred bond” I began. I had to stop multiple times when I got the words choked up in my throat. I realized at this moment I didn’t even know who Alice really was. She had run off with my teacher and was going to marry him, she did god knows how many drugs, she was a shell of her former self. I zipped through the eulogy, giving half-hearted “she was a warrior” epitaphs and all that jazz. I honestly didn’t give it my all, but I should have, and I regret it to this day. Now here’s the thing about dead bodies. When somebody dies, and you stare at their body in the casket hard enough it would seem like their breathing. After the eulogy I couldn’t stop looking at Alice’s body, it’s like I was caught in a trance. It really seemed like she was breathing. That’s because she was breathing. Then she opened her eyes, was I the only one seeing this? She sat up, stuck in the coffin that was closed below her legs. She desperately beat with her knees to get out. Shrieks came about but I couldn’t take my eyes off her chest. Then she got out of the coffin and limped toward me, groaning. I it I was totally taken

aback by my sister coming back to life. Her mind must have been destroyed after being dead that long. Knowing she overdosed made me think someone had just shot her up with Narcan, but I was staring, she was right there, dead one minute then alive the next, I had been staring transfixed at her. She eventually had enough consciousness to pick up the coffin end with her hands. She came bounding toward me, I looked back quickly everyone was struggling to funnel out of the narrow parlor door. Alice fell into my arms, although she had a tongue pant that was like a dog after a walk on a hot day. “Alice?” I asked, but all I got back was a groan. Looking into her eyes I could tell she recognized me but there was no form of emoting. I heard a bumping crash coming from the door, as if someone had gotten out of the morgue. I went and opened the door and out came two more women, one looking like discarded white trash. I could see by the holes in her arm she was a junkie like Alice. They looked me straight in the eye and gave more inarticulate groans. Downstairs to the morgue I went, there was a banging on one of the refrigerator doors, dead people stuffed in like sardines. I opened and slid out yet another woman, wouldn’t you know it a junkie, and she reached up and took off her toe tag. She stumbled around as if in a daze, groaning and groaning. I gave her a push in the direction of the stairs. Going outside I saw the three of them running around, arms flailing and groaning excruciatingly loudly. Alice tried to go up to dad, but he ran away like she had the plague. Can’t say that I blame him, who knows what diseases she had coming out of the morgue cold as a freezer. Again I can’t state firmly enough that at this point I did not know what the hell was going on. I went down the street, and three more of the re-animated corpses came out. Panic ensued on the streets. Rioting began, Milwaukee looked like the 1977 New York Blackout. I calmly walked into the nearest Starbucks and ordered my 2nd coffee. Luckily the baristas hadn’t seen the ground zero for panic. I had my pad with me, writing down observations about these animals while I sipped my latte. I at that moment I couldn’t stop shaking my head because I had dandruff. It began to snow that day in Milwaukee, I’m not much of a god person but when I saw my hair flakes line up with the snowflakes I bizarrely felt a sense of peace. Everything was falling from heaven. Everything white, everything pure, even the horde of zombies that had descended on our fair city. These days I never drink black coffee and always shell out the big bucks for white foam lattes to remind myself of that moment, even though it’s a silly superstition. Then a garbage can came flying through the window and I had to book it out of there with the rest of

the Starbucks entourage. I got home and saw dad and Mary Jane, the only remaining sister since Annie had moved out to pursue her own life of hopping house to house scoring smack. It seemed to be only a matter of time before she was another fatality to fentanyl. My dad was loading his .38 special next to his service .45 caliber. “Pack up your bags we’re leaving.” “I’ve got the food, only canned like you said” Mary Jane said “When are we leaving?” I asked “One hour” at that moment we heard a thump at the window, it was a reanimated corpse. I went to the window and put my hand at the pane. I looked in the eyes of this woman, crying and unable to emote. I wondered why that was. “Get away from there!” shouted my father. He was absolutely correct, we had no idea what was going on with these zombies, which I started calling them even though it was horribly cliché. No one I saw had been infected, it just sort of felt like mob mentality and panic had taken over. “Dad, what are we gonna do?” I legitimately had no idea what we were going to do “We’re going to run.”

Chapter V

The Great Chicago Migration

Milwaukee had become ground zero for the zombie outbreak. The outbreak was spreading pretty fast at this point. TV was still mostly out in our house and reports were sketchy. There we were on the great migration. Obviously, we had to go south being all the way up in Wisconsin, so we made our way to the next big city. At this point it was just around the riverbend. But luckily we did not see too many zombies lining the road like you see on The Walking Dead, it was more the eerie emptiness of 28 Days Later (what, did you think our culture wouldn’t know how to handle a zombie outbreak after the oversaturation of it in the media?) The car was almost out of gas, we nearly had to resort to hitchhiking. I saw a ’72 Chevy on the motorway, tried to siphon off more gas, but could barely suck two drops out of the hose. Annie always said I could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and I never had a good response back at her. It’s a shame that a car of that majesty had to die. Chicago was the last resort for us at this point. Even if the outbreak had spread to Chicago there was no way we could get to the west coast without a car. We arrived in Chicago getting by on fumes and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. People were going about their day to day lives. It was almost St. Patrick’s Day, they were going to dye the river green. A mist was hanging over the Windy city, just below the clouds. But as I came in it was almost as if the fog was lifting and the sun shining down on the hallowed metropolis. Chicago didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary compared to other cities, towering skyscrapers jutting out into the heavens. We were honestly tempted to go to the museum of modern art where I heard “The American Gothic” was housed but we had more important things to do. We saw a policeman on a horse. “Hello officer, we’re from Milwaukee. We just got out when everything was going down. Have you guys heard anything about what’s going on?” “I checked Fox this morning. What’s happening in Milwaukee seems to be

concentrated there. There are only a couple reports of zombies only out of Madison.” I was a bit taken aback that even a formal officer of the law was saying “zombie.” We decided to catch a game to take the mind off the stress, I couldn’t help but hold hands with Mary Jane the whole game, afraid she would leave. I wondered what would happen to poor Alice, I hoped she wouldn’t be gunned down in the panic.

Chapter VI

The Stevie Ray Vaughn Promenade

The next stop was Michael Jordan’s house. Our motel was next door and we might as well take in the sights. It was at this point I realized our father had never taken us traveling and I began to resent him more and more. We had just arrived at the United Center, the famous home of the world champion Chicago Bulls. I saw my reflection in the mirror and saw a full beard coming in. I hadn’t time to shave and hadn’t even packed a razor in the havoc. I had never grown a beard before, and it was not perfect, definitely patchy with its fair share of peach fuzz. With my slow growing hair in the back forming a gross mullet I’d be lying if I said in my scruffiness I looked a bit like Jesus. Not a super religious person as is, I think this whole business of the dead rising from the grave and being treated like lepers is something Jesus would definitely speak out against. “Let the lepers into your house.” Jesus was technically a zombie, and I’m sure if he came back to earth and saw these beautiful zombies he would have pity on them, love them. That night at the United Center was a tribute concert for Stevie Ray Vaughn. It might as well have been a Cranberries concert since I couldn’t for the life of me get “Zombie” out of my head (go figure). It was there, the soundtrack of my life, with their guns and their bombs they are crying. There were CDs and DVDs for sale up the wazoo, too bad we had no money outside of our strict budget. Really we were just ing the circus. We found a nun standing over a man outside the lobby of the United Center. She was consoling a junkie who was OD’ing. I was immediately transfixed in the nun’s eyes. I knew how I looked with the whole Jesus image, but she had probably seen it before. I was about to assuage her hope. I went up and stood over the man, I felt drawn to him thinking of Alice in her casket. When suddenly: cough cough, He hacked up a lung and went up to hug me, groaning a deep baritone not unlike Alice, although hers was more of a high-pitched whine.

“God breathed life into these dry bones.” The nun said I went to step up to the motel door and it opened, next door there was another thumping and moaning. This was certainly a strange part in what was becoming an epidemic. Or was it the apocalypse? One thing was for sure, it was following me. I awoke to a knock at the door, more a frantic pounding, arms sounding like they were flailing like one of those inflatable tube men outside car dealerships. I struggled to wake up, the events of the last few days messing with my inner sleep clock. But the banging and wailing wouldn’t subside. I went to the door, blown over from the shock of the following exclamation: “A miracle! He’s back!” A black woman in her early thirties ran up and gave me a bearhug. “Thank the Lord and bless you!” I stood there almost hypnotized, giving probably the least amount of effort in a hug in the history of mankind. I was confused beyond all belief. “What happened?” “He shot up and was dead all day. I was going to call an ambulance but when you got here he came back to life! It’s all thanks to you!” It was shocking but also fit in perfect to the narrative. People came back to life in Milwaukee, around me. Then two more come back to life in Chicago. There was only one way I could test this theory, make sure it was completely foolproof. I grabbed a paper and checked the news. There was a woman killed by a gunshot wound. I went down to the Mount Sinai hospital where she was brought in. “I’m here to identify my…sister.” “Name?” the nurse asked, and I started to draw a blank. Who was it again? “Amanda McCreedy…” I needed to make sure this wasn’t just a coincidence. I had to know once and for all I wasn’t crazy and didn’t have the power to bring people back from the dead. The hospital took me down to the morgue. I checked, drummed up some fake tears, put my hand on her head, nothing. I was prepared to leave when I heard the sound of metal being kicked on the third row of body carts. The kick happened again, so powerful I could see a dent being made from the outside. The morgue attendant went to open the cart and there was again loud moaning. The attendant began to panic and she called

upstairs but when I brought her down from her hysterics I was able to coax from her that this person overdosed on heroin. And that was it I could bring junkies, and only junkies, back from the dead.

Chapter VII

60 Minutes Interview

Once the doctor and nurse staff in the emergency room got the junkies properly sedated, but before they could be analyzed, the CBS news team that was there to cover the McCreedy shooting couldn’t help but catch a peek at what was happening. “It appears we have nothing short of a medical miracle here at Mount Sinai…” began the hospital representative “What happened, what kind of miracle?” They were shoving microphones in her face “You won’t believe it! He can bring people back from the dead” the morgue attendant announced from the mountaintops. I may be a lot of things, but I was too humble to toot my own horn. Before I knew it cameras were being shoved in my face, but I was too timid and tried to make my way to the car. Now I knew what it felt like to be a celebrity with paparazzi following you all the time. What I had no idea of was what would happen with the fallout from being able to bring some people back from the dead. News circuits were objective, but interviews that they had with religious sects from Christian to Muslim hailed me as a prophet, someone sent to usher in the end times or some nonsense like that. Footage from Morocco and Jerusalem showed people going to church with intentions like I was the second coming of Jesus. I was just a kid from Milwaukee. At first when every morning I went out I was surrounded by microphones from ABC, NBC, even the BBC. I was making worldwide headlines, but I ignored the daily Chicago circuit. I decided I had to move on from this and that I was going to give an exclusive interview. I figured CBS since I always watched that local channel 5 , life’s random like that, huh? I usually just watched for the sports section. Maybe the cooking segment on the weekend “Wake Up America” edition. But when CBS reached out to me, I

agreed almost immediately to give an interview. They flew me out to New York to their headquarters, I was brought in to meet Morley Saffer and Ed Bradley and the whole surviving crew. 60 Minutes was in its 50th year and they wanted to kick it off with an interview with neo-Jesus. I shook hands with the bunch, I feel like each shake they felt that some magical ability had ed into their bodies. I felt bad for those poor saps because nothing was actually happening, I could only magic with dead junkies. Now funny thing happened when I was shaking hands: I had to go to the bathroom, 4 complimentary whiskey sours on the plane would do that to you. Why do I always do that? I went to the bathroom and as I was staring at my booze strained urine I was thinking how ungodlike it was to be such a crippling, yet functional alcoholic. One thing I’d never give up no matter what happened was my liquor. I always needed something to take the edge off. God made beer because he loves us. “Tell us a little bit about yourself, who is the man behind the miracles?” “Well, I was born and raised in Milwaukee. You could say I was a natural born loser. I was going to take up cooking, maybe go to a culinary school, but of course my grades didn’t that.” They cut to stock footage of me around the house, cooking my signature Warsaw Benedict while obsessive compulsively rubbing my Buddha statue. “Do you think its heresy to rub Buddha’s belly for luck? I asked lightheartedly, not expecting an answer from an objective journalist “And you lost a sister not too long ago to drugs?” I was taken aback by this question and honestly got a little teared up at this reminder, you think we’d have it pre-prepped but not the fashionable 60 Minutes. “I found her here. She was foaming at the mouth like she had rabies.” Footage of me walking around the house to the spot she overdosed was showed on the screen “Alice Ewing, along with the 71,000 overdose victims who died last year, succumbed to the powerful effects of Oxycontin before turning to heroin laced with fentanyl.” “I had done some when I was younger with her, but I was lucky to break the

habit. I wonder if this was god’s way of having to repent.” I picked up both my hands for the camera and looked and stared at them for a while transfixed before Bradley asked me another question. “Take us through what happened at the funeral.” Saffer started. They cut to footage of the funeral parlor, so sterile and white, very pure. No sign that anything had happened, just a run of the mill death house that showed no signs of one of the great miracles of the modern age. “Yes, I was giving the eulogy. All I really got through was our love of cooking. I specifically I was going to talk how excited I was for her future, going off to college soon.” This was a white lie because I knew where taking opioids led, there would be no higher education for her, just a long path of crippling addiction, whoring herself out to Mr. Peterson until he got sick of her and threw her away like a used tissue. Maybe her death was the best thing to happen to her “What are your plans now that you have this power?” Saffer asked “I don’t want to have to use my powers. So if you’re listening to me, please that I have a life too. Leave me in peace.

Chapter VIII

Junkietown

When I got home, I watched it. The 60 minutes interview was one of the most watched in the history of CBS. I’m not a good person to take advice from, probably the last person to take advice from to be honest. I wouldn’t take my own advice is what I’m saying. So why would an insecure bunch of junkies listen to me about not committing suicide? The lord works in mysterious ways and if he wanted to grant me the powers of resurrection so be it. From that day on, people brought their dead children to me, sent me to overflowing morgues, to touch them on the head and bring them back to life. Sometimes I think with heroin addicts they’re in a fate worse than death, I could bring them back to life four times, but they might purposefully overdose a fifth time. Some people didn’t think that way at all. I can tell you for a fact that it’s sad going to the cancer ward, seeing poor women and children’s hair gone and knowing there’s nothing you can do for them. I can’t put my hand of their forehead and grow their hair back and shrink their tumor into submission. I was starting to feel this is as much a curse as a gift. People started to take it too far and test my boundaries. A new drug came on the market: Amoscentrafil I, it was a powerhouse kicker. A new synthetic painkiller that required no opioids. It was marketed as so safe that it could be gotten over the counter. It was like acetaminophen on steroids. It was marketed as impossible to abuse, like Ibuprofen attacking at the inflammation with no euphoria. Imagine, no more stealing, no more shooting up. The opioids would filter out from society and many homes would not be torn apart from the scourge of drug use. Eventually though people were going to emergency rooms with night terrors. Purdue Pharmaceuticals said it was just a minor side effect of the drug. Soon people were having hallucinations, and eventually some started using “Amos,” as it was shortened to, as a hallucinogen like LSD. Since there were no FDA restrictions on it yet, an epidemic soared. Although it was built as a deterrent to abuse, people took more and more to test the psychedelic boundaries

of the fabric of space. Just like taking too much Tylenol, there were people who started to overdose. And of course, they all started to come to me. Some people came from Arizona, California, Washington state, Florida, and Georgia. I always wondered at what point the body degenerated too much that they were too far gone. But it seemed even if they were dead for weeks or even months my powers could bring them back. Some had even buried their dead before hearing the news and unearthed them, exhumed their corpse. Once they came into my presence, not even needing to touch them on the head, they came back to life. They started to say nonsense words, this dumb simple babbling like coming out of the womb (I did hear “dada” and “muma” enough times to recognize it), it took a matter of months for them to make a full recovery. I didn’t know where Alice went after she came back to life. She was so frightened it seemed that maybe she walked into Lake Michigan. For what felt like years this was going on. I’d start my day just like back in high school, up at 6 AM sharp for a run and breakfast. That was the only time I had to myself. I made an announcement on my local news that that I could not start work until 7 AM. Some people tried to give me money, and I couldn’t turn it down because I didn’t have the time to work at a job. I didn’t charge anything but took as many tips as I could. Eventually I had enough money to live, basically minimum wage. I could have asked for more, but I knew that was all the money in the world they were giving me. There they were in their parents’ arms, dead like Jesus after he was crucified, heads tilted back, and eyes rolled back into their head like The Exorcist. And as soon as they came into my presence, maybe about five feet from me their eyes popped open. Babbling and running off in terror away from the gift of god that had brought them back, but they would return to sanity in time. If you don’t know back in the late 1970’s Jonestown was a place in Guyana where Jim Jones took his cult and convinced them to overdose on poisoned Kool-ade. A number of people were so enthralled by my ability to bring people back from the dead they did a similar thing. The press dubbed it “Junkietown” a bunch of junkies symbolically rented space in Guyana (you’d think they wouldn’t want all that to happen again) and took all the Amos they could. The cult leader was a bit off-putting claiming to want to “experience death firsthand.” But they wouldn’t come back the same at first, they cannot communicate verbally for a time. It was recorded live on CBS (there was a 60 minutes report on it). I was so taken aback by their brazen recklessness that I almost didn’t go

down, but I got a first-class flight from their leader Jim Bergeron. Piles and piles of the dead across a wide field, it looked like a Nazi concentration camp. The smell from the vomit everywhere with flies descending. He led me around giving me a tour and explaining how they had come from all over from Canada and Mexico to England and . They wanted to test the boundaries of human consciousness and see if it was possible to graze the afterlife. Honest people turned to demented hippies. The fact that so many people were completely dependent on me to save their life and assumed I would blindly help them scared some away, but most were aware of my common decency. I didn’t do it out of some religious need, I just did it; get it done. I couldn’t bear to have even a single dead soul on my conscience. As I went through the field, souls rising behind me like a wave as they came back to life, I asked everyone what they saw. From what I heard it was a trip like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the colors became overwhelming, colors of every part of the rainbow colliding to make new colors the mind couldn’t comprehend fully. The greens collided into the yellow to make a vomit that wouldn’t stop for what felt like an eternity. I hovered over them and they coughed up the remaining puke stuck in their throats. They talked in a slower rambling babbling then the heroin overdoses, most likely because they were still experiencing the “side effects” of Amos. In the field, before I came upon the last batch of victims, I saw a baby in the field next to its dead mother. I had become somewhat of a prohibitionist. Anytime I had a microphone shoved in my face I decried Purdue Pharma for all the epidemics they were causing, how they let drug after drug ruin fresh faces with futures and tear apart innocent families. This baby I picked up and cradled in my arms. Little did the dead mother know I was going to have it taken into protective custody by the authorities so she could never get her hands on this sweet girl again. It was only a matter of time before the infant accidentally swallowed Amos getting into the medicine cabinet like Alice and I had. I wouldn’t subject that baby to the scary explosion of colors before it succumbed too. But for now I hovered over the mother and she came back to consciousness. I looked out at the field, previously dead, and it was like a field of wheat regrowing. Slaughter behind me, but life coming back into these dry bones. I after everyone was brought back to life at Junkietown I went to the head of a hill. I was carried like a coach at the end of the Superbowl to the top. It was clear that they were expecting some words from me. And I held up my

hands, fuming red headed from anger at what all these people had done, the steam practically exploding from my ears. “You people don’t need drugs to experience life, life is beautiful as it is in its pure form….” I started “You are a prophet sent to heal us.” one of the in the back shouted “I’m not a prophet and I’m not a messiah.” “You are! Hail O favored one, the lord is with you.” I walked down the hill, all hundreds of people trying to get a feel of me, arms outstretched in every direction. I took a hand and it looked like to me she would never wash it again. At that moment an epiphany fell over me. My father grew up in Milwaukee, he was born there, raised there, worked there, raised a family there. He wore the same blue shirt, felt like every day. I wore a red shirt it seemed just to spite him. Have you ever had a dream? My dream was to escape Milwaukee. I wanted something more, anything more; for a while I thought I was resigned to the same fate of my father. There’s no doubt that having the power of resurrection certainly, at that moment, for the first time, got to my head. After the rather uneventful life I had lived I couldn’t help but to finally be excited. The power to make overdose victims come back to life is much more fulfilling then making a delicious meal from scratch. I’m not saying that some people become talented world class chefs and that’s what you’ve chosen to do with their lives. Now that I am a god, or as close to a god as anyone has been since the days of Jesus Christ, egotism has struck me hard. And it helped that whenever I touched someone on the forehead or just hovered over them for a minute, I got a huge rush. Adrenaline, maybe, or just my powers. There’s a drama to it, an intensity, because you never know if the next person you brought back will be the last. What if the powers wear off? At this point it’s almost like a routine: wake up, brush my teeth, bring a junkie back to life. But ultimately my story is just like the American Dream: with a little can-do attitude and a fighting spirit, a man with a little bit of talent can achieve wonders and be the change they want to see in the world. I was carried onto my private flight that Junkietown’s minister Bergeron had procured on a golden footstool. Where the druggies had gotten it, I’ll never knew, but Bergeron was a man of significant means. Maybe he meant to be

carried in on it one day. On the flight to calm my nerves I had a finger of scotch, then another, a third and a fourth. The television streaming on the screen and there he was: my father. That arrogant son of a bitch. Even in what was supposed to be my time in the sun he found a way to make it about him. They were surrounding him like they had every day when he tried to go to work. I threw my glass at the screen but was too drunk to throw it accurately enough. When I got home, I waded through the sea of reporters to get to the house. “This ends now! I want you out of my house today!” my father said indignantly “I have nowhere to go” I responded quite innocently “Don’t give me that bullshit, I just saw you down in Guyana on a golden throne. You could own a castle!” “This isn’t about me; this is about you! You’re scared by my fame and resentful that I actually did something with my life.” “Why should I be proud that my son is a freak?” he said scornfully “You never loved Alice” I said in a vengeful mood. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he took out his service revolver and shot me in the back. Mobs would be calling for his blood though if he did that, and I think he knew better than to even lay a finger on me. I turned my back on him, walked out the door. As I slammed the screen, Mary Jane came bounding after me. “You’re leaving me alone?” she asked sobbingly “You heard him; he hates me. Always has, I should have left sooner.” I said “I need a brother.” She said getting all choked up, it disgusted me “Trust me, I had a sister once, it didn’t work out so well. You’ll be better off without me. See you around kiddo.” After all this I thought it would be my father who would have taken out the service revolver during this crisis, mowing down the litany of reporters, taking as many out as his clip could before it emptied. But no it was Mary Jane with the .45 caliber pistol pointed at my chest. She had probably snuck into our father’s bedroom, getting the gun as easily as I got the oxy out of his medicine cabinet so many years ago. At first I thought it was just frustration that I was leaving, and I turned my back on her. As I took

about three steps I was bolted forward, shot in the back. Then, amidst heavy crying, my sister, dear little Mary Jane, turned the gun on herself. Although stunned, I went to wrestle the gun out of her hands, I pushed her and she fell and cracked her head on the sidewalk. There was a large pool of blood and then she began convulsing. I leaned down and took her head in my arms as she stopped with a jerk.

Chapter IX

Iman Kabir Comes to the Stream

So here we go again, we have come back to the start. The blood is on my hands. And the worst part is everyone had seen it. You forget for a minute you’re on twenty-four-hour surveillance on all the news cycles. Streams, podcasts. It’s like the Truman show, I think it’s a nightmare to not have privacy but that’s my life that has been chosen for me. Now they can see me above the stream begging me not to end it all jumping into the shallow stream, bashing my head fatally into a rock and floating, merrily merrily life is but a dream. I was standing on the ledge, looking down into the stream, hypnotically catching my attention. I feel like I had been staring at the chunks of ice for what felt like days when suddenly I looked back and saw three men with turbans approach me. “Look, if you’re news people from Al-Jazeera or whatever, I’m not in the mood.” “You mistake me my great friend.” He said with a thick accent “My name is Ali Kabir, it is an honor to make your acquaintance. We are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” “I see there are only three of you horsemen.” I said completely disionately, and I didn’t feel like playing games “You are the fourth.” “…And what exactly do horsemen do?” “Good deeds to usher in the end of the world. Bringing the paradise of god unto the earth once and for all time, showing that it’s not all death and vengeance with the lord that the kingdom of god is beautiful. You have the power of resurrection, Aabinus has the power of alchemy, Danish has the power of extra sensory perception, and Imran has the power to manipulate vegetation to make food.”

“Imran waved his hand down the stream and up came carrots amidst the water. Aabinus went down to the stream and made gold which he gave to me.” “Bet you can’t make a million more gold bricks could you Aabinus?” I joked “Of course I can!” he gave a hearty laugh that shook his mighty long beard “I take it you are all Muslims?” “Yes we are. I when I threw away the slave name of Jeff Alcindor to become the true prophet of Allah. Taking my name of Ali Kabir was the happiest day of my life. It felt like everything was fulfilled in my time on Earth. “Sorry, but I don’t believe in any religion or supernatural forces.” I turned my back on them, wondering if a hotel would take one of the gold bricks just made out of thin air as currency. I also wondered if those carrots were edible. “You are a living miracle, how can you turn your back on god when he has given you this gift?” he asked “This ‘gift’ as you call it is a curse. It takes up all my time, saps all my energy, ruined my family, and killed my sister.” “We have a plan.” “What’s your so-called plan?” “To spread the news that the time has come for God’s kingdom to reign on earth. In our teachings the powers that be will call it socialism, they will call it communism, they’ll also throw out words like Fascists and Nazi like they’re candy. But with the power of the lord Allah behind us there will be no stopping us. Come with us.”

Chapter X

The Holy Tea Time

I was led to a house that was dark and only had a white mattress in the center. I put my head down for what only felt like a minute and must have been three hours when I finally awoke. Ali was rubbing my temples. Ever had that nap that feels so refreshing but you aggressively overslept? Terror when you awoke because you subconsciously knew there was somewhere you needed to be? I was on a cloud, at a table sitting next to Ali. Turkeys, crumpets, biscuits, any kind of food you could imagine was there. We were drinking tea, it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland, it was just that crazy. Suddenly, the biscuits turned to a bread that dripped blood that diffused into the tea. We sipped the blood which tasted of a peculiar blend of Earl Grey and Cognac wine but was not disgusting in the slightest. I could feel the warmth of the concoction filtering down every organ of my body. I looked at the person at the head of the table “Jesus?” I asked “Allah.” Said Imam Kabir “I dub you John Ewing to be my priest. Spread the word far and wide.” At that moment a hurricane force gust blew in and nearly knocked Kabir and I from the table. It began to mist slightly. We looked over from the tea table and saw a farm, there was Mother Mary milking lambs in the stable. A young woman with cropped hair sat sculpting a large block of marble. Although only the top half was complete (the rest of the block being squared) it resembled the Renaissance painting of god pressing a finger to Man’s limp index. The god’s figure was a round mass of thorns whilst the man had two bites on his neck, was grotesquely hairy and had blood on its lips. Good to see art wasn’t dead in the Kingdom of Heaven. I woke up next to Imam Kabir and we nodded our heads in an understanding solidarity. As night turned to day, I started to understand the truth.

I converted to Islam that day.

Chapter XI

The Tennis Court

Imam Kabir flew us four horsemen out to L.A. He told me he was a regular fixture at the Southern Los Angeles Country Club (probably got the money from the alchemy business) and this was where we’d begin our odyssey. Dressing in a special Islamic priestly garb raised no eyebrows. It appeared the club was used to his eccentricity. We went into the bar, and someone immediately recognized me because one of the televisions was covering me, in a roundtable discussion on a 24/7 news cycle what my gift meant to the future of the human race. Could my power be manipulated? Could it be used like a vaccine. Two weeks ago this thought would have greatly relieved me, but now I had a mission to use my powers not just for individuals but for the whole of humanity. The first thing that happened was Danish, having ESP, again spotted the helicopter hovering above us and waved, in a style that said “hey check this out.” He grabbed a racket and went up to one of the club pros and challenged him, a hundred dollars a set (don’t worry, we had plenty of gold if we needed it, we were honest prophets). Using his extrasensory perception he was able to beat him in straight sets. Everybody was attracted to the game we played. They shook hands and we were given the cold hard cash in hand, and Danish went up to everyone who had gathered around. He burned the money in front of everyone. “People, the kingdom of god is at hand. When God comes you will have no use for your money.” He motioned to Imran to start his thing. He pointed at the weeds and they turned to wheat which made bread. “Give us tired, your hungry, your poor huddled masses yearning to be free. True freedom is coming, come us.” Many ed us that day, but as I looked on the crowd I saw someone very special. “Alice?!” My eyes bugged out, almost not believing what they were seeing.

“Hello, John sweetheart!” Alice replied “It’s so wonderful to see you. What have you been up to? I had been so worried about you.” “I worked to get into college. I’m studying culinary arts!” “You are?! That’s wonderful.” “You know, I wish I had seen you sooner. I was too nervous, and you were so famous I never thanked you truly for saving my life.” “Everybody deserves a second chance.” “You know who deserves a second chance? Dad.” I paused, not answering. “Isn’t the will of Allah to do so?”

Chapter XII

Venison & Jägermeister

Time ed, more and more. Some days we did very little, just doing small town preaching at the Elks lodge, or if we were in a big city going to a baseball game. I wondered what the point of it all was on those slow days where nothing was happening so I flew back to Milwaukee so I could be with my father. Alice told me he was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. It was honestly nice to be back in Milwaukee. A bar named a Jägermeister drink after me (“The Healer”), they even named a Venison sandwich after me. My father was still working a shift (downgraded to part time) with his dementia. I sent him a text (Alice had to give me the number because I had deleted it.) “I’m almost out of work, would you like to go to breakfast when I get home?” We went out to breakfast and he ordered Venison and eggs, “The Ewing & Egg Special.” He said it was the greatest breakfast he could ever having. I took that with a slight grain of salt. We talked sports for a little bit. I told him how as a hometown hero I was invited to throw out the first pitch at Miller Park. Dad said he was really excited about this Kareem Abdul-Jabbar character; the dementia must have been further accelerated then I initially thought. “Dad, can I tell you a story? when Mary Jane died?” “Mary Jane didn’t die. She has a cerebral hemorrhage. I plowed past the newsmen and rushed to the hospital. Luckily I had the cruiser, if I didn’t have it she wouldn’t have made it. She’s still with me, talks a little slower, but she’s doing OK” He bitterly retorted “Just like Alice. I found her in Los Angeles, she came up to me in a crowd at a tennis court.” There was a long silence, like she was dead to him (still dead) to him after all that happened “I stood at the stream down by Menomonee. The one we went to all the time that

summer when I was 5 to go fishing?” “Yeah, you caught a catfish and we couldn’t believe it had migrated that far.” “I stood at the stream that day, I went down there right after she died. “Uh huh.” He retorted “Dad, do you believe in god?” I asked “No, not with all the bad things that have happened to me.” “The end of the world is coming; you need to be prepared so god doesn’t look down on you unfavorably.” “If anything, you and your antics have turned me off from god. I don’t care if I go to hell. I’ve made an agreement with god. After Alice died, the first time, I swore to god, asked him to just leave me alone, he had done enough for me.” After this he looked down at his plate like didn’t know where it had come from. And it was in this moment that I realized that in my memory I would only his uncaring feelings for our family. He might have taken care of Mary Jane, but I knew in my heart he still found her a burden, just like he found me and Alice. And that’s all he’d ever me for: a burden. Right now at this moment in a greasy spoon I had tried my best to mend our relationship. I had extended an olive branch and he snapped it in two. “I’m telling you this because I’m moving to Marrakesh in Morocco. I want to live in the desert. I’m going to pilgrimage to Mecca. You’re never going to see me again.” I was about to stand up from the table, but I felt I had to get one last smack in there, make the emotional resonance count and the punch feel crushing. I could think of all the times he screwed me over and felt it was just punishment. I would read into every word he said and now it was time to turn the tables. “Tell mom I say hi when you go to hell.” I said. I threw down the cash down on the table and stormed out. That was indeed the last time I saw my father; I did not even go to his funeral. There was a sense in my mind that I would bring him back to life if I went, and I didn’t want that to happen.

Chapter XIII

Camels to Mecca

The next day I boarded a flight to Marrakesh, the Four Horsemen were going to start in Morocco and trek through the desert on old fashioned camels. The pilgrimage all Muslims were required to make would be as close as the time of Ramadan as could be. We were special trekkers and I didn’t know what would happen when we touched the black Ka’ba. It was finally something to look forward to in life. “So, everyone knows my story, tell me about yours.” I started one day when we had made out toward the sunset “I was there at the Revolution back in 1917.” Aabinus started “I had been in the trenches when we were on the retreat. I was in favor of the revolution at the start, but then the dehumanization of the enemy started. And we were the enemy. I was sent to Siberia on the first exile train. I one night when I was thrown on the snow and I was expected to die. We were dying by the thousands and there were two others next to me. One said you will be with me in paradise, the other seemed to have succumbed to famine. I closed my eyes, waiting to feel the warm embrace of death. I hadn’t been a religious person at all but soon I saw what could only be called a nebula that said “’I am Allah, creator of worlds. You are my speechmaker.’ I converted to Islam that day.” This explained why with his pasty Eastern European skin he still was a Muslim, which I wasn’t expecting. “After the war, I went west to find peace, I did for some time in the Weimar Republic, making silent German Expressionist movies. I was the real DP on Nosferatu. Then came another revolution, again we were in retreat when the enemy became each other. I was sent to a concentration camp in my native Poland. They said I was a good man and would be spared. Then they told me to go take a shower. I ultimately survived the gas chambers. I bid my time to the end of the war until the first people who had killed me showed up. I made my way west and settled in Britain.” This explained his British Accent.

“In 1972, I was walking down the street and a little girl came up to me and said “The time of Allah is at hand. I said ‘what’s that sweetie?’ when a sudden burst of light went off. When I woke up a month ago the first thing I saw was you on television performing your miracles. I heard Ali Kabir at the door knocking. I opened it and he explained that I had been killed by an IRA bomb but reanimated here. I went to pick up the remote, but when I touched it it turned into gold. This is when I realized I had the power of Alchemy. I wonder when I touch the Ka’ba if it will turn to gold.” Aabinus hit a dip and nearly went flying off his camel. Imran chimed in: “We lived in the slums of Los Angeles, on a tent in the street. There were so many of us tent dwellers. The worst thing happened when my wife and I got pregnant. I didn’t know how I could bring a child into this poor world. My wife was lucky enough to die in child birth. I had secretly been praying for it. There I was all alone in my tent. I had just lit a cigarette with a match and the light stayed perfectly lit and did not burn further. ‘The time of Allah is at hand.’ I slept in the tent for what felt like ages; Rip Van Winkle. I woke up a month ago and I was in a bed at Ali Kabir’s house. I went into the kitchen to get something to eat. When I touched the pan, eggs magically appeared. I hope that I can cure world hunger with my powers.” Danish chimed in “I had a lot of different jobs. After high school I went to the police academy. But I hated throwing people in jail. Even when people were redhanded guilty I hated having to send them upstate. Then I became a teacher, but I hated how everything was a test. One day I went down to the nurse’s office with a bad headache, and she gave me some Benadryl. I took the pill and started hearing voices in my head. I was driving home and blacked out I heard a voice say ‘The time of Allah is at hand.’ I woke up in the driveway of Ali Kabir, Aabinus and Imran were there, and after Kabir caught me up to speed, we made our way to Milwaukee to catch up with you.”

Chapter XIV

Jahannam

As we were riding on a camel, I took out a small bottle of Jim Beam. Ali Kabir saw this as heresy, as alcohol (and pork) was banned in the Qu’ran and Muslims could not partake. I honestly didn’t know how I was going to make it to Mecca without Mr. Booze. I realized at that moment I was an alcoholic. Liquor had hit me in the face and I had let it, always turning the other cheek. Alcohol had a hold on my soul, and with all the people who I had brought back to life I had needed it to numb my senses. I had to sweat out in a sauna of a hotel room in Marrakesh. We slept in separate rooms, which was a good thing because I planned on going on one final binge. I sat there on my bed staring at myself in the mirror, the bottle of whiskey in my hand. I chucked the bottle at the mirror like every alcoholic is supposed to do at some point in their depravity. I had a journal next to me and I started writing feverishly. I grabbed a pack of cigarettes that was sitting on the dresser (one vice deserves another) and was chain smoking away. Now here’s the thing about me writing before it gets in its final diary form that you see here. It’s all gibberish and I’m barely able to make out the run-on sentences before it kind of snaps into place. The first thing I wanted to do was write about my experience bringing people back to life. I had already written out exactly how I felt earlier in the diary you are reading and felt that my life story could be published even at twenty some odd pages as was. I had writer’s block as was and felt like it could go no further. I tried my hand at poetry:

In 1948 Palestine was evicted, The Nakba, Hundreds of thousands thrown out. Jordan and Egypt to whence they fled.

They wander, no more home. Homeless in the land of the desert. Hot sun beats down in the day; Cold death at night. Where will they be settled. Where is New Palestine?”

The day was getting hotter and hotter. I felt like the sun was getting closer to the Earth, broiling me, but I couldn’t stop smoking. I was sweating buckets, wiping it with my yellow nicotine-stained hands. I prayed to Allah for relief. I wondered what I was going to do when I ran out of this pack of cigarettes I was in the desert where were the vendors? Lord was it a scorcher. And there I was slipping on a pond of thin ice. When I fell, I got sucked more and more into the ice until I was frozen into the ground. My head was free, and I looked to the right of me there was a man lying there and he stared at me, peering into my soul for what felt like an eternity. An Amazonian forest all around us began to burn and there was fire raging all around us except for one white tree that stubbornly refused to burn. We obviously were unable to move. My forehead burned; my lungs choked. My legs were frozen numb. “Rest in peace sweet prince.” My fellow frozen popsicle said as he snapped his back and was free from the glacier. I came back to reality. I had asked for relief and gotten too much. This is what happens if you keep drinking, I interpreted from the vision. Allah was telling me this would be my body, burning from the alcohol. My organs frozen from abuse. Who the man was I did not know, I would have to go into the Qur’an more in depth. I crushed my pack of cigarettes and vowed never again to partake in human vices, all glory to god. As we came into Mecca, I saw fields of poppy seeds growing. I felt god was giving me a sign.

Chapter XV

Flash Flood

We entered Mecca through Medina from the northwest. We were nearly there. Saudi Arabia is Saudi Arabia, say what you will, but Mecca is gorgeous. Very clean, they’ve done some renovations over the last decade. We got on our rugs and prayed the last prayer of the day. Most Muslims were not able to fulfill the pilgrimage this early in their conversion. I felt lucky I was able to find Allah after so much. I came into Mecca that day with all the other Muslims (only Muslims were allowed in the holy city). I had barely slept the night before, nervous tics bugging me all night. I felt like I was on my last legs, running out of gas. More than anything I desperately wanted to just circle the Ka’ba the seven times you need to and crash. I was going up to it when I saw from far away one fellow worshipper grab at his chest. He was having a heart attack. I kept a vigilant eye nearby. As he crashed to the ground, I asked Imam Kabir to translate for me. “Has this man ingested any opium today?” Yes yes they all shook their heads, then the worshippers, who I sensed were aware of my grandstanding, parted like the Red Sea. I asked Imran to accompany me. Out of the dry dirt I told him to make some fruit grow and as he did that I went over and hovered above the man. There was a fifty-fifty chance that this would work, but it was worth a shot. Suddenly the man opened his eyes and stood up. “Allah Akbar, you are cleansed. Eat of the fruit of the earth.” I said. Many fellow Muslims picked me up, but in my humility that I had learned recently I asked them to put me down, which they did. “I am no better than you, I am just a man with a gift. I am not a prophet so come not to me to seek the way of life; the way of life is already written. I lived a life full of pride and arrogance before I met you. Anger and hatred boiled in my heart. I’m just proud to be here with all you devout Muslims at this ultimate

place of worship.” I went to touch the Ka’ba, black because so many had touched it before me. Billions maybe. I was very concerned for Aabinus to touch it that it changes under his alchemy powers as he feared. But maybe that was some kind of prophecy “The Ka’ba shall turn golden.” We walked around the Ka’ba touching it. It didn’t turn golden when Aabinus touched it, showing this holy site could stop even the power of alchemy. Sadly, I didn’t feel any different as I circled it, and was wondering if this pilgrimage was a failure. Imran was not feeling anything special either. Aabinus looked like he could take on death he was so optimistic and hopeful, it was like he was touching the face of god. That’s what I had hoped to feel too, but I suppose you can’t force it. I took my rug and went to get some solitude. I went to the top of a hill and tried to meditate. I had my eyes closed for what felt like an eternity. Suddenly, a lightning strike. It struck right face of the Ka’ba. I wondered if that had ever happened before. When rain falls in the desert, it falls hard. But it didn’t stop, for it was a flash flood. A flood like that hadn’t been seen since the time of Noah. The Ka’ba was unplanted and went floating away, the black being washed away. The water began rising, I knew this had to be a sign from Allah. The end was coming, and I knew that and had known that for years, I just wish my father would repent and be with me on this hill. The next thing was truly bizarre. I reached in my pocket and found a granola bar. Chocolate chip and peanut butter granola bar. I took it out and stared at it. I looked down at the valley and saw the dirt turn to mud. Although it had been nearing sundown there were still practicing Muslims down there who were drowning. I ran down and pulled people up from the valley two at a time, one with each hand. I handed the first person a granola bar because they seemed famished. More and more granola bars were appearing in my pocket, one at a time. I guess this was another sort of test. It will all probably make sense when all this is over with. A voice talked down from the thunderclouds, it sounded like Ricardo Mantleban from The Wrath of Khan. I wondered if that meant Allah was speaking with a representative, or he just like the silky smooth yet intimidating voice of one Khan Noonien Singh. It certainly wasn’t the weirdest thing to happen to me that day, I could honestly just accept anything. And if there was anything I needed to surrender to it was the will of god.

“Space is the final frontier. You will leave your earthly pursuits behind and spread the word of Allah to other places in the heavens. Spread the word.” I was dumbfounded, four people on this earth had special powers, every other Muslim seemed to be living in the desert. Islam used to be a religion of science, and they were a proud religion that put math ahead. But I didn’t know at this time of any Muslims in NASA who could take charge of this demand. I for one could not do basic algebra to save my life. But who were we to reject the will of god? We all sat there, everyone was eating granola bars and opening their mouths for the torrential downpour. I did not partake in the granola eating; I knew there was something I had to do.

Chapter XVI

A Month in the Sahara

I began fasting that night. I walked around the hill and went into the desert. This could have been a suicide mission. I didn’t know how long I could fast and go without water, but I was going to push it to the limit and die trying if necessary until I could find answers to Allah’s message. I walked and walked until I felt I was sufficiently in the middle of nowhere. I sat down Indian style and closed my eyes; no prayer, just breath. No clocks, no watches; I didn’t know how long I was there until something happened. Allah, why are you doing this now I wondered in my thoughts. What other people were out there, how could we even communicate. This isn’t like Star Trek, no matter how much Ricardo Montleban wants us to think. I fell asleep on the cold hard dirt as the sun began to come up over the horizon. I woke up lying down on a small twin mattress below a bunk bed. I got up in small quarters, I opened the closet and there was a uniform. Yellow stripes over a blue jumpsuit. The door opened like a supermarket; hiss. I walked around what felt like a grey submarine. I was dazed, walked up to a fancy elevator. I stood there not moving, there was a lever there. I grabbed it and squeezed tight. And after a couple minutes, there I was. On the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I pinched myself, I didn’t think it could be true. And there was William Shatner sitting in the captains’ chair. All the captains were there; Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer. Archer had on the same yellow striped and blue jumpsuit from his show that I was wearing. “OK, come on guys, what is this?” “Look out the window.” Said Kirk. I looked out the window saw a planet covered in sand “That is the planet that was spoken of in Frank Herbert’s Dune.” Said Patrick Stewart’s Picard

“You think you’re alone in the universe, but the writers of old knew when they wrote. How do you think they got their ideas? They went to some form of isolation, they meditated, they flew out into the universe and found these people. That’s why they preached of these faraway lands. Star Wars, Doctor Who, 2001: A Space Odyssey, they are all based on reality.” “How will we get there, how will we know where to go?” “The Enterprise, you don’t think humans can build that? Communicators, transporters, starships. You don’t think that’s in the realm of possibility?” said Sisko “No I don’t.” “That’s because you do not have faith.” I woke up in the desert. I felt strangely that I knew what to do but I needed more time. I exhaled deeply and fell back to sleep. I saw a woman on a floor, a needle next to her; a familiar scene. I stood over her, she was not waking up. I saw her black hair in her mouth as I began to see her vomit and suffocate. She seemed to be very familiar to me. I stood over her body, not able to push the hair away, but I ed who she was, I had seen her on cable. She was the President’s daughter. She had been campaigning hard with him when he first got elected. I wonder how having a President of one country could oversee the running of the universe. But I in Star Trek, first with aliens brought humanity together. Maybe he will be the President of the future United Federation of Planets.

Chapter XVII

Mr. Ewing Goes to Washington

I wondered how I was going to get all the way to the President. Once I got to him there would be no issue, his daughter had to be a junkie and there was no doubt I could cure it. I had foreseen her overdose; the President would be heartbroken if his daughter died and couldn’t continue on with his job. Honestly if I had it my way, I would want to tell the President to do whatever he could to stop the opioid crisis, but I had a mission from Allah to deliver humans to space. Everything would fall into place eventually. I didn’t have the 24-hour news cycle following me anymore, I guess my fifteen minutes of fame were just about up. Strange how it all happened so fast, even though I still had powers, I should have been one of the most famous people in the world. I did though have a following on twitter, some followers more fanatical than others. I put out a tweet: “Leaving the reasons a secret for now but I have to meet with the President. Demand CNN, FOX, anyone to get me a meeting with the President.” Although I got 15,000 positives upvotes, they only seemed to be sympathy votes. None of my followers seemed to have any clout, all basement dwellers. I booked a plane to Washington DC. My only plan was to the protest outside the fence of the White House. I initially had a sign that said “President Nelson’s Daughter will die” but I thought that that would be a security risk, it wasn’t worth the gamble. Then I had a picture of a teenager I brought back to life. “ me” was the tagline. I couldn’t believe that after three days I hadn’t got any attention and was about to give up. I guess no one ed me. Suddenly a large crowd came out of the distance. They had a picture of their children I had saved and marched on the White House. Some had Molotov Cocktails prepped to be lighted and thrown, but I, having the crowd’s attention as their de facto leader, demanded a peaceful demonstration. One in the front of the crowd had a bullhorn, and I went as far as a I could up. I shook her hand and after the obligatory thank you she told me saving her daughter, who was the one on my sign, was the greatest thing that ever happened to her and that she would

do anything for me in my time of need. I saw President Nelson’s silhouette in the West Wing window. He made direct with my eyes and I knew he was contemplating me. The Vice President was behind him, clearly distaining me. I had nothing to offer him so I could understand on a surface level, riots outside the White House served no purpose. But the President subconsciously knew that I had something to offer. He waved his hand, as if to signal me coming in. I turned on the bullhorn. “My friends, we’ve all been crippled in one way or another by the Opioid Crisis. Friends, family, gone in the blink of an eye! I made a dent in it, and we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the miracles I could perform.” The next part was gross bullshit and I had to expand on it on a wing and a prayer. “We’re going to leave this planet, we’re going to leave the poppy plant behind where we can’t get to it, manipulate it, and kill with it.” I was led to the back toward the White House security entrance. I was let in without a security badge. I told everyone to wait outside. I went through security, having nothing on me. I waited about an hour, eventually being let into the Vice President’s office first. “Let me tell you something.” He said, “I don’t like you.” Why he didn’t like me, especially since I voted for him, I had no idea. All I ever did was help people, and now I had to speak on behalf of god. “I think you’re arrogant and sarcastic and don’t deserve the gift you have.” It was like he could read into my soul. “So let me run down some ground rules for talking with the President. Never, ever interrupt him, expect nothing from him. And whatever you do, do not eat his M&Ms that are on his desk.” I was tempted to eat them the second I went in. “President Nelson, let me introduce you to Mr. John Ewing.” The Vice President said. I went to go shake hands with the President, nice firm handshake, I would expect nothing less from the President. Although our last President was a bit of a doltz, so maybe I should have expected less, to be fair. “Mr. President, it’s an honor. But I’m afraid we have no time to waste. I’m aware that your daughter has a substance abuse problem?” “How did you know…” President Nelson began to retort, but I held up a hand to stop him before he could finish his query. “I have gifts you could not even comprehend.” I said, glancing a snarky eye at the Vice President, who took his leave of us, apparently too appalled to even be

in my sight. “But Mr. President we don’t have a lot of time. I need you to call your daughter, if she doesn’t answer call an ambulance with some Narcan. The President took out his cell phone. There was no answer. He called 911. “Hello, I think my daughter is having an overdose. 222 West 8th Street, Gary Indiana.” He hung up the phone and began to gently sob into his right hand. “My daughter means more to me than anything. Do you know if she’ll be OK?” “I’ve had a vision she will be with you campaigning with you for re-election. One day she’ll be running for Senate with you at her side.” Now he sobbed into both hands “Is there something I can do for you? I feel like you didn’t do this for nothing.” “I’ve been doing this for nothing for years. But the time has come for you to serve god. Tell me, what is the state of NASA?” I asked “We’re going to decommission it. We in this istration feel that the Moon is as far as we need to go for human exploration. We need to focus on our own house on Earth.” “Tell me, what if I could get your daughter to a place where she’ll never been tempted by the devils of heroin? Purify her of those demons with the power of 10,000 rehab visits” “Another planet? Is that what you’re saying? Trust me it’s a fallacy. Traveling faster than going the speed of light is not possible. I once asked the head of NASA he said it was impossible. Warp drive or light speed is not possible, pure science fiction.” “Nothing is impossible with the power of god. when I told you your daughter would be running for Senate? Did I tell you it was of the Senate of the planet Vulcan III?” “I might wear a cross, but I am not a religious person. I don’t know if I even believe in god. I wear this for my daughter… Come with me.” He went up to a wall in the oval office and opened a safe and pressed a couple of buttons in a code. It opened up a small door. “This is from Area 51. It was the most incredible thing I ever saw when I was debriefed. We didn’t find an alien, but we found this extraterrestrial suit. I may not believe in god, but I do believe in life

outside this solar system. I’ll do what I can.” “Thank you, Mr. President. I know we can do this with a little help from god.” Two weeks later the President had a State of the Union. He announced a tenmillion-dollar investment to NASA for space exploration. It was a complete slap in the face. I went to protesting outside the White House, demanding more money. I yelled and screamed my lungs out shouting for justice for days on end, but there was no ushering me into the hallowed halls. I walked away in sadness and embarrassment.

Chapter XVIII

The Watermelon Patch

I was going to go to Russia for help from the Cosmonauts, they were the next plausible avenue. But I didn’t want to defect from my country. My only option was to go back to Milwaukee. My father was probably in the final throes of Alzheimer’s, but maybe we could reconcile. I could see my sisters again, maybe go work in a factory, punch a clock, reject my gift now that I’d failed Allah. I was in a taxi and asked for the driver to turn into a watermelon patch I could see deep in the woods. I told the driver he could just let me off here, I paid him exorbitantly to drive off and not come back. I felt like I could stay here and just die, wrap myself around the vines and choke myself to death. I looked up at the moon, so close, like we could colonize there and live a happy existence. How it would happen I didn’t have a clue, but I had my complete faith in science. I stared up at the moon, there were stars, but I didn’t know how to read them, they were just too many of them. I thought about the north star guiding the three wise men to Jesus in Bethlehem. If Allah could just give me a sign, my own north star to guide me. I looked at each star, home to possibly thousands of systems where species of every type could be imagined. Suddenly, I was out of my body and on the moon, looking down on Earth. I could breathe miraculously. This must be an out of body experience. I drew a happy face on the dust, tempted to pick up a piece of it to see if it was really cheese. I hopped around in the low gravity. Hop, hop hopping around, wondering why I was up here and if anyone could see me. I waved at the Earth, confident that the satellites in Cape Canaveral could see me. I looked back, there was a Klingon, straight outta Star Trek, ridges and all on the moon with some kind of laser rifle. He began shooting off into the distance toward Earth. It took me a minute to figure out what this symbolism meant, but one this was clear: War was coming. I woke up back in the watermelon patch. It was mid-morning, I wondered how

long I had been out. I was immediately picked up by FBI agents, who hustled me into a van with tinted windows. I was taken to the FBI field office in Langley, Virginia. I was interrogated. “How did we find you with our surveillance on the moon? How did you get there?” One agent asked “Nothing is impossible with Allah.” “Stop bullshitting us, are you working with the Russians?” “Your President nearly drove me to.” He punched me in the face. “All I’ll tell you that war is coming, and you have no means to stop it.” “War with who?” “The Klingons” There was a long pause, the agent looked at me like I was crazy for a second, but then thinking how he had seen me on the moon nothing seemed impossible. “Tell me about these Klingons.” “Ever seen Star Trek? Warlike, conquering people. Carry sharp swords around? They’re coming for Earth. They are going to blow up the planet, everywhere from Boston to Brussels looking like after World War II. So maybe sitting here wasting time beating me up, we can ally ourselves to stop this threat. The agent went to a button in the wall (Was it the United States policy to have secret safes in walls of federal buildings?) and took out a blueprint for a prototype starship. “The NX-01 Firebomber (see, Star Trek was a blueprint). Five nuclear warheads, two hundred surface to air missiles. A defense for the Earth.” “You’re going to need fleets of those starships. Klingons have hundreds of battle cruisers.” “You think we have the resources to make that?” In those days we had invaded Iraq very quickly, our military industrial complex was off the charts.

“Yes you do, you’ll just have to use everything at your disposal.” This would be difficult as we were currently occupying three different countries. It would be hard to withdraw from those territories, but I had to convince the powers that be that we were small and our petty differences were insignificant next to the powers out there. And they were coming. We would need ten to twenty of these firebombers. Maybe we can launch one out into the outer edges of the solar system just for the sake of exploration. But those days were gone, it was time for a call to arms.

Chapter XIX

Building the Fleet

There were several different aspects to building an NX-01 Firebomber. Missile launchers, interior guns for security in the hull to accommodate the hundred and twenty soldiers on board. Propulsion systems in case the Klingons try to outmaneuver us to Earth. At the time we didn’t know what they had for weapons, but if it was anything like Star Trek they had energy-based weapons that could decimate a major American city with one shot. How could we shift our nuclear weapons that could make that amount of damage without the fallout? They probably have some sort of shielding too. We would need to build strong hulls for our ships. I obviously was a little peeved with the President after the way he treated me. But as a Muslim going further into faith I had to forgive him. I also realized that time was ticking, the assault on Earth could begin any day, and that there were more things at stake than my beef with him. They begged me to go meditate and see if I got any more visions. I asked them to clear the Oval Office, maybe I could get their plans on our leadership. No dice, I sat there cross legged on the logo on the carpet for half an hour, two hours, three hours, by six hours I gave up for the day. I looked out the window, there was the watermelon patch in the distance. There I had had my first vision, but what was the significance of the patch? I walked over back to it and ripped open one of the Watermelons with my bear hands. It came apart straight down the middle. And I ate the seeds, getting all the nourishment I could. I laid my head on the ground again, looking up to the stars. The stars were pock marked in the darkness as I closed my eyes. I flew past the moon and Saturn’s rings. I only took a moment to realize I had gone farther than any human had gone, because I knew there was business that had to be done. I noticed at this moment I had a piece of watermelon in my hand. I guessed this was my sustenance for the trip, where ever that may be. I woke up naked on a sandy beach, I looked behind me and saw a temple. The Klingons questioning my pasty lanky body as they were light brown, lighter than

they were in any iteration of the show, and buff (I assumed this was because they were conflict based warriors). I looked around on the beach, but there was nothing. I was so embarrassed, this was like a bad dream, naked in front of the school at the auditorium. Suddenly the building next to the temple exploded. Fire and debris flying in all directions. I started running to the ocean for cover but ducked my head into the sand like an ostrich. As I got up, I collapsed. Then some of the Klingons began talking in an alien language, as they picked me up and dragged me to the temple. Miraculously in my haze I could make out what they were saying: “What’s that on his face?” I licked my mouth like I had been punched in the face and was wiping away the blood. The juice that would become blood was there: watermelon. They took the slice I had on the sand and picked it up and brushed the sand off it. One took a bite, not knowing that you shouldn’t eat the black seeds, and spit it in my eye. “Delicious, we must take this for the glory of the empire.” They raised a dagger to my chest, and I was sucked away back to earth and I woke up in the watermelon patch surrounded by federal agents. Also naked and horribly embarrassed. The rind was in my hand. That was it, this war was for what Earth had and the Klingons didn’t, and it was my fault, all because I decided to eat some watermelon.

Chapter XX

The Klingons are Coming

I figured we had a matter of weeks. I don’t know how far away I was whisked exactly, but it wasn’t too far. I went to the President: “How long has the United States known about the Klingons?” “With the invention of the Hubble Telescope we knew about their planet. But we didn’t know about their fleet until you got back.” “How many ships did NASA see?” I asked, although begging not to know the answer. “Over one hundred.” I fell in to a chair, facepalming my hand “Why didn’t you prepare sooner?” “There was no way we could prepare in that time. We don’t have the resources or the manpower.” The President said “We’re pouring all our resources into the Firebomber.” “Sorry, Mr. President but that won’t be enough.” “We’re arming it with one hundred nuclear warheads.” The President almost pleaded “You think this will stop them?” “If we fire them all at once we might have a chance.” “We have one other option, send me on the firebomber, I can try to negotiate with them. This is my fault, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gone to their homeworld.”

“I thought you said the Klingons were warmongers.” “When I was on their homeworld I saw a building blow up. I think they’re in a state of civil war, they’re bombing themselves like the IRA in Ireland. Maybe we could do something to help them with relief.” “We don’t even know their language.” “I could hear them clear as crystal. This might be our only opportunity.” The President rejected me firmly. And once more I went to the watermelon patch, hoping for a miracle.

Chapter XXI

Once More Unto the Breach

I sat down at the watermelon patch. I meditated but got frustrated pretty quickly. I ripped apart a big ol’ melon with my bare hands and ate ravenously. Nothing happened. I waited and waited, the fate of humanity in my hands. I began pacing and pacing, shaking my fist at the moon, praying to Allah for something to happen. After all he did put me in this rather unfortunate situation. It was up to me now; I had to think this one through on my own. The Firebomber was about to fire off like a rocket into space, defending the Earth in a desperate suicide mission. I called the FBI to get me on that ship before it took off. I went to the grocery store beforehand and stocked up on produce, one from each section: a fruit, a vegetable, a grain, a sugar, and so on. Everything would have to depend on negotiation and free trade. I had to hope beyond hope that the only thing stopping atmospheric nuclear holocaust and the annihilation of Berlin again would be offering to co-exist. Based on human history, that never happened on the first shot. The odds were slim, but I knew my position in the history of Islam, where one day I could be an Imam like Kabir. I would be a great legend of the religion or the last vestige of human civilization. I got on the Firebomber; guns everywhere, security ablaze in case of an intruder alert. Black unlike any submarine hull. Hundreds of buttons on the center console to fire the nuclear weapons. The head of the ship told me, a navy iral, that we have a policy of not shooting first. We had a small shuttle, I got in there and prepared to launch when the Klingon fleet arrived. Flagging them down with our harvest might make them even more bloodthirsty. Our only hope was I had the power of articulation. Then they arrived, hundreds of ships. Blue with a hint of brown, to be honest they looked more like a certain Starship Enterprise. This could only go two ways, this was the pivotal moment in human history; peace in our time, once more unto the breach. I left the shuttle bay and went over, flashing red lights off every light source to

get their attention. This could end any second and I could hopefully be in paradise and not Jahannam for my actions. I floated and floated, waiting for one to take me in. What if they couldn’t bring me in, I thought for a moment. But they had a tractor beam, oh damn they’re definitely more advanced then us. What if they could block our nuclear weapons? Too late, I was in. “Hello there.” Said one of the Klingons. How did they understand me? That’s right, more advanced than us means some sort of translator. I guess I put myself on the high horse of Islam a bit too much, eh? “What do you have?” they asked “Earth delicacies, we call this watermelon, corn, apples, and bread.” “We have bread, it is our staple food.” said one pointing to the loaf. It was again presumptuous of me to assume that non-Earth planets didn’t have a single terrestrial thing. I decided to get the peace offering out of the way and get to the heart of the matter. “Are you here to destroy us?” I asked “We are here for another reason; we need your help. We are in a Civil War; we need your army and resources to quash the rebellion.” said the head Klingon “What is this rebellion about?” “The religious zealots are carrying out suicide bombings to drive us out. They see our occupation as oppression.” Immediately I was terrified. My father was involved in the IRA bombings during the Troubles, a time often touted as worse than the Second World War. But there was no truce, no victory, the bombings just happened less and less. One of the leaders even met with the Queen, but that was just a masking disguise to what was really happening. “And what will happen if we do not help?” I asked “We will enslave your people to fight for the United Klingon Republic.”

Chapter XXII

The Final Executive Decision

The fleets were at a stalemate. I had twenty four hours to get a response to the Klingons before they opened fire on all the major cities. I took the shuttle craft to Washington and discussed the options with the President “What if we sent a SWAT team? What were their minimal demands?” “I don’t think that is going to work, sir. They need a large force to crush the opposition.” “Wouldn’t the Klingon’s know better than fighting an insurgent force with a direct assault? None of our forces would make a dent. They have to make a peace.” “That’s easy enough to say with our own forces still fighting insurgents in Iraq.” “Now’s not the time for smarminess. We’re out of time, we have to get together.” “Volunteers? We could ask any active duty if they want to volunteer for the fight.” “But we shouldn’t get involved in the first place. It’s not the policy of the United States.” “OK, I won’t be snarky like you said, I understand how hard it is to be the President and send men into battle. Can’t we convince them that it is the honorable thing to do to serve their country?” “I could try, but it might be difficult to get them to fight for an alien force that is lightyears away.” “It’s worth a shot,” I desperately pleaded “we only have twenty-two more hours

before the ultimatum is up. I don’t like any more than you do, but it’s all we can do.” The President then rounded up his cabinet, twenty-one hours to go. Debate and talk, we were down to twenty hours. I had to prepare to get in the shuttlecraft to bring the bad news to the Klingons. Maybe if I told them I did the best I could do they would spare our cities. The truth was there was a part of me that wanted Earth to be destroyed. Allah had promised it to me when I ed the Four Horsemen. The world was an ugly place, the worst part of me bringing junkies back to life was seeing the dead son or daughter, murdered by corporate greed. Seeing them lying there, eyes rolled in the back of their head like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Twenty hours to go. By T-minus twelve hours we had the forces we needed. We left but a bare skeleton crew in our Middle East operations. We just had to pray to Allah that nothing serious would happen in the meantime. I guess the news had broken, I didn’t know of any way NASA and the government could keep this secret. My mind was racing at a million miles an hour. Allah would have known there was other life out there and that this day was inevitable. I guess he knew from the beginning of time that he had planned this pivotal moment in human history. Sometimes I wondered why he put me in this position. I guess my one regret was I couldn’t go on becoming a faithful Muslim, reading the Qur’an and praying to Mecca five times a day. The tension was killing me, I prayed the best I could that it would turn out alright but then I realized what I really needed to pray for was that god’s will would pour forth. I bet that Klingons have their own version of Allah, if I from Star Trek correctly it was K’plah. Or maybe that’s just how they say hello. Anyway, I would love to learn more about these Klingons, introduce them to Star Trek so they could learn why we (or I) were stereotyping them so badly. Everything that we’ve come up with about them were based on my visions, but as someone on that ship I dreamed of once said “Every work of fiction is based on something that did happen somewhere out in the universe.” I actually felt that there was one way to get out of this all. The key lies in Science Fiction, right? The only thing I about Star Wars, Star Trek and the like was there was no room for writers. You had to be brilliant at science and technical engineering. I barely scraped by with a D in high school Chemistry and took the easiest possible Algebra class. I guess it was inevitable that humanity was going to be destroyed at some point. Now, a hundred years from now, or five million years from now its inevitable.

Even if we made it to the end of time and the universe collapsed there was nothing, nothing at all we could do to avoid that. But that’s not the pragmatic approach I’ve seen in Star Trek, whether Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway they were all faced with impossible situations they had to work. And this certainly seemed like an impossible scenario. We tried to reach out in peace and that didn’t work. The next logical scenario was to go to war, but this was a war we couldn’t win. Maybe fortune favors the bold, but I hope the President doesn’t feel that way because I certainly wouldn’t want to take the foolish risk of starting a war that could destroy humanity. What about other forms of life? They’ll just move on to maybe Arrakis or Vulcan, we know they’re out there. We’ll be a drop in the bucket. We have to make the most of the next twelve hours, but when time is up, no matter what Earth’s population of scientists and tactical fighters decide, I’m going over there.

Chapter XXIII

The Final Countdown

Now we were down to three hours. We had enough troops for the time to assault a continent, but I had to get word from the President before we pulled the trigger. I was a civilian, but I had the most power. I was so caught up in all this I forgot about my fellow Muslims who also had powers. “Are you aware of the Four Horseman?” I asked the President. Aabinus has the power of alchemy and Imran can manipulate vegetation, so as a peace offering we could make gold for them. Maybe that would fuel their war machine. But, more importantly, Danish has the power for extra sensory perception. I, in all humility, agree that my powers of resurrection are the most powerful, but I thought if we got Danish on that ship there may be a way to get him to shut the power off. We were going to go up to what seemed to be the main battle cruiser. It looked just like the one from The Next Generation. One last thing I had the President do, and it seemed a little silly, was get Trekkies to analyze a Klingon battle cruiser from every show, we may have needed to find a weakness in whatever shielding they had. A wild goose chase for a needle in a haystack. The Four Horsemen were assembled with forty-five minutes remaining. I asked for all of them on the shuttle craft. We could barely fit all of them on there, it was only meant for two people. We flew over to the ship, with no time to spare. Danish and I had a signal where I bowed my head as if in apology to an offense the Klingons took, that way we could anticipate their decision. Danish would have to close his eyes to try and access the ship, assuming it ran on some sort of electricity. Things could get very dicey if they didn’t allow Aabinus, Imran, and especially Danish. I didn’t have powers that would work in this situation, and Aabinus and Imran’s powers were but a token gesture. It was all in Danish’s hands, and I wish the backup plan of giving away our soldiers, but I was morally opposed to it.

We docked from our shuttle to their main shuttle bay. My heart was pounding the whole time, begging Allah for this to work out. Aabinus, Imran, and I boarded the Klingon flagship, bearing a truce. I was going to explain that we were willing to submit a contingent team of advanced soldiers who could fight. I didn’t like sending our boys that far away to fight an alien war, but the President told me these soldiers were willing to fight the good (or bad) fight. My father being Irish I knew what it was like to fight a war against insurgents rather than soldiers, an unwinnable war. But I had already had these worries and there were no other options. I’d gone over and over them in my head and while the first options were more of a compromise, I wasn’t afraid to try the second option. We came on board; I was tempted to say “K’plah” but I shook that idea out of my head; I could communicate with a perfectly good “hello” as I should have known. When we got on board I looked around, expecting swords or bat’leths but ultimately it was completely sparse, whether due to the war effort or cultural ascetic. I went up the leader and bowed my head, then offered a handshake which confused them. Aabinus and Imran offered them gold and heads of lettuce. “Perhaps these offerings could be a token of peace between us? I asked “We accept your offerings, but ask you what of the soldiers for our war?” “Well, we have a contingent of soldiers at the ready. They are the most elite squad we have on the planet for extraordinary conflicts.” “We demanded your whole military.” “We have our own conflicts to fight.” “What a puny race with their own problems to deal with. You are not meant to live in the stars.” “You have your own problems with the insurgents.” “You think they are friends of our world? They came from somewhere else in the galaxy. They are not among us.” “What do they want?” I asked, hoping Humanity could solve this problem “We don’t know.” He said, genuinely confused

We came to realize the Klingon leader was fighting for medical supplies. There was a plague going about on their homeworld. The insurgents had searched the galaxy looking for a cure to this plague, and with it popping up on the Klingon homeworld they might have found what they were looking for. They infiltrated them, testing their world’s plague versus their plague. They forced them to come up with a cure. “We can find a cure and end this war once and for all.” I pleaded “We’ve tried everything, nothing can cure this plague.” “You don’t have Earth resources. We have cured many illnesses. Give us some time.” “No! There’s only one way to end this all, an overwhelming military buildup; we need your soldiers.” I looked back to the shuttle bay doors, Danish was peeking his eyes through the door, I bowed to the head Klingon; the signal. Danish closed his eyes to concentrate. The lights began flickering; I hoped we didn’t lose life . If this was the end, I was proud to save humanity, even though not too long ago I prayed this was humanity’s death. I was wish washy on stuff like this until I actually experienced the events. The lights and the computers flickered more and more but refused to shut off completely. One of the high-ranking Klingons found Danish in our cargo bay and shot him, and the lights turned completely on. The captain had seen through our deception and were prepared to kill us too. We were agreed, the President and I, that if I did not get a response to him in twenty minutes after boarding he would launch the nukes, and none of us wanted that disaster on our hands. “Trying to betray us?” I wasn’t one prone to lying so I was tempted to give him a straight answer, but I sugar coated it a bit and got to the heart of it. “Look, none of us want a war, and certainly you don’t want a war on two fronts.” “Whoever said Klingons could not win a war on two fronts?” That was the first time I had heard them say that’s what they were. And it’s not like the United States hadn’t already done that in World War II. “With the ships and technology you have it would be closer to a genocide. And then when you were done with us you would annihilate your other enemy.” It

was time to throw up a Hail Mary. “Sir, would it not be dishonorable to wipe out a species, especially when they are trying to help you?” “What do you know of honor?” “I know that you are an honorable species and always have been since the time of Kahless.” Really bullshitting now, thanks Deep Space Nine “I’ve seen your planet. It’s very much like Earth’s, you have beautiful temples, you know of a higher power just as we do. Please, bring us to your world so we can bring about an honorable peace.

Chapter XXIV

Triple E

There were a couple things I overlooked about the Klingons. The “scientists” who looked over Star Trek and other science fiction works found out that Klingons were spread beyond their homeworld. I was foolish to think Klingons were confined to one world like we humans were, so I didn’t know of which planet I had seen. If it was anything as bad as I saw in my vision, I knew these negotiations might prove fruitless. If insurgents were spread ten or twelve planets wide even with our entire military that they wanted, it would not be enough. I begged them to accept our resources, and in time with more of the Firebomber class for exploration, we could exploit more materials. The head Klingon asked what sort of missiles we had on our ship, I explained it was called a “nuclear device” but did not delve deeper into the explanation of the destruction it could wrought. I missed Danish, I botched the one attempt we had to hold a trump card. I felt like the blood was on my hands, but we all tried our best. The second thing I learned was that Klingons were alcoholics. Not in the sense that we humans are when we are intoxicated but nonetheless dependent of alcohol. As I guessed they always had barrels of “Blood Wine” on their ships, and always needed to stay at least buzzed to function. Maybe we weren’t in any way superior to the Klingons. We landed on sand (I didn’t know ships could land safely on sand) and I saw a familiar beach. I wanted to walk into the ocean, swim and never come back. But my luck I would wade into the shore after a hundred feet. It looked long enough. This was D-Day times a thousand; K-Day; Storming the beaches on a shuttle. I had Aabinus grow carrots as a last-minute token. That’s when I saw a bug on the carrot. I looked closer and it was a mosquito and looked at the head Klingon to notice he had something similar to a mosquito bite. “Have you ever been to Earth before.”

“Yes, during your initial negotiations. I was on a beach similar to this in a place named Florida where I got this bite.” It all became clear to me. Klingons had been to Earth before. They had some minor ridges on their foreheads, but they could have gone in disguise or cloaked very easily. We had a Hubble Telescope to tell us the Klingon homeworld was out there, they took it one step further. They went Paris to sample wine and cheese; they went to Munich to try our beer. But like the Native Americans who died from smallpox, they couldn’t process our environment in a world of foreigners. They didn’t get sick until they came back. And by then the bacteria mutated, and the situation spiraled out of control. Earth-based infections spread throughout their colonies, and they tried to develop a cure. “You do realize that bit is the cause of the plague? How far you into finding the cure?” “So you figured it out, did you? We were prepared to die before showing our hand to you. If you must know we are part way there. We were on the fast track to developing it, but the insurgents thought we had developed it and were withholding it. We’ve been swamped by the war ever since.” “We can solve this, this is an Earth based disease, our scientists can cure it.” “You will give us your military within the time we have allowed you. We will crush the rebellion then we will find a cure.” “Are you insane? Stop the bloodshed, come to a truce with the insurgents, meet with them and come to an armistice.” “Impossible. We cannot allow them to win and dishonor us.” “You are killing yourself senselessly. Don’t let your warped sense of honor get in the way of saving your race.”

Chapter XXV

A New Dawn

The last few weeks I going into a deep sleep, whatever time I could get to I rested. I was getting less and less, but a deeper sleep then I had ever gotten. Then I woke every day and for a second I didn’t know where I was and felt a bliss. But then reality sat in and I felt like I wanted to die, if not to get more sleep. But once the New Earth started that day I can tell you I never dreaded getting out of bed again. And I waking up on that special day. Maybe in the present with the technology we have you might think this old hat, but back then you wouldn’t believe the ships that were constructed after the Klingon incident. We christened the Firebomber ceremoniously into the Enterprise. We cracked a bottle of champagne on her and had Scott Bakula, Patrick Stewart, and William Shatner on hand for the “Leaving the Solar System” expedition. Not wanting to be too cheesy we didn’t play the Next Generation theme, we just let the ocean of stars twinkle in their magnificence. And It wouldn’t take until the 23rd and 24th century to build more advanced Starship Enterprises and Millennium Falcons for science expeditions. We even built a TARDIS phone booth for one-way slingshots around Alpha Centauri and back. We are so unoriginal, and that’s a good thing. The blueprints were there all along. In time, we allied with the Klingons. We found a planet we christened Vulcan shortly after, colonized Alpha Centauri, and began trade negations with Aarakis. In time, the drug problem on Earth receded. No planet is completely devoid of drugs, but people didn’t feel the need to shoot up and die when they had the whole galaxy at hand. I feared there would be a tyrannical Galactic Empire out there, but we knew through our archival footage to shoot in their exhaust port if the time came. I wouldn’t imagine a Death Star destroying Earth, then all this would have been for nothing. Since I have come to know Allah I can only imagine that in his goodness he meant for us not to scatter but to expand. That’s why he created Star Trek and Star Wars and everything else, to show us through science fiction what a bright and optimistic future humanity can have if we could

only grasp it. Romulans, Vulcans, and probably Wookies were all out there waiting for us to in the interstellar community and Allah knew what was out there and gave us hints. Humans had finally found their place in the sun. But here’s the bad news, I go get a checkup at the clinic (when I had the power of resurrection mortal medical instruments could not gage anything) they see something concerning, do a biopsy and I have Stage II Liver failure. Liver failure at my age! I had abstained from drink according to the will of Allah. But it was hereditary apparently, not from my previous life of binge drinking, my father not knowing (literally) that he was screwing me into an early death. Imam Kabir offered to donate his liver, but his was not a match. I also felt I had achieved the will of Allah in his eyes and lived a fruitful life. I’m going to give my body to science and hopefully my gifts could help as medicine or some other way to benefit the human and Klingon race. I had been a prisoner of pleasure, bouncing around the world, but now I think back to when I was standing at the stream, how I nearly jumped. I would have been damned for throwing away my gift. But now I can move on from the stream onto the wide-open fields of paradise. I’m turning yellow from jaundice; I look in the mirror and realize the end is coming. There is one thing left I want to do though. My life, especially since I got my powers, has been a marathon. The one thing I from my childhood was when the Boston Marathon was bombed. I wanted that day to become a doctor and help people in crises like that. My father ran the Philadelphia marathon, but even though that was closer to Milwaukee I wanted the Boston Marathon for “Heartbreak Hill” where you make it or die. And I wanted to die there. Plus, the fact that the Klingons running it every year and kicking our asses was becoming repetitive. I took my last dialysis treatment (Klingons weren’t that great at medicine ) and went solo. Jogged every morning, my skin dying the color of vomit. I didn’t want to be completely prepared for the effort, I wanted to run out of gas on purpose. I was going to push through the hill on fumes and look up at the bright sun in the sky thinking “I will make your descendants as multiple as the stars in the sky” and think even Moses didn’t realize what God meant. I’m at the starting line waiting for the opening gun. This is the last you’ll hear of me. John Ewing, g off.

Part III Fame

Steam comes off the typewriter, The needle scrapes the vinyl kindling smoke Books catching flame through the pages turning Fahrenheit 451 in the house

Fire won’t stop me My lungs may turn to meat My throat turn scarlet red At this arson scene Tongues of fire descend on my shoulder

The vinyl is melting The pages are scorched Ink flows from the typewriter in this intense heat Knuckles crack, four alarms, out the house And down it goes

Chapter I

Vinyl is the Best Medium

I finished writing the book, I was proud but not super proud. I could see it making an impact in the avant-garde scene like my Met Sculpture, although like with that I feel like I had kind of slapped it together. However, not working on an endeavor like this before, it felt like I had just delivered a baby. I felt like it was the best I could do, and nothing else would come to mind for a while. I called an independent publisher I had found on the internet. It wasn’t Penguin Publishing or anything, but it was a start. It honestly didn’t take too long, the Met residuals and what I had in my remaining savings easily covered the cost. Publishing this work was like shooting an arrow through my heart, I could feel my heart gushing with happiness. This was true happiness, finally doing what I loved for a living. But I wasn’t prepared for it. Shooting an arrow through most people’s hearts would kill them but it strengthened my heart, made it beat faster. No sooner had I reached out to an independent publisher then I saw my book flying off the rack at Barnes & Noble. I wondered for a moment why everyone was so enamored with this narrative. I soon had book gs, and everyone who came up to me showered me with praise. I didn’t get anything below an average review. Book gs reminded me of the time I was at a Knick game at the Garden, I saw players throwing their headbands into the crowd. Obviously, my family was poor and we were in the balcony. I wished they could have cannoned it up to me, oh how I wish I was down there. Now they were coming to me, I was the player throwing headbands into the crowd. “What’s your secret?” a customer asked me at a book g “Don’t be afraid to wing it. And that’s not just in writing, that’s in life.” I took my advice very literally. The first thing that happened after I got semifamous was I prepared to take a trip to Los Angeles. I was excited to start rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elite. Make the magic happen, that’s what I

set out to do and that’s what happened. I booked my ticket, I was getting more residuals from the Met for my sculpture, on a first-class ticket to LAX, because damn it I was royalty now. I wanted to personally thank my lord and savior lord god first and foremost, he gave me the power to write my magnum opus. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died penniless he thought he was a horrible failure, but failure no longer I was! Here I am talking like Yoda, but powerful warrior I am. Maybe I should get to work on my second novel, I wonder how long that will take to make. Thank god the west coast has Starbucks on every corner, I can really dig in and make a dent on the writing scene. I landed at LAX, got off the plane, grabbed my overhead bag with my manuscript, went backwards out through security, and bam! New life started. I went to a recording studio, I wanted to have an audio transcript of the book, possible for audible tapes and podcasts. I had to take the elevator up to the 42nd floor and wouldn’t you know it! There I was in the elevator with Stephen King! The one and only, no doubt about it. Once in undergraduate school I had a professor who said, “If you were in an elevator with Jackson Pollack for 30 seconds would you try to pitch him something or just let the conversation trail off?” “Hello. Nice to meet you Mr. King.” I said, nodding my head. Bold move, just name dropping like that, for all I know he could be a lookalike or a stunt double for a commercial.” “Hello, nice to meet you too!” Very cordial. I wanted to ask him one question, but I was too afraid to bombard him like this. “Look I know you probably hate to get asked questions from strangers on the street. But I have something to ask you. “No not at all, I love to mingle with fans. I often get my best writing at Fenway Park with twenty thousand other fans.” How do you write books that are twelve hundred pages like It. I recently wrote a book and could barely get it to two hundred pages. I felt like I was throwing in the kitchen sink but couldn’t beef it up. And I don’t like to pad.” “Come with me.” Luckily, he was also going to the 42nd floor, and we got off. I only had a few minutes before the audio recording.

“The key is collaboration. You need to bounce ideas off other authors. And yes, don’t be afraid to just bullshit out lines on paper like you said. But sometimes you need inspiration.” He opened the door to what seemed to be his office. It had a gramophone sitting on a table with a vinyl record. He clicked the on button, cranked it at a blistering speed, as if he was still on one of his 80’s cocaine binges. The house began to spiral. “Keep in mind, I have no idea where this baby will land.” He said “What’s going on?” I asked as if I was drunk, the room was spinning more and more, everything becoming blurry. I felt drugged. “Voila.” said King “Here we are.” Where we were was a hill in a quasi-jungle. I saw a man with a distinctive mustache lead a charge up a hill. I was a bit of a history buff, especially of turn of the century politics, this was Teddy Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders in a charge up San Juan Hill. “This is where I get my inspiration.” “Cuba?” I asked “The past. In the late 1990’s, I had been in a car accident. Immediately after the car crash I had been crippled initially, but as I was lying in the snow the world began to spin. I thought I was possibly going to the afterlife, when suddenly there were all the great writers around me when I woke up in 1920’s . There was an old gramophone in the office of Ernest Hemingway. I was afraid to approach my idol, but there was no way I could get home without it. I went up and spun the gramophone and didn’t let go, sensing a great power within it. Even though I stole a time traveling device from my favorite author, it seems many of the talented writers could time travel (although I guess Hemingway couldn’t anymore).” This reminded me of what had happened with Cthulhu. He once told me he liked to collaborate with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien specifically to come up with The Dark Tower series. After everything I had seen nothing surprised me anymore. I was tempted to take the gramophone for myself, but King’s powers of perception were far beyond mine. I felt like he knew who I was intimately somehow but not exactly sure how. This was all too weird for me, I knew I had a future as a writer, but I didn’t know if I was worthy to these League of Extraordinary Writers.

“Is this special gramophone the key to the travel? Where did it come from?” I asked “You need a special object. Consider the gramophone your training wheels.” “And we are completely at the mercy of the device when we go?” “Again, training wheels.” “Can I meet the League?” I genuinely wondered, he seemed amused by the connotation. I imagine Hemingway would have been pissed at us for my association with stealing his gramophone, but he probably found another. The possibilities were seemingly endless. “Who is your favorite author to collaborate with?” “I prefer to do it all on my own. I’m my own best collaborator. The best is within.” King said. I was always questioning if that was true. Cthulhu, God, my Father, all there to guide me. But was the best truly within?

Chapter II

The Lakers Game

I needed to wind down before going on yet another roller coaster ride. I got home to see mom. I was walking down the street and saw Madison Square Garden was undergoing renovation. In fact, it looked like it was close to being done, I wondered if and when the Knicks would move back. After what happened I wondered if they would ever be allowed to re-enter the league. And then I saw something that confused me to my core. The Twin Towers were back. I’d guessed I’d been away for so long, jumping through time with the great authors that I pondered if this was the future, that this was the memorial, but soon I was home. “Mom.” I started, giving her a gigantic bear hug. “Did you see Madison Square Garden?” “Looks like the renovations will be done soon. I hear the Knicks will be coming into town to kick off the season.” I was very excited yet slightly confused, maybe it was just her wording. I slinked off to the computer; typed in “Knicks Game” into Google. “Los Angeles Knicks vs. New York Lakers; Thursday 7:30, Madison Square Garden.” I started grinding my teeth to dust. I glanced back at my mother, who was innocently washing the dishes. I was tempted to go taste the water, maybe it was tainted with LSD. “Will you be going to the game? You definitely have money now with your novel.” “I’ll think about it. Did you read The Stream?” “I did honey, but I was wondering why you made the characters Muslim.” “Well, I was thinking after 9/11 and ISIS and all the anti-Muslim bigotry that came with it, I could do something to repair that image.”

“What are you talking about dear, what’s nine eleven and eyesis?” “Mom, what planet are we on? Why are the Knicks from Los Angeles, and how do you not know about 9/11?” I questioned “Son I think you’ve gotten a little too wrapped up with your book. You must be having delusions.” Mom retorted. I went back to the computer, typed in September 11th, 2001. All I got was a picture of Al Gore shaking hands with Israel’s Prime Minister on that date. From what I could find, Al Gore had been elected in 2000 after his famous recount. I hurriedly went to check on Wikipedia about the Knicks. Apparently, the Minneapolis Lakers had moved to New York in the late 50’s while Los Angeles had the homegrown Knicks since the NBA originally started. I went to Yahoo! to see what was in the news today. Electric cars were taking over according to a new report, the stock market was through the roof, and peace talks between Iraq and Iran seemed to be coming to fruition, all hunkie dory. “By the way, I have some bad news honey, we have to put Friday down.” “What, he’s a year old! We’ll discuss this on the way back.” “What do you mean we’ve had him for almost 15 years, he’s a mummy!” I needed a breath of fresh air. I stepped out and called Stephen King; it definitely felt a bit surreal to have a phone number for such a famous author. Maybe one day I could mentor an aspiring youth writer. “Stephen, is there anything going wrong out there in Los Angeles? The World Trade Center is still here. “The Red Sox are now based out of L.A. Happens with time travel. Stuff moves around.” “I walked down the street; the Brooklyn Bridge was gone. I stopped and did a double take. I checked my phone, taken out by terrorists in 2003 apparently. Look Stephen, I can’t deal with this. My world’s flipped upside down.” I said “My world is flipped upside down every time I do this. You get used to it.” “I don’t want to get used to it.”

“I’d seen your tape of when Madison Square Garden was burned down in your melee. Do you really want to go back to that?” “How do you know when we come back it won’t be worse?” “That’s the price we pay for our art.”

Chapter III

The Break-in

I absolutely believed in the Butterfly effect. I wondered how many times the time space continuum fractured in my life. What else could have happened? Could Kennedy still be alive? For better or worse, I had to stop this time traveling nonsense. I would have to break into Stephen King’s office (or whatever it was) and destroy his special gramophone. What would happen when it broke was beyond me, but something had to be done about it. I flew back to Los Angeles and got to the audiobook office. I went up to the 42nd floor, third door on the left. Locked (of course), I knocked, and King answered the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked. I knocked him on the head with a bully club. I went over to the gramophone; I had the crank in my grip. I knew Stephen King went wherever, whenever willy nilly. I wondered if I had the will I could go back to a time of my choosing. If I wished hard upon a star I could go where I wanted back to the Madison Square Garden riot, I wanted to stop it before it happened. But maybe too much damage had been done. I cranked in confusion and defiance, unsure if I really wanted to go back to that horrible night, unaware of what the repercussions might be. The room began to spin again, I had to close my eyes to avoid puking. I opened my eyes, there was a Christmas tree in the room, and it was lightly snowing outside. “Hello? Mom?” I hollered. This was bigger than mom’s apartment, but the amount of snow coming down have meant that I hadn’t left New York. “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy’s here! Now we can open presents!” “Hi sweetheart.” An attractive woman my age gave me a peck on the cheek “You really put other last-minute shoppers to shame. Can I make you some coffee?” “Absolutely…” I gave her an affirmative but confused answer, they popped off

to make the morning coffee and breakfast before we ripped open the paper for presents. “What are you doing here?” Stephen King popped out behind the tree. I was completely startled “The last thing I happening is you attacking me, then you were gone. The gramophone was still spinning, so I cranked it some more and here we are. Christmas day, the year unknown.” “This is my future isn’t it? The tree, a loving wife and kids. Everything I ever wanted. “I’ve written plenty of horror novels, and I can spot when something is about to go wrong. I can tell you, for certain, something is going to. go. wrong.” “What could it be? Are you telling me the snow is anthrax or something?” Suddenly there was a high-pitched shriek that scared me to my bones. It was my daughter “I don’t want eggs! How many times have I told you I hate eggs!” Then she threw the plate into the wall. My worst fear: little brats. “Take me back.” I began shaking, begging to leave the nightmare that was unfolding “I thought you loved children. I thought this was your dream.” Another loud pitched scream made him dread opening the presents that he probably didn’t get her. “What do I have to do?” almost in the throes of tears “Do you know how many books I’ve written? Hundreds! I’m always writing. I think you were just beginner’s luck, show me what else ya got and then you can the true group of elite writers, he threw a pencil and paper down then disappeared. I could hear the sound of screaming inside, I knew the unwrapping of presents was happening.

Chapter IV

Hutter Revisited

I picked up the pencil, immediately with a story I had once visited. It was cold out and I didn’t know how long I was going to make it. It may not have been fiction, but I could only hope to god that King wouldn’t notice, but here goes: “It was 5:15 AM on a blisteringly cold February morning. He was warm in his bed and could honestly die in the warmth. The dream was vivid, he could only bits and pieces, but the nightmare had begun. The moon was halfcrescent, in Morocco it would still be nighttime, and he could still be in bed. But he had eight hours to go, he could already dread it. He could stick his finger down his throat, but Mom had held him back from school enough times after he had had vomiting spells in terror of going to school. Today would be even worse because he had to take an hour ride to school in the cold of a New England’s winter. He showered, looking around for a razor, he found his father’s but realized it was too dull to slit his wrists. He turned on the shower and went in. He wanted to turn the shower ice cold and freeze to death, but then he was done. He toweled himself off and looked at his reflection in the mirror, one of loathing and anxiety. He grabbed his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck, got his backpack, and waited for the bus. One last suicidal thought he had was running into the woods and living feral. He didn’t know what kept him going to face yet another excruciating day in eighth grade. For the bus ride in the pitch blackness and ice cold where he could see his breath there was nothing he could really do outside of dread the day coming ahead. He stared at the trees zipping in the distance, hoping one would break in the wind and crush the bus. With his luck it wouldn’t be the half he was sitting in. Boy and girl after boy and girl came on the bus, him knowing that they were going to be part of the source of their torment, but it was hard to get mad at them seeing as they were just prepubescents and didn’t deserve the way they were going to

be treated later today. He ate his breakfast on the bus, god forbid the bus driver yell at him. Maybe it would be like a vaccine to prep his body for the onslaught of the virus. Then they were there, the hour had flown by, him begging not to have it end. He saw the school: “Rochester Middle School.” The buses filed one by one up to the door, he felt like a prisoner going into the State Prison. Any last-minute ways out? No, so he shuffled into the gymnasium. He had another fifteen minutes to dread the day. The loud chit chat, completely banal among middle schoolers, washed over him, shaking him to his core. Home room was coming up, the whistle blew, off they marched. Mr. Hutter was a rage-o-holic. He only had a 25 percent chance to get his homeroom at the beginning of the year, but as was his life story, drew the short end of the stick. I checked for his car, his piece of shit beige Ford Windstar in the parking lot I knew he was here. Lurking in the layer of his classroom. Coke cans everywhere on his desk, his rotted teeth and cavities made for blue teeth. Clown makeup inside the mouth. We all stood for the Pledge of Allegiance; this could have been the first big hiccup in the day if any of us were goofing off. I one day a kid didn’t take his hat off and he unloaded on him: “SHOW SOME RESPECT!” The pledge went without controversy. Thirty seconds down in my eight-hour session in hell. So, we started with reading class, again stuck with Hutter. We were reading a book about the Holocaust, which seemed a touch dark for just eighth graders. Now I would be lying awake at night not only dreading the next day of school but petrified I’d dream of the ashes of murdered Jews. Here was another opportunity for black comedy misfire when one of the kids tries to make a cruel joke. Nothing happens luckily, and we’ve survived another ninety minutes. I go to science class, and it seems to be a good hour respite. Until he came in clutching two candy wrappers in a fist. “One more piece of trash and you don’t get recess today.” Calm, cool, but stern. But I felt like his anger thermometer’s mercury was about to punch over the top. After science came the dreaded lunch period. We were all slobs and tended to trash the cafeteria something fierce. This was the period that was most tense, my vein throbbed blue in my head like his teeth. I ate my slice of pizza, but always ed on the carton milk which disgusted me and made me hate anyone I saw drinking it. I picked up any rubbish I could that I saw, I have to prevent the hydrogen bomb from going off. I had averted another emotional crisis that I wouldn’t be able to get over. Sad

about yesterday, scared about tomorrow, unable to move in the present. “Gemini!” My English teacher Mr. Jones called. We grouped. Now, Mr. Jones was a bit laxer about how we assembled, marched, and dispersed. I was happy around Mr. Jones, he liked to play guitar for us in class. We walked around the school building to the front entrance. I thought I was in the clear for the rest of the day, just had to survive his math class. Then I saw his feet come out the door. My heart skipped two beats and I almost shit my pants, his face was maroon red. “I’m going to have a little chat with them.” I burst out in tears knowing the tirade that was about to be unleashed. “LOUD ENOUGH TO SHAKE THE BUILDING, I COULD HEAR YOU FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE BUILDING.” And the next thing I he clutched at his chest. Oh thank god, a heart attack! Life couldn’t get better. But he punched his chest and continued his little meltdown. And that’s when I prayed “Dear God, let this be massive heart failure.” Then he began hacking and coughing up blood. Praise god, he answered my prayers. Down on the ground he went, coughing bile. And before he lost consciousness, I ran out of line and said “This is what you deserve” to his ear. I had a few months, inching ever closer to high school, but unfortunately, Mr. Hutter survived, and he ed what I said. He called me to his desk after school, the pent-up frustration of three months of recovery boiling up under the surface. But surprisingly he didn’t yell at me, I could see the big vein in his forehead where he had his episode. “Why did you say what you did when I fell?” he started, and everything spilled out because I couldn’t hide from him “Mr. Hutter, I’m terrified of you. I’m terrified to go to school every day because of you. Your yell scares me. And I said what I did because I thought I had escaped this nightmare.” I lightly began sobbing, he got up from his desk, completely ignoring me. In his contempt, I was tempted to punch him in the face and knock the rest of his disgusting teeth out of his face, but I didn’t need a reason to get expelled this early in my school experience. I went home to the usual suicidal thoughts; in everything I saw a possible game ender. It was March, I had a trip to Los Angeles to see the Lakers, who I had never seen but was dying to since they were playing the Knicks. But I knew

what every day would be like out there, knowing I had to go back with two months left on my sentence. And all sixty days would be complete torture. And with a bullseye on my heart with Hutter out to get me. Maybe I would have an aneurysm scaring myself to death. But first was the trip; I stood outside the Laker’s arena and took a picture with the Magic Johnson statue. The game that night was tight, I was lost in the moment. But then we were back at the airport, heading back to the disaster zone. I was in the clouds when I realized there was only one thing to do. Run away from home and start a new life. I had forty dollars my dad gave me for spending money for the vacation. A oneway flight from LaGuardia would be at minimum in coach a hundred and twenty dollars. I didn’t know how I was going to get the money. When we landed in New York, I grabbed my bag. I was probably going to have to take it to a pawn shop. But even then I would come up short. “Dad,” I asked. “What was the hardest thing that ever happened in your life?” “When my mother had terminal cancer when I was college. What makes you ask that?” he wondered “I wish we never came back from L.A. I don’t want to go back to school.” “Why? I haven’t noticed anything wrong with you. Why is this happening now?” “My math teacher Mr. Hutter yells at us every day. I’m terrified of him.” “Son, when I was your age my father was terrified of being drafted into Vietnam. But he sucked in his gut and put up with it.” “Yeah, but he died.” “You’re not going to die from a teacher yelling at you though. If your grandfather could face ‘Nam right in the face, you can go to school for sixty more days. Think of him as a drill sergeant, but he can’t hit you.” And that’s when I realized it. I would need to get Hutter to hit me. I went to school the next day with a plan. Piss him off so much that he hit me, voluntarily or involuntarily as soon as I saw him. Maybe kick him in the shin or shake up his can of Coke. But before I left I got the idea. I would jump out and key his car when he left for the day. I would jump out of the small woods, then kick him in the shins. That’s what I did and sure enough I got a physical reaction out of him. I got hit in the

face, worked up the waterworks, he was fired, and I won. The next thing I ed was waking up in King’s bed, the gramophone twisting a vinyl record wildly with Count Basie flooding the room. “Not too bad, not too bad at all.”

Chapter V

The King’s Court

It looked like I had proved myself in the great Stephen King’s eyes, so it was time to enter the pantheon that few were able to enter: the writers’ group. There was a lot I was excited to learn about what it took to be a truly great writer because with The Stream I felt like I had just scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg. “Let me ask you something Stephen, why did you test me like that? Did you not like The Stream?” I innocently wondered “I like this story about being terrified of going to school every day. Where did you get the idea to write this?” “It really happened to me.” “All of it?” “Too strange to be fiction. I bet if you heard him scream at you, you would piss your pants too. I was just lucky I didn’t shit them too. “That’s why I like it so much, its personal. The Shining had roots in my alcoholism. Writing should also be about exorcising some demons. “But you always saw something in me?” “Of course, you’re incredibly creative. I could never come up with a man resurrecting junkies from the dead.” “I don’t know if I can expand on this story, I mean what’s the point in the end? He just has a tortured middle school experience. So what? So do a lot of other people; there’s just no theme to it. Maybe it can just work as a short story in an

anthology. “I’m the exact opposite, I can throw a million things at the page and make a thousand-page book that has hundreds of different themes.” “I throw a million ideas at the page, and I can barely get to 100 pages. “I see a theme running through the two works you’ve done so far.” “What’s that?” I asked “That’s for you to find out.” King devilishly teased “Do you have a running theme?” “It’s changed over the decades. But I see one sticking with you for the long run.” King said, might as well he should have pushed his finger around his nose like The Sting. “All you have to do is keep writing.” Let me see how far I can expand this.

Chapter VI

Parallel Universes

Science fiction often deals with time travel plots. “Infinite possibilities in infinite combinations” a great orator once said. Why I didn’t include it in my novel might have to do with the fact that I didn’t want to stretch the limits of credibility too much beyond what it was already at. A junkie healer who becomes an outer space diplomat and all was already stretching plausibility. But if there’s one thing I know is that if you go through time you won’t just change it, but it will split off into another lifetime. King had asked me rather bluntly if I wanted to go back to a world where my beloved Madison Square Garden burned down, or the world where they rebuilt it and the Twin Towers never got hit. All worlds are all out there, ones which I wasn’t born, and ones where I committed suicide. The world I had been to which still had the Knicks was a pretty good world, but there was one where I also probably still worked a shit job and wasn’t a famous writer anymore. Maybe I land in one where I was seven-foot-tall and played for the Knicks. Who knew the possibilities? But of course, it could get worse, New York could be occupied by Nazis or Commies or something. But I had to take a gamble. I had never gambled in my life, with money or ambition. But now seemed like the time to gamble. That’s what the gramophone was, not time travel but a peak into alternate dimensions. I decided to focus up and fly into the future. But of course, the gramophone was never accurate. I was at its whim. Newspapers were always the key to getting the date in the past or future. I always wanted to be in the paper, even though it was a dying breed in my time. Ink was dead and print was morphed into a horrible mutation. My fear in going into the future was I wouldn’t find a way to find out when it was. And if I couldn’t find out when it was I was blind. Luckily when I gained orientation, I picked up the paper and saw something that really got my eye. January 19th, 1961. I had a good memory with dates, the day President Eisenhower gave his

“Military Industrial Complex” speech before giving way to President Kennedy. It was also the date of birth for my mother. Whenever I needed to I thought of President Kennedy. Three years from his assassination, I wondered if I could wait and stop it, but from what I’ve seen the time with the gramophone was limited. I went to the television and turned the lunky knob, hopefully I wasn’t too late to catch it. “We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world.” I was lucky to live in the age I did. Minor skirmishes but not major engagements. I never had to a draft, I never had to storm beaches, or blow up a jungle. “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” Sorry Dwight It was at this moment I am thinking about the gift King gave me, and the gifts I had received from Cthulhu and so on down the line. I don’t know what it was, maybe it was King saying what a gift it was to use the gramophone and how I had so many opportunities to prove myself. Why was I the one chosen? John Ewing had asked that of himself. Maybe it was like President Eisenhower said about America being a special place. We fight, we bleed, we die for a better future, and that future is in me. I can’t be all things to everyone, I can’t be a good son, I can’t be a good father, I can’t even be a good human being. If I keep putting these burdens on myself, I would collapse harder than I have ever crashed before. I was tempted to turn back, but I legitimately felt like I could get something out of this riddle. Why was I sent here? But then it hit me. I was here to write a story about it, my default mode. That’s what King tested me on the first go around. I needed to the elite writers, since writing was the only thing I was good at and I needed to prove myself in life. I was feeling under the weather and wondered if time travel had a similar effect as the bacteria Klingons come in on Earth in The Stream. But there was no time for that right now, I had something more important to do, and I would have to push forward.

Chapter VII

Eisenhower/Kennedy ‘60

“Eisenhower was threatened by John F. Kennedy. After the Stevenson blowouts of fifty-two and fifty-six, Eisenhower needed another challenge. Citizens were heartbroken after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dying after four consecutive in office through war and economic hardships that had worn him down. And in Eisenhower’s case he felt his time was not up yet. The situation in Southeast Asia was deteriorating, and Kennedy wanted to put men on the moon, build bases in space to defend against the Communists and all that poppycock. A Washington JAG office was convened to look over a bombing that happened in 1944. Eisenhower thought the statute of limitations was over, but it was like hunting Nazis to Argentina. World War II was fickle when it came to laws as it was so catastrophic. In 2020 they would probably still be prosecuting Allied and Axis figures alike. Dwight went to pet his dog Heidi and looked out the Oval Office window. Kennedy was the leader of the movement to have Eisenhower impeached through this JAG inquisition. It was almost like he hated him on a personal level, like there was something he had done to him. An impeccable President who ended the stalemate in Korea at the beginning of his term, many were infuriated by his ivity to the crimes of Joseph McCarthy. Although not a lawyer in the traditional sense, Kennedy wanted to find a way to charge something that fit a crime that he saw Eisenhower as an accomplice to. But the articles for Impeachment were thin. After all, McCarthy turned out to be a bafoon when tested by Edward R. Murrow. Eisenhower was so confident throughout his entire term as Supreme Allied Commander and the rest of his Presidency, the overarching Red Scare was a small blemish. Eisenhower had eliminated the two-term limit that was installed after the death of FDR. He had used the same reasoning as Roosevelt, there was too much at

stake to walk away. Kennedy had breezed through the Democratic primaries, and with his youthful looks and charisma he could probably do four in the Oval Office as well. In their first debate Eisenhower had a stern aura that did not translate well to the new television age. Kennedy, sweeping bravura all around, easily won the debate. Although whenever he looked at him, he always sensed something was off about Kennedy. The toothy smile seemed fake; the hair parted too well. And although Eisenhower lost the first debate (at least according to polls), it was going to still be a close race. Conservatives and Protestants alike despised the youthful Roman Catholic who sought to bring about change. Change was dangerous at this point. Giving Blacks the vote, ending foreign wars prematurely, going into outer space, it was all too much. The status quo had to be maintained if America was to triumph over tyranny. There was a second and final debate coming up and Eisenhower needed to prep to potentially swing crucial voters. He invited Senator Kennedy to a dinner in the drawing room. It was the night before the debate. When he arrived, they shook hands and both peeled back a smile, as if the cameras were beaming down on them still. Kennedy almost looked around to see if he was being bugged. “Won’t you have a seat? Our appetizer is your favorite: New England Clam Chowder.” White House Kitchen staff, on call twenty-four hours a day came with the white, creamy chowder. “How is your wife?” Eisenhower asked; the other side to his charisma was his dashingly beautiful wife, a symbol to millions of American women. Kennedy took a few loud slurps with his large spoon. “Your transparency for wooing me is thick as this soup. What do you want from me?” “I just want to know why you hate me so much, Mr. Kennedy?” Eisenhower asked to his face, finally away from the cameras to get to the blunt point. He kept his smarmy happy-go-lucky face though. “I feel the American people deserve a better President.” “I think you hate me on a deeper level.” “You were the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, yes?”

“Of course, I started with the war in Europe, but I shifted focus to Japan.” “ the PT-109?” Kennedy menacingly asked “Of course, that’s what made you famous. You wouldn’t be here without that disaster.” “It was more than just a disaster. Let me tell you a story: we were near Iwo Jima, getting ready for the assault. We were torpedoed and I dragged my comrade to the nearest base. That’s the story the American public heard after the censor board had its way. As a matter of fact, I almost drowning, I had no energy left and could barely keep my head above water. I was about to give up and could see the sun glittering on the edge of the water when suddenly I saw a redder sun. It was a Japanese boat, they picked me up. The part the tabloids kept out was that by this point my fellow soldier had fallen in the depths of the ocean. He was a crewman working in the galley, and I never knew his name. Whatever name I did come up with was a total falsehood. When I got on deck I looked up, I saw a fleet of planes going overhead. I was tempted to rip my wet cotton undershirt to come and get me. Trust me I know you guys had more important things going on. I had to find a way to sabotage the Japanese ship. I tried to go down to engineering but was struck on the head as the boat turned eastward toward the Island. I was bound and gagged, but I was able to wrestle my way out before I could become a hostage. This is the story you haven’t heard. I was about to jump off again and swim and swim some more. I jumped off the deck, the Japanese didn’t have life preservers because they didn’t believe in surrender. If I was lucky I would have landed on a beach, no food, no supplies. But it wouldn’t matter because I would be in radar range. How easy it would have been to find me. So many died that day before it was over, and I saw the smoke from afar, but you would have found me. I had a wife and brothers who loved me, but I couldn’t picture them at that moment. I couldn’t see Bobby or Teddy. I was tempted to walk off the beach and sink into the Pacific like my fellow soldier, but I had something to live for. Soon the planes kept being funneled to the island. I even saw a destroyer. It went on; time ed. My cut on my leg was infected. That’s why I have my fake foot. Three more days in the baking yellow sun until you found me.” “You think you’re the only one who’s lost something. You think because you

spent some time alone on a beach you know what loss means? I had to send so many condolence letters to lost soldiers…” “But I was special. I was destined to be the President. Those were little people. You think because you led us in a war that you deserve to be President for as long as Roosevelt? You are tyrannical, trying to steal the highest office in the land.” “You’re the one trying to steal it by manipulating me. Your hands aren’t so clean. I’ve had to work for everything, I’ve earned this, you’ve earned nothing! You’re just a daddy’s boy.” At this Kennedy threw down his chowder spoon and stormed out of the room. When he heard Kennedy’s footsteps fall away, Eisenhower got up and walked slowly down the hallway, looking at the portraits of former Presidents. Most people, and it would be cliché to for President Eisenhower to do this, would reflect on the final portrait Lincoln did in his life that was hanging. But that’s not who he stopped on. He paused at James K. Polk. Native Tennessean, Polk was a hard worker first and foremost. He always burned the midnight oil. That’s what Eisenhower was determined to be and better. He looked at his own portrait, but more importantly at those empty spaces down the hall for future Presidents. He didn’t know at the time his VicePresident Richard Nixon would be up there. A senior member of the House Gerald Ford would be up there. And the governor of California Ronald Reagan would round it out by the time he died. Later that month there was a final debate. Eisenhower was sweating bullets but had to get them back in his head. He was considering sweating it all out in the White House Sauna. But he had more important things to do. He felt his heart skip a beat; not a sign of nervousness but the fact he had early onset heart failure. If he went four like Roosevelt, he would need a miracle. In fact, he would most likely die like Roosevelt before his term was up. But he had more important things to do at the moment. He needed to focus to get the point across that the situation in Vietnam was untenable, but they needed to find a way to leave without the domino effect, all the remaining Asian countries, falling under communism. “We need to find a way to stop communist infiltration of Vietnam. But escalating the troop presence will lead to a never-ending scenario…” “Let me finish that thought for you. We all know what’s coming. President

Eisenhower’s plan is to bomb the country to smithereens before we can get a positive negotiation.” Kennedy harshly interrupted “It’s exactly what he did in Dresden during the War. And you think by ordering this massacre from the skies, you are somehow better than the Nazis and the communists?” Kennedy was playing hardball now “Just by fighting the Axis we were better than them. And we had to do whatever we could to stop them as fast as we could.” “And why was that?” Kennedy asked smugly, already knowing the answer “Thousands were dying every day in the concentration camps and labor camps.” “Thousands died every day, what made this situation any different?” asked Kennedy “…We, as Americans, value life. We preserve and defend life at all costs. Before the bombing we had no chance of reaching any of those enslaved. And we face a similar situation in Vietnam.” “The Kennedy istration has a different policy. Stay in Vietnam for the time being, a small troop presence… “…An occupation force?” Eisenhower shot back, giving Kennedy a taste of his own medicine “A contingency. Help the South Vietnamese fend for themselves before…” “That would never work…” “Your shoot first, ask questions later gunslinging attitude may have worked against Nazi , but your blind to contemporary issues. The world has ed you by.” Kennedy shot off one of those boyish smirks that radiates arrogance to the point of insubordination toward his current Commander in Chief. Eisenhower was fuming so much he thought a capillary in his brain was going to burst, but took an ultra-deep breath (unbeknownst to him, this was caught on the NBC cameras) “When I was growing up we respected each other, even if they were our adversary, in a critical election for the highest office in the land. I believe that we

can all work together for the better interests of our country, especially in Vietnam. One night exactly a month later, the election results were coming in (and for the first time on television and not radio). It started with small states going Eisenhower’s way, Vermont and North Dakota. Then suddenly California went to Kennedy, and even though the projections were close, Eisenhower knew this was the fatal blow. He called a concession speech around 2 AM, gracefully bowing out of his 3rd campaign. His only thought at the moment was that this must have been how Adlai felt both times he whopped him. The inauguration was a small affair: Kennedy bravely walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, cocky as always. He said something in his inauguration speech “The time has come to ask not what you can do for your country but what can your country do for you!” Eisenhower didn’t blame Kennedy for these thoughts since one war seemed to bleed into another and another. That cold January morning in 1961 saddened President Eisenhower to see that he was ing the baton of the future to this disrespectful kid. But he shook hands and congratulated him because that’s what he knew he had to do out of respect and duty. Cut to two years later, there was a looming disaster. Kennedy’s istration had been run very smoothly, but the one thing that was a black stain on his record was Cuba. In 1961, shortly after his inauguration, he led a botched invasion of the communist Castro’s regime. The next year, they found missiles on the beaches of San Juan. His istration was all lawyers, he had no . He needed a second opinion from someone who knew what it was like to sit in the Executive’s chair. He got the red phone from under his desk and called the Secretary of Defense. “Get me President Eisenhower.” Eisenhower was blind. It was a stroke not a heart attack he had had at the debate and lost his sight completely in his right eye and partially in his left eye. The loss of three quarters of his sight didn’t slow him down though. He still woke up to his same routine, walked Heidi around his Washington residence, albeit at a slow pace. He drank his coffee and had his dietary grapefruit. He had the kitchen television on, listening to reports on the escalating issue, dubbed “The Cuban Missile Crisis.” He heard his telephone ringing; it was not hard to find the shrill klaxon.

“Yes?” Adlai Stevenson, his bitter rival in the ’52 and ’56 election, was now head of the United Nations. He had urgent business to discuss on the Missile Crisis that was unfolding. A sleek black cruiser pulled up prepared to take him to the White House. Eisenhower was thinking about something. As a general and a President, he could never stay fixated on the present. He was always looking forward to the next offensive, the next election. Soon there would be an election for 1964, which he imagined Kennedy would sweep over the favored Republican crackpot Barry Goldwater. That’s what he hated about Goldwater; he was in actuality everything Kennedy accused him of being. Kennedy was firing off at the wrong person. But he supposed he could demonize a phone book if he wanted to. But Kennedy, whether he liked it or not, was President, and Dwight Eisenhower had a duty to serve the Commander in Chief and find a solution to this Cuban Missile Crisis. The year 1968 though he couldn’t get out of his head. He couldn’t see beyond this. When he was a junior senator he ed with perfect clarity every four year election cycle. Roosevelt thumping Hoover and Dewey. He could see Kennedy trouncing Goldwater thoroughly. But after this there was a blank. Kennedy could keep going, he was young enough to, but he couldn’t see beyond this. He imagined his life would be over, this stroke had already taken a lot out of him. It wouldn’t be long before one night he was lying in bed, dreaming of happier days before the war. He was thinking back to the debate, to when he was a kid and there was no electricity. Pushing a ball with a stick in his youth, a pintsized tie and jacket. West Point was in his future as certainly as the sun rose. When he was a kid he didn’t think about his destiny. He probably didn’t even know what a destiny was in those days. America was isolationist, if he was going to fight he didn’t think he’d have to go far beyond America’s borders. Then he grew up and came the first World War. Although he didn’t storm the German trenches he could see from afar the chaos of the mud and bloodshed. When the Second World War broke out he grew weary at the thought of another war. When the bomb went off over Nagasaki he saw a new type of war. Science fiction in the 1950’s thought up space wars with lasers, but the sometimes pessimist Eisenhower thought humanity wouldn’t advance to that stage of evolution. The scariest thing was the fact that he didn’t know where America was going to go. Even though he rode his 1960’s ticket on the fact that he had brought stability to a rocky generation, things (mostly related to war) were moving too fast. When he first saw John F. Kennedy he saw a pompous Ivy League type.

These boys didn’t fight in the war, they could defer. And if the situation in Vietnam escalated like he thought it would, at Kennedy’s hands, they would defer again. The definitions of wealth were changing. Everyone could afford a nice Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, a nice car, and a two-bedroom house with a white picket fence. Lincoln lived in a log cabin in a frozen tundra. Eisenhower only had a fireplace for the never-ending Arctic. Central air conditioning, oil burners, he had to hope wealth wouldn’t go to average citizen’s heads. Not everybody could be J.P. Morgan. The first person Eisenhower met going into the White House was Secretary of State John Kemba. Secretary Kemba had overseen many aspects of the Manhattan project. He seemed to know much about Uranium and heavy water. He wanted to move the project closer to San Francisco, that’s how the tests wound up at Trinity Site, New Mexico. As atom bombs shifted to twenty megaton nuclear warheads he seemed to be more giddy during cabinet meetings during the day. To most people, and especially Kennedy and Eisenhower, this was no laughing matter, and certainly not the time to be happy about the grim prospects. “What’s to smile about?” He didn’t answer, the smirk got wiped right off his face as if he had been discovered harboring a terrible secret. But he adjusted his tie and they both entered the Situation Room. Kennedy, as an executive but also a narcissist is wont to do, was at the head of the table. There was a blue and red standard map of Cuba behind him. Eisenhower ed how at the end of his istration when Castro capped off his little revolution. The news was the worst since McCarthy: “Eisenhower loses Cuba,” “Reds ninety miles away from Miami.” It was a part of the reason he lost in 1960, but was secretly glad, deep down, that the aborted Bay of Pigs was such a disaster. Eisenhower was born to do more than critique the President endlessly. The office of the Presidency was a sacred position. In these days of radio and the burgeoning television, there were endless opportunities to critique the President. During the war, the President was infallible, and that’s why the disaster at Dresden had not exploded in scandal until recently. “I’m sure you’re all aware of the situation. I want to start with you President Eisenhower, what would you have us do?” Eisenhower was shocked to be called President again, he began to tear up in his good eye, but shook it away incognito. This was a time for strong men to stand up. President Eisenhower was proud to save the world one last time.

Eisenhower always seemed to have a pencil in his mouth. Though almost totally blind he always needed to take notes. He went to speak, mumbling though gritted teeth before taking the pencil out. “During the war, hell even during my Presidency, we dealt with foreign policy in a, let’s say, forceful way. We obviously can’t in the never-ending chess match with the Soviet Union. We have to be forceful yet respectful. I’ve heard rumors that they want our presence out of Turkey, why don’t we swap?” “We do not negotiate with the Soviets.” Kennedy said “Frankly Mr. President, and I speak from experience, we’re not in a position to go to war. And I don’t need to explain the disastrous consequences of nuclear war, which needs to be avoided at all costs.” “I’m well aware of that Mr. President, but I see no alternatives.” Eventually the day reached no imes. No solutions, no compromises, and the Soviets were inching closer and closer to re-arming the Cubans. If they were going to avoid a nuclear winter, someone had to blink, and President Eisenhower wanted desperately for Kennedy to, even if it meant losing some image on the world stage. In the Second World War this diplomacy might work, as the Allies logic was to force the unconditional surrender of the Axis forces. But Russia was too much, it was too big and had too much influence around the world in the form of communism to face a direct assault. After having a stroke, Eisenhower got shoddy medical care. It really was no one’s fault because it took so long to realize he was even having a stroke, but things could have been done better. When the paramedics arrived at the boondocks mansion he had isolated himself in, they went through the routine, but did nothing to help when time was critical. They shone a light in his eyes that were glazed over and he was unresponsive. Eventually they got him to the hospital, but by then he was stricken nearly blind and was limp on his right side. As he lay in the hospital bed, not knowing if it was the stroke making him think this way, Eisenhower pondered whether communism was so bad a form of government. Sure he had gone to war to fight for our way of life to avoid the pitfalls of tyranny. In communism everybody got along. There were no more classes. And free excellent health care for all. But he had heard the stories of the gulags, if you spoke out against the state you were exiled. At that moment he realized he was actually grateful for John F. Kennedy. He was grateful for the country he lived in where he could stand up to him, whether he personally liked

him or not. Eisenhower may have been at the end of his life, but he thought, at least for the time being, America was in good hands. Eisenhower had a bad habit of not getting sleep. In fact, the more he worked and the less slept he got, the more energy he obtained. Even in his retirement he tended to burn the midnight oil. His memoirs he needed to focus on, turning his attention to news of the burgeoning space race all took precedence. During the war, especially major campaigns like Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, he couldn’t toss and turn if he tried. This no doubt was a major cause toward his stroke, but he didn’t learn his lesson. Kennedy, well pampered and groomed, looked completely exhausted. The bags under his eyes made him look undead. The Crisis would end up taking thirteen days, of which they both got a handful of hours of sleep. There was no more beating around the bush. The Russians were in the Atlantic. Countdown to crossing the waters that constituted Cuban sovereignty had begun. The Kennedy istration had shored up the Florida Keys and Miami against any possible invasion, although there was not much to be done if the missiles began to fire. Kennedy had launched a fleet to pose a blockade. A destroyer on the American side signaled to the Russian boat to turn back. At that moment President Kennedy turned to President Eisenhower “Mr. President, I want you to be my liaison. Negotiate with the Soviets, we’re going to pull our cruise missiles out of Turkey.” Almost completely blind and with sharp pain he could barely contain in his right arm and past the point of exhaustion, he felt the Soviets would see him as weak. “If needed remind them of Stalingrad, and where they’d be without our supplies at that crucial time.” Kennedy, with his phone to the Soviet Premier under his desk, was able to create a ceasefire until Eisenhower got there. In fact it was in such a short amount of time he felt like he teleported. “Mr. Premier, you look great, how are you?” “The handling of this negotiation by your superiors is questionable to say the least. You look like you’re on death’s door.” “I in ’53 when Stalin was knocking himself. He had double distilled vodka and fresh caviar, confident even though he was about to meet his maker. But if I believe in one thing it’s that you can’t take it with you.”

“A very serious communist opinion.” Said Premier Khrushchev “You know why I’m here.” Said President Eisenhower ignoring this accusation and instead getting down to business as only he could. “This situation in Cuba…what do you want?” Eisenhower was certain he knew what the Soviet Premier was going to say, cruise missiles out of Turkey, but was shocked when he instead replied “We want you out of Vietnam?” without hesitation “Vietnam is vitally strategic to…” “So is Cuba to us.” Khrushchev stared daggers at him. Eisenhower kept his glance for a long time “Of course, I’m not exactly running the show anymore. I will have to run it by the real head honcho.” Khrushchev clearly did not grasp this lingo and Eisenhower corrected himself with ‘The President.’ Eisenhower was flown back to Washington on Air Force One (How Eisenhower had missed this baby) as the blockade continued at a stalemate. “What happened?” Kennedy asked, frantic though disheveled “They will retreat if we pull out of Vietnam.” Eisenhower did not break eye . Kennedy, knowing the implications and ing what he said during the debate, even through his extreme fatigue replied “Inform the Soviet Premier we will be pulling all forces out of Vietnam. And I want a press conference… At that moment, just when Kennedy and Eisenhower thought the situation was neutralized and an agreement had come to , one of the destroyers pointed a missile off their front bow towards the Florida Keys. They saw it on the war room screen “Where the hell did that come from?” Kennedy demanded “Get Khrushchev on the line, how could Dwight have screwed this up so bad?” Eisenhower felt like he could slink off and die. The thing about the Soviet premier is that he wanted war this whole time and

nothing was going to stop him. He fed on the weaknesses of President Kennedy, his youthfulness paving the way for naivety in thinking they could negotiate on his . Eventually though Kennedy did retaliate. The United States had pockets of areas not affected by radiation. Kennedy turned to Johnson, who turned to Nixon. Then Nixon finished what Eisenhower started. He turned to term limits and made the Executive Branch into the American High Command. Kennedy may have put us on the moon, but it was time to put away silly endeavors like that. The war in Vietnam, already in its tenth year that had been escalated by each President before since Kennedy, reached a critical mass. Nixon had no use for Kennedy, who after losing his good looks had also lost much of his charisma. Johnson had been assassinated. Eisenhower and Kennedy would go on to die on the same day, July 4th, 1972 of simultaneous heart attacks. King looked over this. “Why would you paint these two giants like this?” I was momentarily speechless, I thought at first he was asking how I came up with this story, but judging by his tone I could tell I was slightly off. I truly thought I had drafted a great alternate universe glimpse into a crucial moment in American history. “I it this one was rather unusual. I traveled to 1961 and saw his speech and crafted a story around it. You would have done the same thing If I continue I could make an anthology out of it, don’t you think?” I said proudly “President Kennedy was a great man.” King said infuriated “And I don’t deny it!” “But you do, you shamelessly mock him in your story!” “I went to the past and crafted a story out of thin air based on my surroundings. Why are you taking it so personally?” I was feeling severely depleted like I had the Flu 2.0 so I had little time for this bullshit. “I was taken there just like you were. He was my friend where I wrote his memoirs. President Kennedy saved us from Fascism and Communism in its worst forms.” “What about Hutter? I embellished him

“A small man not a giant.” I almost rolled my eyes “It’s not real! It didn’t really happen! Surely you must know that!” “Our jobs as writers are to make fiction seem real, you open the paper and are transported to another reality.” “This is fiction; An alternate universe. People will wake up from it and realize it was not the real him.” “Humans are stupider than you realize. Even if one read the book, the news cycle will rip you apart, especially the conservatives. And eventually fiction will become reality.” “Isn’t that something we should strive for. To test boundaries?” “Not like this. We do not tear down men like this. Turn in your device, you have failed the test. We do not grant you hip to the League of Elite Writers.”

Chapter VIII

Yankees Stadium

I can’t tell you how much it sucks to write yourself into a corner. I can never find my way out; I’m always boxed in. When I wrote that Eisenhower asked Kennedy “Why do you hate me so much” I sat at the computer for what felt like days because there was no good way to answer that question. Now I had literally written myself into a corner. What was I supposed to do after being rejected from my inclusion in the League of Elite Writers? My writing career is finished, I couldn’t come up with anything else right now if I tried; I need to travel to get inspiration. The only thing I saw as formative at this time was to go and repair my relationship with my mother. It all began with my father inspiring me with his Wedding Bomber sketch. My mother was not special in any way. The only good thing she did was squeeze me into world. But now in the autumn years of her life maybe we could finally start something rolling. To start with I should probably clarify that although you all know about my basketball feelings, you probably don’t know about my feelings on baseball. A dying sport unfortunately, especially in the time we live in. But a nice way to spend an afternoon. I took my mother; she needed some time out of the house where she tragically was confined in like a prison. I tried to spend time with her, bring her Chinese food every now and again because I was no good at cooking. She watched the Yankees every night on warm summer evenings, the heavy fog of dusk just barely floating into her room. Rarely I stayed all night with her, trying my hardest to form a connection to her but struggling. Baseball is boring as all hell. But I felt the fresh air would help her quite a bit, maybe that could be a catalyst. We went to a playoff game, although I couldn’t get field side seats. I might have been rich from The Stream and the Met piece but that didn’t mean I was a millionaire. I had been to old Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, this new Yankees stadium felt like it was missing something. Yankee Stadium wasn’t burned in a riot like the Garden, but a controlled demolition. Decades and generations of fame and legacy destroyed willingly just to build a sheik new

palace of granite. But that’s all there was now, and I had to take it or leave it. The first inning got to a bumpy start. At first I forgot if the home or away team went first. The St. Louis Cardinals were playing in their bright and majestic red uniforms while the Yankees had the legendary blue pinstripes down a white cotton shirt. The slice of pizza I got was a mammoth triangle that seemed to stretch out a yard. The beer was an appalling twelve bucks, I got two; my mom asked for wine and that was an alarming fifteen dollars. They had a lobster roll for twenty-four dollars, I guess they had to make up the billion dollars they spent building the new stadium. We were in the outfield, and the first batter hit a fly ball that flew up and up. I thought it must have been a routine flyball. But it came closer and closer, until I knew it was coming right for me. I stretched up to catch it, but it was snatched by a seven-foot giant of a man. During the game, they were trying to buy it for the Yankees Hall of Fame because it was that player’s five hundredth home run. I was expecting something bad to happen. The planes doing the National Anthem flyover crash, a bat goes flying off and kills someone. The worst that ever happened was some doofus rushed the field and got tackled and arrested. My mom, though slipping a bit in the mental department seemed to be having a blast. The ninth inning walk off homerun was the icing on the cake. “I love you mom…I’m just sorry it took me so long to say that.” I said, my mother nodding as if she knew all along. The time with my mom was calm and peaceful, and quite frankly I did not want it to end. I was going to buy a condo for us somewhere far away yet still having baseball in the city. Maybe Atlanta, maybe Tampa Bay. Although my mother may be entering the final stage of her life, I honestly wanted to be there for her unlike my father. We walked out of Yankee Stadium and tried to hail a taxi, but it was such a throng of humanity that it was impossible to even distinguish my hand from the Bronxites. Mom was starting to look frail and needed her nightly medication from back home. We luckily were able to hail a cab and I got her home no problem. I feared the traffic would give her heart failure, but she was a tough woman. If she could survive the crack scare in the eighties in the heart of the epidemic, she could survive this. I for one hadn’t slept in weeks. But I didn’t need to anymore. Living in the biggest metropolis in the world made me only think of Paris. Stephen King often

said he can read at least sixty pages at Fenway Park. Here’s one from the heart I came up with during inning breaks at Yankee Stadium, bear with me: “Captain Jeffries was a navy man, nearing retirement and needing to start preparing for life out of the sea and on land. He had fought in the war and had that fighting spirit in him still. It was here he ed being part of the fleet that invaded back in ’44. He was stationed again off the coast of England looking out for possible Soviet incursions but being this far out made it more like a pleasure cruise. One thing that he wanted to check out were the caves. The caves that crossed the English Channel from London to Paris were called La Jette, and they were an interesting tourist attraction. The USS Marker was traditionally a supply ship. It was refitted during the war to guard the defense in the Atlantic. But the last mission he would ever command would be getting supplies from Africa before they came back to the Channel. They were carrying a supply of breadfruit that would be ed throughout the British Empire, a strong food that could survive nuclear war. Nuclear war was on everyone’s lips but the mission was nothing but routine. Somewhere around Morocco he was listening to the morning sermon, Ash Wednesday was coming up next week. He hoped to have a pious weekend of lent and had given up alcohol. He soon would be giving up so much more. He turned on the transmitter. There was a bitter war going on in Albania to separate from the Soviet Union. Albania had become nuclear recently, the only reason they had any leverage. No one wanted a war, not him, not the iral he answered to, and certainly not President Kennedy. This was a new age of war, it is not fought on the beaches of it was fought above the skies with nuclear armaments. He called the lieutenant in the captain’s quarters. The lieutenant was crying. He wasn’t crying because he was a coward, which the captain had no room for on his ship, but he was having extremely agonizing stomach pains. The ship’s doctor had looked him over and couldn’t find the cause. The ultimate reason was because he had a botched colonoscopy, and all he could eat in the mess was buttered toast. They could see on the horizon when the captain took a bottle from his desk: “Damn good port, don’t want it to go to waste.”

“Sorry, sir.” “I called you I here because I know you’re a religious man, will you me in celebrating this informal mass?” “Absolutely sir.” He turned up the receiver, the French pastor’s thick accent coming through the static. The captain soon grew bored and his mind wandered, he was speculating what he would do when he got to Paris. He dreamed of becoming a writer, sitting with a typewriter overlooking the Eiffel Tower, smoking cigarettes and with a bottle of bourbon like a rogue Ernest Hemingway. “What do you think of Eisenhower getting tried for Crimes Against Humanity?” he asked “I haven’t…” “I the bombing of Dresden; I the night the bombers took off from Manchester “Sir…” “Total waste it was though, and now…” “Sir, with all due respect I want to listen and pray reverently.” I shutting up and tuning in at the last second: “If only we could all see the light of Christ that shined in the world.” The Priest said. Serendipitously at the same time there was a burst of light behind them. Damn he thought, so it’s begun. “We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you a special bulletin. The thermo nuclear age has begun. Missiles are flying and hitting every country. Reports say the fight was started when…” Captain Jefferies turned off the receiver and went to the bridge. “Lieutenant, set a course for the English Channel. We don’t have much time.” The lieutenant had stiffened up, pushed away the tears. The captain had an idea. “We’re going to have to transport as many refugees as we can. We need to get everyone into the caves of La Jette before the radiation settles.

The USS Marker arrived at the port of Calais and began to evacuate the population into the tunnels. The horizon had a green glow and the Eiffel Tower was not visible. The honeymoon of his retirement looked like it had been blown up too. How they were going to fit all these people in the caves he did not know. Most likely there were going to be some people who couldn’t make it in. The captain ferried them into the tunnels as quickly as he could. Where was the ship going to go? There luckily was a small opening to crush the Marker into. Going in, the water seemed to be naturally occurring in the caves but many people who would test it died of radiation poisoning. According to those that soon succumbed to it, the water tasted like vodka. Soon they got dysentery, then skin rashes, then they died. But not at this moment, right now the Frenchmen and women were busy setting up their new home. The captain wondered how humanity would survive this. It was also getting hard without cigarettes. The few that everyone had were pooled would not last more than a couple days. The crew of the Marker began to search the caves within the next couple days, they looked like they would never end. The captain’s guilt was almost as subterraneous as the caves. And as long as the beard he was growing. Navy men were supposed to keep their facial hair ship shape, but they had to ration whatever water they had left. The caves were damp, constantly dripping water not unlike a sink. And that was keeping the captain up all night. Sleeping on a rock bed certainly didn’t help either. There was a woman who was pregnant. She seemed to be due in two months, and the captain and lieutenant were not sure if they were going to make it two months. Another woman foolishly became pregnant, he wanted to personally go down there and perform a coat hanger abortion. The baby would simply take up the much needed resources. But he sent his lieutenant to do the dirty work. “I won’t do this unless I have your consent.” “He has no future.” They were in tears the whole time. There was so much blood. Suddenly they were both distracted by the honking of another vessels horn. At the time the captain was pondering when he would break out the breadfruit he had aboard. He hesitated about releasing them so soon as it was the last food they had. One great thing about breadfruit was they were going to be able to grow them in the caves, they didn’t need sunlight. But at that moment Captain Jeffries went to the edge of the caves. Another ship was on the horizon.

They were transmitting by SOS. “We need to come on board.” Jeffries let them on, but they had to leave the ship outside “Care for a bottle of port?” “I don’t care for fancy drinks of the bourgeoise.” “Soviet battlecruiser, eh? Those are some fancy looking guns you have there.” He poured himself a glass, he didn’t want it going bad. “They are energy-based weapons.” “We could use them to make fires. Can you spare a couple?” “Yes, absolutely; I see no reason why we can’t cooperate fully.” “So you want something I presume?” “We seek refuge in these La Jette caves.” “We can’t do that; we’re swamped with refugees already and cannot afford more. We’re stretched to the limit.” At this moment, he dismissed his lower ranking officers. “What supplies do you have on your ship?” Jefferies asked “Not much outside some water.” “We have a supply of breadfruit here. Its our only food source, we need to find a way to grow these plants in the caves. But it’s more important now that we get water to everyone who needs it.” “Actually I have something that might help more than food alone. Come with me to my ship.” Said Soviet Captain Savicheva. When he arrived he found nothing but a chair. He knew the Soviets didn’t believe in personal belongings, but this was a bit excessive. Behind the chair were two cotton squares. “The Soviet Union was experimenting with short bursts through the time space continuum before the crisis in the Siberian Gulags.” Jeffries was disgusted at the thought of experimentation, but he pushed it deep down. He was firm that time

travel was comic book science fiction. It would have to be some form of interrogation if they used it on him. When the Soviet Captain Savicheva asked him to try it he thought the whole thing was a trick, but the Captain countered rather effectively: “Sir, we live in a world where we were enemies. Focus on the past tense. But there are no borders anymore, no more communism or capitalism. If we’re going to survive we’re going to have to put our pasts aside and work together. We have one desperate last chance to save the future of humankind. I don’t like it as much as you, but we have to give it a shot. He went over and sat down. The Captain put the squares on his eyes. The world was as dark as the caves. He felt the electricity surging through the squares. A bright light, and he began convulsing to the point he began foaming at the mouth. He felt he was in agony for a lifetime, then suddenly he was out of the chair. He was in the middle of the street: trolleys in San Francisco, a ball game on the radio. The San Francisco Bay made for an eternal cool rather than a damp cold of the La Jette caves. His old apartment was nearby; he seemed to be able to walk just fine. How was this miracle possible? He went up to his old apartment: 7G. His first wife was in there he bet; this was before his navy days. He put on an Al Jolson 78 RPM album. He looked in the fridge, prohibition was still in effect it seemed. Good thing he had a bottle of champagne in his desk. He took it out, drank the bottle and did some writing on his typewriter. A series of memoirs about his time in the La Jette caves that would happen. All he could do was hope his past self or past wife would find them. Drunk from the champagne, he laid his head down. He woke up and pretended like he didn’t have enough time to get supplies, when they had in fact just slipped his intoxicated mind. He left the ship and upon arriving back at La Jette, Captain Jeffries was briefed by his Lieutenant, who was in tears again. With the news that he received he wasn’t sure whether it was his stomach issues, or he was legitimately saddened by what was happening. “The radiation is causing some sort of leprosy. Arms and legs and other limbs are falling off due to radiation poisoning. We’ve lost a few people already and we are going to lose more. I’m promoting myself to iral. I need to be the one who is answered to. I’m making the Soviet captain my number one man.”

“What are our options?” The lieutenant asked “We have two: Get everyone below decks. Many will have to be left behind in the caves, we’ll make for the desert, bombs shouldn’t have been going off there. “It’s not too far from here. That just might work. Get a night’s sleep, we’ll get up around dawn and leave no later than 0900 hours.” Captain Jeffries was going to try the time travel angle again, see if he could stay focused long enough to get some supplies. Jeffries woke up in San Francisco again, just outside his apartment. He saw a young ensign in the navy, it was himself, he went behind an alley to avoid him. There was nothing to say to him anyway. He made it to a farmer’s market. He had no money, so he stole a crate of oranges. Running down the alleyway Captain Jeffries had the oranges in a crate, it was all he could grab. He closed his eyes and said “I want to go now” and woke up. He was shocked to find the oranges were not in his hand. “What happened, where are the oranges? I was carrying a crate of oranges in my hand.” “What we were experimenting with in the caves was a mixture of a new drug called LSD, with a truth serum we had perfected. Prisoners told us it was so convincing it was like being back in their previous lives.” Everything that the Soviet captain Savicheva did was a lie. Basically, a light show; but a damned convincing one. “What was the point, you specifically said we weren’t enemies anymore.” “We thought this would work, that we were one step away from time travel.” “Damned commie horseshit.” He said, he felt like he could shoot him with his service pistol. Jeffries had to go back to the task of getting supplies for the cave dwellers. It looked like they were doomed to spend all of eternity beneath the walls of rock.” As you can tell I kind of lost track of the game. I’ll always be addicted to time travel plots, I guess. And I wouldn’t mind living in a cave, maybe mom would take it over a condo, a little less expensive.

Chapter IX

There’s Only One Way This Could End

Before I started scouring the market for a house there was one thing nagging at me that I needed to take care of. I don’t know if it was my experience on the airplane, I don’t know if it was the Muslim character who had a religious experience I wrote about, I don’t know if it was the time travel making me loopy, or the untimely ing of my father, but ultimately I went to my local Catholic church for the first time in years. I knew for a fact god was out there, but I didn’t know in what form. I think it was because I wanted some peace after such a long winding journey. I was willing to accept anything, and the Church was luckily only five minutes down the road. When I arrived a man from the Knights of Columbus opened the door for me so it was evident after all that had happened chivalry wasn’t quite dead. I was immediate hit by the smell of candles which really put me in a different mindset. Walking into the cathedral was monumental. The stained-glass windows, the altar, and the massive crucifix hanging above it made me want to cry. I hadn’t cried in years; tears are just stress toxins leaving the body after all. But I did have the overwhelming feeling to cry and finally let it all out. There was so much pent up aggression, and everything had taken an effect on my nervous system. I feel like for my whole life I had wanted to cry but had to hold up a strong front, although I couldn’t stop the mist from dewing. Eventually I had pretended I was cold and had an ice block for a heart. But I thought of all those people at Madison Square Garden who died in my memory. I thought of my father’s first wife Tess who died of cancer, I thought about my mother who I never appreciated enough. I never even thanked Mr. Hutter for scaring me into shaking my apathy away, even though I was a prepubescent. A nun at the front began a rosary. “Hail Mary full of Grace…” Right, the Jets are on the afternoon. My selfishness would never disappear. I sat in the uncomfortable pew for about fifteen minutes. A nun came up to the microphone and asked if we could silence all electronic devices, it would be embarrassing if my Avengers ringtone went off full blast. It was at this moment I

thought I would honestly be more inclined to believe in Superman than any kind of god humans have conjured up. Superman can at least fly and shoot laser beams out his eyes, I think the only thing Superman can’t do is walk on water. He’s there in more books than just one too. I looked up at the massive crucifix, and I could have sworn Jesus winked at me. I shook it off, relegating it to the returning to church heebie-jeebies playing games with my mind. “The Lord be with you…and with your spirit. Let us acknowledge our sins so as to prepare for the coming mass.” The priest said, starting the prayer session. The deacon was about to begin the response prayer when suddenly from above came (now don’t find me too cliched) an angelic voice “I was sent to heal the contrite of heart, Lord have mercy.” We all turned our heads around, when it was repeated again “Lord. Have. Mercy.” We looked up at the blue sky and saw the sun beginning to peak through, an especially rainy week in New York. In fact, it felt like Seattle. Now, as an author this situation seemed a little too perfect. I wouldn’t come up with it in my worst book, and I don’t think any other author, even an amateur, would either. I accepted that this had to be some strange coincidence, an echo of some sort. God is as much an author as I am, the narrative of humanity; what we call “History” in our small view of the universe, is certainly a fascinating one. All books that had been written on the subject brought something to the table. But the god that I knew already had the book in mind. He knew the beginning, middle, and end before he wrote it. I find that a bit constricting with my “wing-it” approach. “Lord have mercy.” we all said. Then we all looked up at the crucifix, the face of Jesus eternally sorrowfully down. After more standing up and sitting down, the Priest went to begin his homily. “Fellow parishioners, Jesus taught that it would be easier for a camel to through the eye of a needle than a rich person to get into heaven.” “Yes I did.” We heard a voice say, thinking it was a fellow member of the Church the priest carried on with his homily. The candles were snuffed out. The Mother Mary statue took off her crown of roses and threw it on the crowd like a hoola hoop. Our church was moderately sized, but not many came to the seven AM mass (I just happened to be up all night), so the shrieking was not surprising. Before we get any further, I have to it that even though I’ve written down all

my life events, I’ve embellished lies, exaggerated truths, written a piece of fiction, and rubbed elbows with the writing elite, but I never liked writing. I could never get down what I truly wanted to say. You can’t experience reading on dead paper what really happened. When I found what my father had said about his first marriage that was bombed, I was inspired to write. I felt like after a while I was too far into it all and could not just discard all my pages, they had to mean something. I think that’s something we all are worried about, that nothing matters. My father used to live like there was no tomorrow then he had a religious experience. I lived loose then I had a religious experience. And then the final judgment came, and I had another religious experience. Maybe life is a serious of experiences. Jesus ripped his hands off the crucifix, but there was no blood. A stigmata was visible, same thing happened with his feet. He jumped down, completely naked except for a cloth covering his nether regions. “Let me finish this homily for you.” He prepared the Eucharist and ed it to everyone in the church who cautiously ate them. “What he means is that we have become too complacent in our wealth. America used to be a country I and my father were proud to look down on from heaven, but it has gotten out of control. Much like smiting the kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah, my father told me he should destroy the United States too. But I interceded on its behalf. The United States is a special place and can become a beacon and a city on the hill it was meant to be again. Everyone in the chapel was a geriatric, minds not so quick. And were probably frozen in sheer terror and awe. But I had to ask it: “Jesus…is this the second coming?” “Who said I was Jesus?” asked…the figure “Now to be clear, I’m not saying the rich need to be thrown out of their decadence. They will get what they deserve in time. Give up your own money. Sell all your worldly belongings. Take up a vow of poverty and follow me. Christ then paused. An elderly woman with cataracts was sitting in the pew across from me, Jesus touched her on the forehead, closing her eyes with his palm. The redness in her eyes was gone. I wanted to run out of the church to get my mother to cure her of her ailments but by the time I turned back, Jesus was back on the cross as a wooden idol. There were live streams from Anglican churches in Britain, the Vatican, and Notre Dame showing a similar scene. Jesus came down off the crucifix, offered eucharist, gave a sermon on poverty, and healed one person before reverting

back. The response around the world was cataclysmic. His message was taken immediately to heart as if it was an order. If you read the Bible well enough it was an order two thousand years ago, but sometimes people needed to be shaken out of their apathy. Houses were sold on the spot; if people could get anything for it they gave it to charity. Fox Business Analysts predicted a possible collapse in the housing sector again like in 2008. It looked like I could get that condo for mom in Florida cheaper than ever before. Speaking of Fox, they started to broadcast a news report from Poland as breaking news. It started innocently enough: A female newscaster was interviewing Catholics who had beheld the miracle. “I know more than anything if I don’t do this, I will be going to suffer the fires of Hell.” I didn’t know what was being discussed here and why it was breaking news. That soon was interrupted by a broadcast from the President: “An historic and unprecedented event has occurred. The question of whether or not we are alone in the universe has been answered.” MSNBC, on another channel had the Vatican, showed the Pope taking an unprecedented step. As a sovereign nation, the Pope had those who wanted to be crucified could, complete with scourging and crowning with thorns. They could be crucified on the hills of Golgotha if they wanted to. The President signed an executive order outlawing this in the United States and protests immediately decried this. Many people felt they had the right to be crucified in the name of Jesus if they wanted to, but the state was the one who had to do it. I understood the President, law and order had to be established. But law and order as we humans knew it was coming to an end. Fox had twenty four hour recordings of the state sanctioned crucifixions. It was bloody, but not censored in any way. I personally thought people were missing the point of Jesus’ semi-return, it struck me as just a further reminder we needed to live a life of poverty. I went home; I already knew from my flight from Memphis god existed, but not in such a cookie cutter way that Jesus was the one and only way; the one form of god. I had studied Islam and knew that Muhammed was the last prophet to bring about god’s revelation. Therefore I couldn’t be a scribe for god like I thought. I had to get rid of my possessions. I didn’t have much, just a collection of Knicks jerseys. At that moment, as I contemplated what I could do for mom I felt a wobble on my back. It must have been acting up again. I took a shot of Jim Beam to calm my nerves. The wobble became a tingle, I tried to scratch it but it was almost like two tumors ran down my front and back. Soon the movement

went away, I was back to normal. In fact with this near second coming I was feeling relatively content. The end was near and the culture of greed and jealously and all the other sins would finally be washed away. My only lamentation was that I wouldn’t be able to express myself fully anymore. I hopped in the shower and turned on the hot water when suddenly I was in agony. I fell to my knees, and seeing the stream of water tainted red. The tumors were rolling up and down my back like a roller. I got out of the shower stark naked, bones crunching. I had never been in so much pain. I ed when I was a kid and jumped off the swing set when I was as high could go, jumping off when my mom called me. I crawled for two weeks; it seemed like a dream. I ran out into the street, screaming for someone to help me, pounding on windows. Someone called the police, but it would be too late, I could not take the pain like a man and ran back into the house. I had to get to a mirror and see what was happening. “Jesus Christ!” I screamed. Sort of taking the Lord’s name in vain but I think he could forgive me. And suddenly as it had started it was over. I looked up, and I had a pair of angel’s wings. I tugged on them to make sure this was no delusion, that I wasn’t in shock. I tried to flap them, sheer willpower coming through. Then, there was another shooting pain, what could be worse than this? I heard a knock at the door, assuming that was the authorities coming to check on me. I had to slink down the stairs, but I answered it. “Dear lord!” said the police officer mumbling something into the receiver on his coat “Did you bring an ambulance?” I asked, more of a demand. They luckily, did bring an ambulance. The paramedic began asking me the standard questions: “How much pain are you in from a scale of one to ten. “Ten! This is pure torture.” “OK, OK stay with me, I’m going to give you a sedative.” I was knocked out when I woke up in the hotel lobby. Today was a big day in the history of Western Civilization, and I had to wonder: was this, or something close to this happening to everybody who accepted Jesus in their heart? I couldn’t believe this was only happening to me. I flickered over to the local news and there was little about it. The Notre Dame Cathedral had caught fire, I assumed in some kind of riot.

Chapter X

The Irish Wedding

I have but no toes I can never run Testosterone coursing through my veins Sapped of energy in this mortal vessel Deformed

Mentally strong, physically weak, and socially retarded Hiding for a reason Chattanooga choo choo come to take me away Skintight except for the feet The electric chair they can’t strap me down to

Here we come, here we go On the train platform Station 9 ¾; Hogwarts on the Nile Maybe the wand can brew back my socks

I don’t know why my son took me to a Yankees game, I’ve told him time and again I’m a Mets fan. But of course, my son usually isn’t living in the real world. I should never have let my son find my husband’s manifesto. My husband was never the same since his brother ed the IRA. He bombed buildings left and right. It was typical in those times for bombings to be prevalent, and one did happen down the street from us. The delusions had never manifested itself for my husband quite like our wedding. 1972 was the year of the Munich Olympics, and he had a job covering it for the Dublin Times. Going there he thought he won medals and married some ultra-wealthy socialite and abandoned her when she was dying of cancer. Ultimately that was just me he married, and he didn’t know it until it was too late that it was him with the cancer. And mostly he didn’t know period. You can see where my son got his creativity. His diary was psychotic after that night. He couldn’t focus consummating our wedding, and by morning he was away at his desk writing something frantically on stationary. A book; a book that might take decades to finish, but he would finish it he be damned, even if he had to it onto the next generation. He was good at pretending that things were all right or would at the very least get better. If he could have only been with me in the present. If only he could have raised Conner well enough so Conner could avoid his fate. Our wedding was otherwise beautiful. I was the one who proposed to him. He was never on Earth quite enough to be aware of how much I loved him. But I knew him since he was a kid, I had known him well before any of this started. I knew his big blue Protestant eyes. Because when he was normal, he was a beautiful soul. The cocaine simply ruined everything. It was the 70’s. It elevated him further when he was already up and brought him back to the sky when he was crashing. He was like a pilot in some ways, the ground always hovering below just out of reach; like the fires of hell going to swallow him up. I wonder why his delusion wasn’t that he was some kind of medal winning air force pilot. I believe sometimes he thought he could go past the clouds into space. And sometimes he was in space. But not that night. I don’t know if he was on some medications, or he was in the calm before the storm, but he wrote the most beautiful vows. He promised to honor and cherish me, but the part that was he would never leave me. I did not write the same vow. But I had duties and responsibilities. I’m Catholic and believe that. I could overlook the Protestant in him, because simply put I had a duty to have a lot of kids. And I know with the white aphrodisiac he was shoveling up his nose every day that that wouldn’t be a

problem. There were two other kids before Conner. When Conner was two I needed to take a last ditch effort to get more kids out of Aiden. He was in Senegal covering “The Rumble in the Jungle” He cancer was in its final stages, but he wouldn’t it it. Pride and illness held him back. He could have been one of the best investigative journalists in the world if he had sought out help for his mental problems and substance abuse. Right before he died I was pregnant with twins. Conner was developing as a gifted but troubled little boy. I’ll it my son is creative, but what he writes about is not based in anyway on reality. I’ve read everything he’s done; he was at the Knicks game that night but Madison Square Garden didn’t burn down. There was a little fire and the arena had to be evacuated, but everything was all right. It didn’t even make the news. He had a substance abuse problem, so the ink that he injected was heroin. It did look a lot like octopus’ ink I guess but I don’t know how he could delude his self that way. It sedated his racing mind enough that he could focus. He tried to pawn my wedding ring to get his drugs. Most nights Conner is writing with his pacifier in his mouth. It’s a disgusting habit to be sure. Most nights he demands to watch Pocahontas on sing-along VHS. I despise that film; I don’t know what he sees in it. He has it on in the background, burping the lyrics through his binkie as he scribbles wildly. I respect his privacy enough not to glance through it, but I imagine it is really quite something. He doesn’t have many friends, but his social worker Mr. Kemba comes to visit him at home. When he comes, he cries. He hates to see him because Mr. Kemba brings to light what he’s done in his manic state. Because of this Conner doesn’t leave home very much. He’s scared to see what’s out there. And I can’t say I blame him; I saw what had happened to his father. He tried to get The Stream published but no one would accept a fifty-page manifesto. I tried to read it, but it was bizarre, it’s like he had a lot of different ideas and tried to throw them into a blender. It took him five years to write it; whenever he was tired or groggy (or more likely high) he just couldn’t summon a word. I know he said he had a revelation with Cthulhu or whatever he called it. The fact is he has a host of mental illnesses. I don’t know much about obsessive compulsive disorder but he taps his feet three times under the table at dinner so he definitely has that.

Me, I’m just a doting old woman. Senility is setting in, even I don’t know what’s real anymore. I my wedding, that’s something I’ll never forget. There was my life before the wedding and after the wedding, that’s how I measure my life. It’s like before and after Christ. My days are coming to an end, and I fear Conner’s are too if he continues this risky behavior. The fact is I simply can’t take care of him much longer. At this stage he needs to take care of me if there’s any justice in the world. But he can’t take care of himself. I’ve personally never been one much for writing outside of essays I’ve had to write for school. I gave him my typewriter from my high school days in the sixties. John Kennedy was my hero, and Conner idolized him because I did too. But it was again his creative side, or maybe his warped sensibility that he tried to make Kennedy a mockery. King scolding him must have been his subconscious. I realize life is short, and Conner certainly wants to live his to the full extent. But he’s reckless, and some day, probably sooner than later, he will involuntarily hurt someone. I can see him now, cackling in a straitjacket in a padded cell. The only thing he’ll be missing is his gross, disease ridden binkie that he would never wash for fear of losing good luck. And for the record, my birthday isn’t January 19th like he thought. It’s April 20th, Hitler’s birthday. I only hope I don’t die on the same day. And I can only hope Conner doesn’t either.

Chapter XI

Kemba Returns

My mother should not leave things out; Kemba might find them. I haven’t read all of it, but she claims I don’t live in the real world. I don’t know how she can live in this world after what’s happened to it. Maybe she just needs to have a religious experience. I wrote a while back a story that there was a man named Kemba. With the coming of our Lord to Earth, I’ve seen Kemba more and more. I thought all the demons would have been driven away. He always walks right up to my mother’s door. He asks who do I think I am today? He always walks in in a can-do manner, like I’m some kind of project, but he will not take my soul. I have already given my soul to god, and god has come. Maybe he wants my blood, that’s what vampires always want. I personally needed some coffee, so that’s what I got up to get. The coffee would take about five minutes to brew, so I went over to have it ready for his arrival. “It” is probably a better term for an immortal being, one who rebuffed god’s love and mercy even when it was right next to him. Of the things I knew about it, it wasn’t blood so much that they got drunk on but wine. He had tasted the blood of Christ and vomited it up. He was there at the end of the first age when the first nuclear fallout had happened in what we can only assume is a version of San Francisco. “That’s just a story” he would inevitably say. “Where did you even come up with it?” A man can do amazing things when under stress. I was under the stress to finish before a deadline. My father under the pressure of his wedding being bombed and losing the love of his life through cancer. “The thing about sequels is people dismiss them outright. But what good would The Godfather be without The Godfather II. Or Terminator without Terminator II. You see the thing Kemba, and you should know as well as I, we are sequels. I am my father’s son. My father who swam better than any Irishman and survived crippling tragedy. You were there at the time of Christ and saw the end of the first age. You arrived at the first nuclear winter, and were prepared to arrive at the second, but the second never came. In a way, this is the final nuclear age.

God, your sworn nemesis has returned, and you can’t stand it, so you come to me, his servant.” “I can’t commit you because you’re not a danger to anyone yet. But I am begging you to try some medications. You are exiled from reality.” “I’d rather be exiled from my life. Take my medications like you take your substitute for the blood of life? I have tasted that blood, it is bitter.” “When’s the last time you slept?” “As an ubermensch I only need two hours. I wake up and drink the nectar of god’s glory.” I pushed my chest out in pride, proud of my achievements. “Tell me about your dreams.” Mr. Kemba took out his pad and pencil. I immediately felt the full weight of partial insomnia and full fatigue. “I actually am scared to fall asleep at night. It’s not that I have nightmares, those I can deal with. It a dizzying assortment of wild images. A rainbow of colors. Last night I went to bed at midnight and woke up at two in a cold sweat. And when I wake up my eyelids feel sealed with super glue. I know where I am but I’m still stuck in the dream world, clawed with Freddy Kruger’s gloves pulling me back. “And that’s why you don’t like to sleep?” “Yes, and now I recognize I don’t need sleep. I don’t need to keep wasting my life in sloth.” “How much did you weigh last time you weighed yourself?” “142 pounds, I weigh myself every day.” “Can I start you on a Pediasure vitamin diet?” “Why?” “Why? You’re skin and bones. I could ask you the same question, why are you doing this to yourself?”

“Let me tell you something, Kemba. I was bad in school. I can’t do math, I can’t read a com, take a shot, or tie a knot. But I can do one thing well: write. I can weave stories you’ve never believed. I conjured you Kemba, and I can destroy you.” “I know you think nothing is wrong, but your mind is playing tricks on you.” Kemba turned to leave the small room “and a major reason for this is you are not getting the sleep you need.” Mr. Kemba sighed “Look, and again keep in mind that I can’t commit you, but you are on a dangerous path. Your mind will deteriorate with less and less sleep, making for riskier and riskier behavior. Eventually you could so something you regret.” I got tired again at this suggestion. This euphoric high I had been riding definitely felt like anxiety was cranking to the max in my nervous system. “What do you suggest?” “I suggest that you go into outpatient hospitalization.” “When could I start?” “Next week, it’s a Monday to Friday gig. In the meantime, I can prescribe you some antidepressants.” I paused for what felt like a millennium. I ed the words my mother had just written. She had always been loose in the discipline of my upbringing, but I believed that she was worried about me. We had always been distant, and her words seemed distant. But maybe she was right. For the first time in a while I didn’t base my judgments off my adrenaline that was coursing through my body. And I hated feeling the way I did, running out of gas, coasting on fumes and then going harder. My tank was bone dry; I needed a change. And even if I didn’t know if Kemba was real or a figment of my imagination, I had to take a shot. “I will attend those sessions, and I’ll get started on medication.”

Chapter XII

A Theatre in the New World

Putting the pill on my tongue every morning made me think this must be what cyanide tastes like. The first day of the medication Kemba gave me made me drowsy to say the least. I didn’t have the night terrors like I feared, but I had the same feeling of my eyelids being sealed shut every morning which made it nearly impossible to get up. The worst part was my mind wasn’t flying at a million miles an hour and therefore less ideas were coming to me. To help with my therapy sessions I considered looking at art classes, sculpting, pottery and the like. I could always get back to what my bachelor’s degree said. But Mr. Kemba had read some of my work and definitely agreed that writing was more therapeutic for me, artwork would bring back bad memories. I wonder whatever happened to my piece at the Met. He gave me some pamphlets for writing sessions that were happening at community centers and colleges. I went to the local community center, walking past Alcoholics Anonymous, not a good sign. I walked into the room: circled around just like the AA meeting. There was no other way to beat around the bush; I had a feeling I was going to be amongst hacks. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but they were only my equals in the sense we were all human beings. No experience in the writing field for most of them. It would be like golfing for the first time and struggling to hit the ball. I felt superior to them, but then I thought about something that happened to me in high school, about my friend who was a computer coder. I couldn’t write line after line of code. I was completely retarded in that situation. These people who were bankers and real estate agents were also trying to do something else, whether just to kill time or develop a new skill. Maybe one day they could reach my level. Maybe I could try something new in the culinary fields and become a good chef. I had signed up for one class that was on Wednesday nights, we could move onto other things later on. The first day of the first session our published author and teacher asked us as a class: “Where do you want to go, more than anywhere in

the world?” He gave us five minutes to think this through and write down some basic thoughts; I treated it with the utmost seriousness. I had been to Paris and been a bit underwhelmed. I started to scribble some basic notes: I scrapped this idea. It honestly wasn’t a matter of where, because I could go anywhere, but when. I was still a bit hooked on the rush of time traveling, even though I was slowly coming to realize it never happened. At mom’s house I had a double VHS tape of Pocahontas and the accompanying sing along. Sometimes I put it on because I feel like I grew up so fast as a kid. Seeing The Exorcist on TV was the first glimpse into an adult world. Sure, your average ten-year-old might sneak into an R rated movie, but this was something else. I saw a version of hell; this is the hell you were meant to grow up into was the message I got. I already wrote about it earlier, so I won’t go into it any further for the time being. But if there is one thing I have gained from that experience was the fact that I came to be a huge movie buff. I soon moved on as a kid to The Silence of the Lambs and A Clockwork Orange. I was attracted to violence and that was yet another character defect, add it to the growing list. If there was anywhere I wanted to go it was back in time to the Jamestown settlement. A New World on the horizon with everything you could ever want. Experimenting with smoking tobacco and drinking coffee for the first time must have been exhilarating. What was probably not so exhilarating was being responsible for a mass genocide that you didn’t even know a disease was causing. But it’s like Paris, what good is going to Jamestown when it has been destroyed and the whole struggle has been lost to the ravages of history. While everyone was giving their shit ideas I started scribbling, creativity was like that. I sat across from a woman, she was young and based on my gut feeling seemed to be a talented writer. She was also completely adorable. She had a Rosemary’s Baby Mia Farrow haircut and based on her figure looked like a vegan. She also looked like she wasn’t too far removed from the Brownie Scouts. When the session was over for the day, she came over to me. She told me she thought over what the professor had posed and wanted to go to Jerusalem. She wanted to bob at the wall. She was going to write an allegory about nuclear war. “Something about the end of the world.” she said “Apocalyptic, eh? Why?” “I fear it’s coming soon, and I want to write a warning.” How many warnings

did we need after all I wondered silently? She asked me if I had any initial thoughts for her piece, and I told her I had some ideas. I let her in on my work: something set during the days of Pocahontas, a little rewrite of history. She told me her apocalyptic theme would be a little history piece too on Israel and Palestine. As a history buff I had studied the conflict between Israel and Palestine. And I was a little afraid to tell her I ed Palestine since the issue was so touchy. But I told her I’d have to think it over a bit more (although I actually had no intention of doing so). When the others went to go dissect their ideas, she asked if she could me at the theatre. “Are you sure?” I asked almost incredulously. I was completely taken aback; I knew nothing about flirting, so I couldn’t tell if she was indeed flirting with me or not. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. In fact I was prepared to ask her if she was, but the thought stopped at my lips. Because for normal people this was probably, definitely not flirting in any normal sense of the word. Flirting happens at parties and weddings, but for people on different wavelengths like me and her I thought there was a possibility. I was wondering if in the dark theatre I would hold hands with her. I had never held hands with a girl before. But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. We took a short bus ride to the theatre, a small picture art house I was surprised existed anymore. The movie in question was a double feature: a John Wayne western flick and a late period Lee Marvin western. The stereotypes in the first picture were appalling, but of course that was just the time. What was it like in the beginning, the New World like a western John Wayne would be in, I thought? I began scribbling, squinting at my notepad off the projector’s reflection: “The settlers on this expedition that came from England were still high off the performance of Hamlet they saw the night before they left. They had been floating at sea for what felt like a generation, but they couldn’t forget the actors’ “To Be or not to Be” soliloquy. They practiced during the long, patience testing days floating at sea on the ship. The first thing they were determined to do once they made it to the new world was build a stage to perform the works of Shakespeare to a new audience. They were going to go with Titus Andronicus, an underdog work. They weren’t sure the natives would completely understand the nuances of Macbeth or Julius Caesar, which is why they were going with one of Shakespeare’s more bombastic pieces. When they initially arrived though, they had other pressing matters to deal with. Food, first with the natives, and building a fort took precedence. It wasn’t too long afterwards that winter began to set in and were saddened that they were going to lose a whole season

before they could build a stage. But winter turned to spring turned to summer, and they were looking forward to many A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Pocahontas, the daughter of the head of the tribe the settlers were about to discover, was bored with her studies. She was bored with not just her studies but her life and her destiny. In class, the tribe studied fate in the stars of the cosmos. She hated her studies and found them useless. There was no way to go to the stars anyway. Even if her people could one day in the far away do it, it would just be to strengthen the all-important, all-encoming tribe. She did not want to lead the tribe in her future, she hated who she was going to be forced to marry. The one thing she did like to do was perform stories by the campfire for her tribe. She once told a story of Ahone the creator god of the Powhatan tribe. He made the universe, then decided that it was not worthy of his time to maintain, not good enough for a deity. “And Ahone clapped his hands and the cosmos was born!” Pocahontas made an explosive movement with her hands in the shadows. The moons and our world were born and in that day our tribe began chopping wood and bringing about the harvest. The leader of the long past Powhatan tribe was prepared to sacrifice his daughter for the great almighty, but he was stopped by Ahone, his intent great in the eyes of him.” Her performance brought a subtlety that was unmatched in Powhatan theatrics, although she almost had to yell when performing the bit about bringing the universe about with a clap. Her banging and use of shadows were a tad much for her sensibility. There was a prisoner on the ship that brought the colonists to Jamestown, his name was John Smith. He had a certain ability, almost a premonition about people from his first glance at them. When he attempted a mutiny aboard the ship that brought them it was simply a matter of survival. They had left England in the dead of winter and many had died and frankly were not prepared to battle the savages he knew they would have to. John Smith tried to take the ship but failed. “You’re mad Smith. Even if you take this vessel, the British Navy will find you.” said the Captain. There were not enough people on his side and he was subdued. However, by the time they reached the New World so few were left of the original mission that Smith was not hanged onboard. When they arrived in the New World, he was told he would help establish the colony before he was executed. But Smith had a plan to go to the savage’s tribes and seek asylum.

Upon getting off the boat he jumped onto the dock and booked it as fast as he could. He ran into what felt like other territories. Looking at the natives he knew his request would be granted, that they were reasonable. He was immediately captured and tied up and brought before the Chief in a large teepee. When he met the chief he immediately knew. He was a dead man either way, but he was scared of the brutal way they would probably execute him in. “I bring you a warning. In exchange, I want to live amongst you.” “We will hear nothing from this ghost, he brings only pain and misery. Kill him!” Pocahontas was appalled to hear this. “How do we know he will bring pain and suffering? We should give him a chance.” she was totally ignored. She looked up to the stars, were they trying to tell her something she wondered? She could not abide yet another execution and sought that night to abandon her tribe and these alien settlers. John Smith’s head was put on a tree stump and chopped off, and there was nothing anyone in the tribe could do to stop it. His head was impaled on a spike as a warning to other settlers. Pocahontas ran away into a field of tobacco that had been planted and met a farmer named John Rolfe. Rolfe was not frightened at all, but soon the tribesmen came looking for her. Rolfe took her to his hut he had constructed in lieu of the brick house he was going to build when the mud dried. They went to sleep on the dirt floor. Pocahontas thought after all the excitement of the day she could sleep for days on end. She was strangely attracted to him and kissed him on the lips. I don’t know if this is right, sleeping with a savage. It’s not Christian.” “Who is this Christian you speak of?” “It is my religion. I don’t speak up often, but when I do it is to preach the word of Jesus Christ.” “Tell me more about this Jesus Christ.” John Rolfe picked up a four-leaf clover from the ground and plucked off a side.” “God is three parts. There is the father who created the universe.”

“Ahone! that is what we call him.” “Then there is the son of God, Jesus Christ. He came to save us from our…evils we do. And then they Holy Spirit is the force that surrounds us and works magic in our hearts. But they are all god: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” “I’ve been taught all my life Ahone was the one true spirit. I’ve never seen anything to challenge that!” Soon they both fell asleep. She woke up and went to go look at the stars, seeing Venus shining extra green. Freezing though it was, she quietly went in looked on at the heaving chest of John Rolfe, his breathe freezing as he exhaled. He had some sort of T-shape on his chest in the form of the necklace, she looked down at her seashell her father had brought back from a previous expedition to the sea. She had in the past wanted to go with her father on expeditions, but her father was stern in his ways. No daughter of his would be a warmonger like him. It was then that the tribesman came, with pitchforks and axes. They were both dragged out and the limp hut was burned. The scalping blade was beginning to go over Rolfe’s forehead as he screamed in agony. “Father, I have a spiritual connection to him. It is like that that was taught in stargazing.” That’s the only way she could explain it, they were star crossed lovers. It was as if she were already precognizant of Shakespeare. “You had a spiritual connection to John Smith.” “No I didn’t, I only begged you not to kill him in your bloodthirsty ways.” “Enough, daughter! I will hear no more of your insolence.” “I am leaving the tribe. I wish to stay with this man John Rolfe.” The tobacco crop not yielding much, Rolfe decided it was time to leave the new world after all. He would bear the scars of the Jamestown settlement forever literally in his head. John Rolfe brought along Pocahontas and led the expedition back to England. She had learned English well and Rolfe was soon to take her hand in marriage. When she arrived in London port, she received many glances. Then seeing a red skinned savage for the first time as was reported by the Jamestown colony, it was hard to be racist as they didn’t know what to expect.

Later that night she was going to perform in Hamlet. She would be playing Ophelia and had studied for her part extensively between the wastes of the Atlantic Ocean. She first went to her new home. “Rebecca, should we christen our new home?” Rolfe asked. Rebecca was the Christian name Pocahontas was going to take, John Rolfe decided it would be best to start the transition. “How?” “In our culture, we break a bottle of champagne, a bubbly drink, on the hull of our ships. I think we should break a bottle on the bedframe.” Rolfe went to the cabinet and got a warm bottle of champagne from the cabinet. 1492, a good year; In fact, in some ways it was the beginning of a new life. Time out at sea took months to when sailing by the wind, and there was not much to do besides practice their theatrical performances (if they were to survive the voyage). After they had made love, christening the bed, there was another christening to be done Rebecca Rolfe was taken by her husband to St. Paul’s Cathedral to be baptized. She was overwhelmed by the size of this building, towering over anything her tribe had to offer in the Americas. She was thrown under the water like she was being drowned and gasped and gulped for air when she was risen. “John Rolfe, why have you done this to me?” “To save your soul.” Rebecca, though willing to come to this new land, mostly out of spite toward her father, was hesitant to turn her back on the creator. Even though she found her former studies trite, she still believed in the way of the Ahone. “It’s the same god, just a little different.” Pasty white, that’s what he meant. Later that night it was her character who was to be drowned, the London theatrical circuit was wild. Pocahontas, now known as Rebecca, would go onto perform as Ophelia in Hamlet longer than anyone else in the Royal Shakespearean Theatre.” The professor said it was good; really good, although he wasn’t without some hesitation. “It was certainly a good piece for one with experience. I don’t know much about the legend of Pocahontas, but there is something you’re holding

back” I internally took major offense to this, but then I ed what Mr. Kemba said about not getting personally offended. It didn’t mean I didn’t have a lot of resentment in my heart. I worried I was losing my edge. Cascading feelings of catastrophic failure I could feel in my gut. “You’ve done a great job with world building, and I’d certainly like to see it expanded on. There’s frankly too much going on and there are too many characters. You need to make it more personal, what is the point of just focusing on a historical moment without something personal to say? Focus on the relationship between Rolfe and Pocahontas.” I was irate and flushed in the face, how could a story about “Pocahontas’ Theatrics” be a flop? We went around the room, in my opinion shit after shit work from everyone, and Karen started to read her story: Her eyes beamed when she started “Alright everyone this is a work in progress so take it easy on me.” Everybody chuckled, I remained stone faced and annoyed “Everyone’s work is in progress, no one gets it done on the first go-around.” Again, I was highly offended “Yeah but I came up with this in an hour, I procrastinated pretty bad. But I felt like I was running on pure adrenaline.” “There’s nothing wrong with a worddump. In our franticness we can come up with a lot in a short period of time.” Preach reverend, I was tempted to say. “The sky was pink and blue. Tuberculosis was a hell of a disease. She imagined her stomach looked pink and blue, too. For 200 years she had dealt with it, but it never took her over. For Tanya it felt like war would never end.” Was she going to end every sentence abruptly I wondered? “She had almost starved to death during the during World War II (if she could she probably would have) but now Tanya was an immigrant to Palestine now. A returning Jew, she had survived Stalin’s pogroms before the formal skirmish began.” Could she be any more descriptive? “She would have to fight one more time. At boot camp she had to pick up a rifle, something she never wanted to do. In her immortality she had seen the effects of death only secondhandedly. A part of her felt like when someone died, she died too.” Could this get any worse?

“They were introduced to a weapon that she never thought they would have to revert to: the Israel and Palestine conflict was about to become nuclear. They went home for the night and when she came home for supper, she had a simple soup to prepare for Yom Kippur; she said her nightly prayers. She could see Mt. Sinai in the distance, something she could never make it up to anyway. She had often walked around the base of Mt. Sinai, looking up at the frost and dew that covered the summit. When Yom Kippur came, she begged god for forgiveness.” Just droning on this piece “There was a glowing orb outside her door, a green crystal she found lying there and she picked it up. She expected it to be hot as it was glowing, and she questioned what it was. But it was quite cool to the touch, the crystal began to talk to her: ‘Tanya, this is your final mission. Meet me on Mt. Sinai.’ She crawled up to Mt. Sinai, the base was covered with mushrooms and she took a bite for sustenance. She may have been 200 years old and immortal, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t very sick.” He could fix it if he really wanted to himself, maybe overnight “It was getting colder and colder, a sensation she thought she’d never feel again; this was a good sign. For ninety years she had dunked her head in a bucket of ice water every Friday at Sabbath, but it hadn’t changed anything. In fact, while her comrades were freezing to death in the barren Russian winter, she was fine. A minor inconvenience but nothing that shook her to her core. She crawled at such a slow pace she felt she needed an oxygen tank. Finally, after what felt like weeks, she made it to the top. The moon was gigantic, so big she thought she could walk on it. The Earth shook, and the rocks were split.” Too descriptive; could that metaphor be any more on the nose? “’I am the father of Israel.’ Tanya was confused; she must finally be in death’s throes. ‘I speak to you through the Szczerbiak stone.’ The stone! It had been an urban legend like the Rosetta Stone. ‘It gives you immense power, use it to help your people.’ If it could only give her the power to die; she welcomed death after all she had been through, which was only natural for an immortal. The stone began to shimmer. She had only heard a voice, circling around the frost. Suddenly a lightning. ‘Only one Jew has seen Yahweh. Moses came up here when I revealed myself to him. He was afraid, are you?” Tanya had always assumed her god to just be a man with a beard, which he could probably summon up if he wanted to, but he was a strange looking figure to be sure. He didn’t have a face; the best way Tanya could describe it was almost like some

sort of long razor attached to a body.” My face turned red at this. Later that night there was a hanging, Nazi swine who had been extradited to Jerusalem for crimes against humanity, specifically in the Holocaust. He was dropped from the gallows with such force it immediately snapped his neck. Then the green stone began to shine in Tanya’s pocket, although she was not aware of it at the time. The Nazi pig, with a twisted neck, was able to wake up and force himself down the rope. He saluted the crowd with a Seig Heil! And he was stoned to death in an old-fashioned style. The Jews threw with such a ferocity no one would have expected. Tanya’s stomach was churning, whether from lack of food she was eating that day or the horrible inhumanity on display. She took the Szczerbiak stone from her pocket. This is what’s causing it! It was some sort of immortality giver. Tanya soon realized what was glowing was not an ancient Jewish stone, it was something called ‘Uranium’ deposits from the nuclear bombs that had been used, and she was slowly dying of poisoning from the rock. She was ashamed she had brought this device into her village and exposed it to everyone else. She could see the pink and blue sky slowly turning black. She could only hope she had helped to accomplish something in this free state of Jewishness.” We all applauded it when it was read, although I more sarcastically clapped. I honestly don’t know what I was more shocked by. I was again personally offended that “The Sacred Stone” had for all intents and purposes won the day, but I had to not think of this as a competition. We were all trying to get better in our craft. Plus, I was impressed someone had the same creative juices, the ability to really go out there that I saw lacking in so many other would be hacks was kindling strong in her. But what really bothered me is she had somehow stumbled on my idea of a form of god I had done a long time ago. I was going to do something with that! “I really want to expand on the ending, but I don’t know how.” “Are you Jewish?” I asked. I could not believe she had stolen Razorface. You could dispute the nitty gritty details, but she took it. With writing this is bound to happen, someone comes along with your idea and you’re not rich or famous enough to dispute it. I felt like going to court and getting an injunction or something. And then to make matters worse, the teacher came back with his verdict on his piece:

“What do you want me to do?” I asked “Scrap it” he said “Pocahontas appeals to you for some reason, but we need to get to the heart of it. Make it more personal.” And how the hell was I supposed to do it? The frustration was boiling and beginning to sap my energy. I went home that night enraged. Don’t drive angry, don’t fuck angry, and don’t argue angry were the three don’ts to live by. Why not just make a piece venting my anger at his warped sense of view? ‘There once was a community college teacher who was a talentless fraud…’ “Karen, you did a really good job on your piece.” I said, my pathetic attempt at both flattery and flirtation “This is really hard.” Said Karen “You said you studied creative writing?” “I did. I think you, like me, have gifts. God’s, in his many forms, has bestowed that on us these gifts.” “That’s what you were trying to convey in your piece, right? The nature of god.” “I did, you did more, definitely in a more experimental way.” “It’s my central theme. And it certainly wasn’t my first time exploring it. I’ve covered just about every aspect of the human idea of god that I can. Sudden lightbulb above the head: this gave me a new idea. I began writing frantically “John Rolfe thought he was a god, but it was John Rolfe who was a fraud. His life in England was predicated by the thievery and plundering he could do on the high seas. Now his deceit moved on to the New World. He planned to exploit the land and establish a new dominion over the Jamestown settlement the colonists were determined to form. That was the creed of all whites from Europe. As soon as he touched down, especially after the gruelingly long mission out at sea, he would seek out the locals and masquerade as a god. He couldn’t even speak their language but that would add to the mystique. Rolfe realized they had to be in the forest. There seemed to be no sign of civilization anywhere. As he went in arrogantly, he suddenly he felt a knife at his throat. A hand covered his mouth and wrenched the gun from his hands. How many arms does this woman have he wondered?

“Foolish to go into the jungle alone.” said what sounded like a young woman. Rolfe was dragged kicking and screaming, seemingly with the force of one arm to a large teepee. The soldier, known as Pocahontas, the daughter of the leader of the tribe, threw Rolfe before his father in a towering wicker chair. Everyone in the tribe after first seeing these pasty face men with long sticks were convinced they were some kind of figure sent from Atone. They came in larger numbers, and she knew that there was no way they could defeat those who had their mysterious smoke sticks. After beheading and impaling Rolfe on a stick as a warning (something her father was concerned about doing in case of inciting revenge from the white man) she was ordered by her father to make her way south, going towards the land of the Incans to get reinforcements. She was given the fastest horse they had and she flew off like the wind. Before she left she cradled her newborn. Although a young, fierce warrior now bathed in the blood of her enemy, she was still a mother. She feared more of the white devils would come, and that’s why she was determined to stop them from coming back, even if it meant leaving her daughter behind. Many days on horseback ed, fighting boredom off. And worse yet much time went by contemplating the future of her tribe. She ed the Seminoles on the way to the southwest until finally making it to the fortress in Mexico City. She was led to the tribal leaders past the great halls of Apocalyptico. “I speak for Powhatan. We need reinforcements.” “Where is this tribe of Powhatan?” “Tsenacommacah.” “That is too far away to send my army.” If Pocahontas could make it down here on horseback they can surely make it up to the settlement she thought, but held her tongue. “I can provide you with mercenaries to fight in your resistance. A thousand troops, none more.” Pocahontas was prepared to lead them back that day. She slept finally, a fitful sleep of night terrors. On her way back with the troops she came upon a settlement, an outpost on the border of the Incan empire. Whites holding out on some sort of last stand. Tape on her fingers, tape on her gun and her backup knife in her leg, she led the charge. Slaughtering these whites, the aliens, would be a great way to test the mettle of this fragile alliance. The first

wave went over the fence and were mowed down. They were going down ten of every Incan to every one white devil. They nearly had to abort the mission, but there was no way of getting around the fortress. They would have to go through them; but if Pocahontas had any say in the matter, they were going to make it. Pocahontas and three others were able to make it through. By the time they returned to Powhatan, they were in the throes of full-fledged war. Powhatan summoned her to his teepee: “My dear Pocahontas, I want you to take your daughter and flee south. Go as far as you can, away from this bloodshed. “I must make my stand with my people.” “Hush.” He put his finger to her lips “I need you to carry on the legacy of our tribe.” Always wanting to honor the wishes of her tribe, and especially her father. Pocahontas took her daughter, and for carried the name of the tribe for ten generations. Wherever there was a war against the white man, she was there. Her great great granddaughter stormed the beaches of Normandy to stop the white supremacist Nazis and fought the Skinheads on the streets of Los Angeles. And the reservation in Virginia had room for a tribal reservation.” At the final writers’ session, we were to present our polished drafts. I was tempted to ask Karen a question about how she got the idea for Yahweh. I didn’t do it before we recited our pieces, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, so after she read “Israel’s Stone” I asked “I had a dream. I was taking a nap on the couch and I saw this figure and wrote about it.” she said “I heard it in an Elton John song myself. ‘Anybody here seen Razorface? Heard he’s back.” “Who? She asked Time ed, Karen and I spent more and more time together. Writing was my first love and was taking the same place in her heart as me. But even though I took notes during romantic comedies she introduced me to, I was for the first time in my life falling in love. I questioned sometimes whether it was love or lust, but more than anything I truly felt lucky I could have a supermodel for a

girlfriend, even if she was an alcoholic. She was an unabashed heavy drinker, and so was I, but I was only on the brink of being a full-fledged alcoholic while she gleefully got plastered every night. My waistline was expanding with all the bottles of wine we went through. Sex was OK, but I had no reference. I’m shocked I never got whisky dick, but when you don’t have sex for thirty years straight, you’ll get whatever you can get. I was thinking around this time when I traveled to the future with a dysfunctional home full of brats. I couldn’t let that happen, not because it would take time away from my writing, but that I personally couldn’t handle it. My mother, even though in the throes of mental degradation, would probably have wanted to become a grandma once. In Ireland, grandparents were “Baba,” if she could just hear that once. But I couldn’t do it, my father’s life was a disaster, my life’s a disaster, I couldn’t let my child crawl on the marathon of life. I was growing out my hair more and more, I was in a way feeling liberated by finally having a companion. Pencil shavings were on my desk from my free writing. Karen was one to more use a pen, and you might think this is just a matter of apples and oranges, but this was crucial: pen doesn’t erase so there’s no room for error. Karen was becoming confident in a way a certain brash young man had. I felt like I was becoming more and more like my father in the 60’s before cocaine took over. The world ahead of you and all that jazz. I’ve been lucky, I something Stephen King told me once allegedly. When he kicked his boozing, he flew into cocaine. Maybe that is the destiny of all of us: a slow descent into madness fueled by substance abuse Two amazing things happened with Karen. With no prior experience she was able to finish her novel. I had gone back to The Stream, but I couldn’t pad it out if I tried. Anyway, I was more interested in this story about Pocahontas, even though I was jumping from idea to idea like Donkey Kong trying to get all the barrels. If you I thought I had it published, but like my mother said it was a trite manifesto no one would go for. I could feel the fire in my belly, I had to do something. I loved Karen, she had freed me in a way. But I couldn’t let her be better than me. I was warm from the day’s whiskey and I went out in the snow and smoked a cigarette. The Boy Scouts were collecting canned goods for the Christmas Drive for the less fortunate. Look at me I thought, fat and complacent, gorged after the recent Thanksgiving that saw Karen and I down 5 bottles of champagne. I sought out god and everlasting life but Karen and I fashioned these songs of death, Pocahontas dies, Tanya dies, Dwight Eisenhower

dies, JFK dies. Nuclear holocaust, poisoning, tuberculosis. Life is a fate worse than death for some and some go before their time, what was I saying? One night, Karen found my binkie. I had been having to sneak sucks of it for a while. And the fact was that I usually got my best writing done while I puckered away. She found it and was appalled as much by the disgusting bacteria growing on it (it’s my good luck charm, would you throw away your lucky socks for the Jets on Sundays, would you?) by the fact I looked like a baby. This was the final straw for her. “Why can’t you be a man for once in your life?” Wine and whisky were a fatal combination that night, and I called her a cunt. She slapped me; I slapped her open handed. Like all anger, it felt great in the moment, but I immediately apologized. I knew at that moment I had become my father, and my mother would be ashamed if she saw this behavior. The gulped air I sucked down as the dam of tears was about to be unleashed was getting more compulsive

Chapter XIII

Nobody Loves an Albatross

Don’t call me a drunk Because I’m not one Don’t call me a stoner Because I’m not You can shit on me and throw stones But if you do, I’ll fucking kill you

Conner was always an asshole. I had just gone Christmas shopping for him, then I had an audition. I don’t know why he thinks I’m a published novelist, I told him time and again I was writing and directing a play not writing a novel like him (if you can call it a novel) He would probably hate my gift the ungrateful bastard, I felt like I was wasting time anyway I should just focus on getting my mother’s present. I like a glass of wine with dinner, but I never thought of myself as a full-fledged alcoholic like Conner told me I was. My father was an alcoholic, and Conner won’t shut up about his father the cokehead. I haven’t seen such daddy issues since Batman. Sex was hate fucking. Conner said the other day all dramatically “I am like a sailor going around Cape Horn. My crew is having a drinking contest below decks because that’s what they are, 3rd class Irishmen, like my father.” Thinks he’s actually first class but he can’t scrape the shit off their toilets. I’ve never understood the idea of an angry drunk, but Conner certainly is. When he’s trashed he’s nasty. I swore I would never date someone like this again, someone who hit me and belittled me. My last boyfriend was one to wear a wifebeater and work on cars, Conner would

probably find it cliché. Our first date, Conner took me to a Knicks game; which I don’t know why even as a ive fan I know the Knicks suck dick. I hate Conner so much now I’ll root for Kyrie and Kevin Durant across town. I raised my arms up in cheer for a three, he put his arm around me when we sat down and when he pressed into my tit I felt something. A lump; I now would never let him put his disgusting hands there again, but I have to credit him for saving my life. Yes, it was cancer. I was in Macy’s looking for the latest in perfume that I was going to get my mother and I broke down and cried. The cashier asked me if everything was OK, and I sucked in my tears when I realized I was in public. I had stated earlier that I was not one to cry much, but it was happening more and more. My eyeballs have never been so sore, the black bags around my eyes were puffy from staying up every night. The whole damned reason I went to that writing session at the rec was I had an idea and I didn’t know how it was going to translate. The reason I had this Rosemary’s Baby haircut that Conner loves to mock is because I do have an audition for Rosemary’s Baby. An experimental piece is opening off Broadway. I did not want to do it to be honest, but Conner’s making shit money I had to whore myself out in some way. I wanted to write my own play but I had no prior experiences. I called my mother, a nurse, sometimes wishing I had followed her down that road. Writing, expressing myself for once, had led me down a bad path. “Are you smoking again?” she asked “No” I said as I puffed away. That’s probably where I got it from. I had been a smoker since age 18, when I could buy a cigarette. Acting for that long too, but I can feel its effects on my lungs, I need to emote. But like something else in my life I couldn’t let go of. “Are you still hanging out with that shithead loser you met.” “…Yes. But I’ll visit for Christmas.” Home in the old village, my only refuge “You mean you’ll both visit; I’ll have to meet him.” And meet him she did. We all sat around the table, a plump greasy turkey on the table. I hated Christmas like I was the Grinch, but this was just as bad because I had come back from the clinic and had tested positive for breast cancer. Stage III-A, and it had spread to my lymphoid. It was pouring all day, we were getting sleet, snow, and rain. A

nightmarish concoction now not unlike starting the first round of radiation treatment that was attacking my cells. I had been resting all day, dead in the water but Conner was being obnoxious. “Wakey wakey, eggs and baccy. Wake up sleepyhead you’ve been sleeping all day.” Bacon turned to turkey, which turned to wine (one glass!), when I went in to talk to my mother in the living room. “Stage III-A, they will have to do many rounds of treatment.” My mother sighed and then got misty eyed. “You know, my mother, your grandmother, had breast cancer. They performed a double mastectomy, and they had started her on chemo, but her body couldn’t take it at her age. She was bedridden until she gave up. She gave up and called it a life. The last thing she told me is that life was fine, but don’t be afraid to give it up if the going gets too tough. “When were you planning to tell me this?” Conner had been eavesdropping “This is between me and her, how dare you butt in?” “What kind of a world do you live in you can tell her to just give up, woman? She’s brilliant and has her whole life ahead of her!” he screamed at her “I hate to break it to you but you’re the one who is not living in the real world. You think you’re some hotshot but your writings not going to amount to anything.” “Look I’ll be with you to the end Karen, but you have to fight.” My mother was right, it is easy to give up. Conner had too many bottles of wine and turned slap happy. I made a decision. I was going to lay it all on the luck of the draw. I was going to pull the wishbone from the turkey. Small piece. This is my deathbed confession. With the tumor spread to my brain I can’t write anymore. This is a dictation from my mother.

Chapter XIV

A Game of Chess

My mother is dying. Her Alzheimer’s is in its final stages. I looked over at her in her bed, wet because she had urinated on herself in her inability to control her bladder. I have to clean her up and give her a sponge bath in her bed. She is intensely labored in her breathing. It will only be a matter of time before she stops breathing, because her brain forgot how to. The most important thing to do at this moment was to start writing her eulogy. She deserves a good eulogy and I need to write it while she is still here. I wish I could run it by her, I would be open to for once. I looked around the room. I saw the refrigerator; she wasn’t much of a cook. No Banger’s & Mash; we were more of a steak and potatoes kind of family. The television? Maybe I could write something about her love of the Yankees. Mom, what would you have me do? “It all started over a game of chess a few years back. When my mother Cara couldn’t leave the house anymore because of her illness I looked below the television. There were some boardgames, the standard Monopoly and Life. I found a chess board, I might have been twenty-five, but I had never played chess before. My mom was great, she taught me the ropes. She was in chess club in high school. It was the only competition she was good at. Chess defined my mother. Life is like a game of chess. There are twenty-three billion possible outcomes and she followed one. She always beat me, there was no getting around it. I never once beat her, maybe it’s because I have a specific learning disability that I just for the life of me couldn’t pick up. My mother inspired me to get better. I the last time I played chess with her. I didn’t technically beat her, I had to help her. It didn’t feel real anymore, it was my pathetic strategy versus myself. We had the Yankees game on the radio. Didi Gregorious hit a walk off home run, and that’s all she wrote. She didn’t cheer, or it so much as . I won’t my mother that way. I’ll when I got bit by a snake and her killing the snake with a cleaver. I when I won my first

trophy in 2nd grade with the pinewood derby. I always wanted a trophy maybe more than anything else at that tournament. These are the things I’ll never forget about my mother Cara O’Brien.” Now I’m out here in Central Park, wearing a scarf. I was going to have to get back to the nurse soon. I’m dreading having to give my mother another sponge bath. A man came up to me and started to play chess with me on my board. The wind was cold; Thanksgiving was just around the corner. I looked out at the skyline of New York City as if I expected it to be completely different again. “I’m Jim.” He introduced himself “Conner O’ Brien” I responded “Do you want to play some speed chess?” I nodded affirmatively. This was my first game not against my mother. I was cautiously optimistic. “Care for a nip?” he asked me. How could I turn it down? Especially since it was colder than all hell “What brings you here on this brisk fall day?” he asked “I needed to get out of the house, away from my mother.” “Oh mothers. Only Norman Bates can love one.” “No it’s not that…she’s dying.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” He said with the utmost sincerity “It’s OK, it’s just hard to see her in the state she’s in.” He invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at his house; I accepted. One week later was the big day. The Jets were ironically playing the Lions in the noon game. I offered to help set up the meal, but he would hear nothing of it. I was his guest and he was thankful he had some someone to spend Thanksgiving with. I was worried honestly as I watched my Jets get manhandled that something was going to go horribly wrong. I thought about a Nova episode I had watched while looking over my mother the previous night. A black hole that sucked in everything in sight. I always felt like there was a black hole on the horizon, that

everything was going to go wrong. Because it usually did. We sat down to the meal. “Let me ask you something.” I said after we had said Grace. “Have you ever thought of living a simpler life?” “Giving things up you mean.” “I mean like the Amish. Have you ever seen Witness?” “You want to be Harrison Ford.” “In a way I’ve always wanted to be Harrison Ford, but that’s not what I mean necessarily.” “Then you really just want to be an Amish…person?” “I want to wake up at 4:30 to milk the cows, plow the fields, build barns. Do hard work and sacrifice for my community.” “I think that’s irable. I tell you I use to work at FedEx, I had to haul boxes for six hours straight. It was hard work to be sure…” “As a writer I’ve never really done hard work.” “But it was very unfulfilling. That’s why I work at Barnes and Noble now. A solid paycheck for solid work.” “But I want more than that.” Hasn’t that always been my problem. We could have I took home a big helping of leftovers, (he had a ten-pound turkey for the two of us). I was glad to meet a friend.

Chapter XV

A Pink Urn

I went to a job fair not too long after this. It was like I was right out of college again, madly scrambling to find a new job. I stumbled across a booth about working for Comcast. The job of course was answering customers inquiries over the phone. I filled out an application: they asked had I ever been convicted of a felony, and I said no, so that was good enough for them. They were pretty desperate for representatives and I had experience so that was more than enough for them. I wondered if I still had the skills to read while working. On my stable meds and with a friend in my life, I was looking forward to getting back in the workforce. Now came what I thought would be the hardest thing I’d ever have to do. After work on my first day I went to a funeral parlor. Worse than this was it was getting freezing cold outside. Winter was here in November and I was not prepared for the short nights. I hadn’t thought how I was going to conduct the funeral, but arrangements were going to have to be made. I had heard informercials on TV say that some funerals went for seven thousand dollars, and I frankly did not have that much money. “So what do you do for work?” the director asked. I was prepared to say independent writer, but I was holding back, thinking he would kick me out for being a starving artist with no money. I picked up a pink urn and began to spin it like a basketball in my palm “Please don’t do that.” He panicked at me, he had such a fast reflex I almost dropped it. “How much is this one?” “Eight hundred dollars, plus two hundred for cremation services.” Mom deserved the best

“I work in customer service for Comcast. I help callers set up their plasma TVs, help them through manuals, you get my drift…I could probably afford this one. Where do I sign?” Later on, work was going well. I had built up a defense against jerk off callers over my previous experience. Every half hour lunch at noon I did some heavy reading with Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, of course I keep biting off more than I can chew, it’s almost indecipherable. “Between grief and nothing, I’ll take grief.” I’ll take nothing; just put me down like a dog. “Being a Knicks fan is pretty tough, huh?” One of my coworkers came up and asked me. I was wearing a tie dotted with Knicks logos. “You have no idea.” I chuckled, almost dismissively “Whatcha reading?” “Faulkner, ever heard of him?” “I reading him in high school. Our class read As I Lay Dying. It was pretty bizarre, and it took all semester to get through it.” “I don’t blame your teacher for taking it slow. In fact, if I were that teacher I’d say the kids were too young and immature for that kind of reading.” “I notice you tend to sit alone at lunch.” “I’m pretty shy, I have a hard time starting conversations. You should see me try to pick up chicks at the bar.” I chuckled, openly mocking myself on the outside but saddened with myself on the inside. “Look, we’re short a man in our fantasy basketball league. Want to come to our house, have a couple beers, try a new experience?” I took up his offer. Try new things, a great mantra. I went to their house in downtown Bronx. A little sketchy I thought it would be at first, but he lived right next to Yankee Stadium, so that was nice. We went in, he offered me a Gennesee, but I turned him down, told him I quit drinking. “You’ve got the first pick, who are you thinking of taking?” Will from IT asked me

“You’d think Giannis, and that would be a safe pick. But I think I’ll go with Harden. Small ball right? We live in the era of shooter. No more Shaqs anymore, not fast enough.” “Solid choice, I’ve got the second pick so I’m definitely going with Giannis. Sure you don’t want a beer?” “No, I’m quitting. I always start with one and it escalates. I don’t like hangovers. I feel like I want to die.” “Who doesn’t…” The draft started. After four rounds I couldn’t tell you I recognized whomever was still on the board. Partly because I was a little drunk, nobody else seemed to be. A bit rowdy to be sure, but I thought I could drink anyone under the table. I was getting more and more tipsy with each sip. It was freezing out, but after dusting down the snow caught in the net we played a pickup game. I had my Patrick Ewing jersey on. I was six foot four, one hundred seventy pounds of grit and tenacity. I tried to get the true power forward in me to get some rebounds, but I slipped and fell. I was lucky I didn’t throw out my back. We decided to call the game with that little episode. We had a rager that night, one beer became six bottles of champagne to go around like I feared. But this was the happiest drunk I had been in a long time. I was so used to drinking alone or with Karen, so I was actually feeling happier just to be around other people. What was more pressing was how I was going to get up to take calls with a nightmarish hangover at seven AM. I made a more reasonable goal: go one month without drinking. I didn’t have much selfconfidence or control, but I was confident with my new friends and meds I could do it. I have had an opportunity for advancement in the company, becoming a regional manager of the customer service branch in San Antonio. You would think that someone who wrote about Pocahontas at the Alamo would have done a bit more research, but you know me. Wing it completely, fly by the seat of my pants until I crash into the sun. But maybe the warmer climate would help with my mood. I told them I had to wait until my mother died, which could be any day now. New York has a lot of dead weight hanging around, literally. There was a lot I wanted to do before I left. I had wanted to work with kids on basketball at the Brooklyn YMCA, work part time at the thrift store to check out

some cool secondhand merchandise. Restaurants to try out, plays to see on Broadway. But ultimately there were too many ghosts here, literally and figuratively, and I had to escape this deadly cold. I went to the Brooklyn Bridge. I looked down and spit off the ledge. Bigger than a stream in Milwaukee. But just as icy as I imagined. I’ve surprisingly rarely come here. You’d think with all my issues I’d come here a bit to get inspiration for my novel, but no dice. All I ended up doing was walking away.

Chapter XVI

Christmas in San Antonio

“Would you like to take a mini-vacation with me?” I asked Jim “The only thing is we have to leave tomorrow.” “Where?” “San Antonio, Texas. I got a job offer there and they want to meet me in person.” “I don’t know.” “You got me out of my shell, you should try something new yourself.” “It’s not the matter of trying something new. It’s just so close to the holidays…” This was true. This was usually the point I’d get frustrated, and I don’t know if it was the giving up of the booze or what, but I was not aggravated by his indecision. I don’t know why I’m so impatient, but I’m starting to think it’s not so much a character defect as much as a choice. I choose to rush, I choose to gogo-go. “Sure, I’ll do it. We’ll have a nice Christmas in San Antonio.” The red eye flight that left at three in the morning had a crying baby. Again, I was not frustrated. I just took a deep breath and closed my eyes. We did the usual when we went down. We went to the Alamo, just a small memorial, very underwhelming. We went to a Spurs game that night, it was better seeing them over the ongoing Greek tragedy that is the New York Knicks. I felt in a way the Spurs were becoming reminiscent of my life and that I needed to give up the Knicks. If I came down here to live amongst the San Antonites, I would be coming to many games. We were so high up at such a steep angle I felt like I was going to fall to my death if I got tipsy. They were playing the Clippers, so it was a good chance to boo Kawhi Leonard. Their next game was going to be Christmas Day, which I considered going to; there honestly wasn’t much to do besides that.

“What do you want to do on Christmas Day?” I asked Jim “Well we agreed not to do presents.” “I hope we can agree there’s more to Christmas than just presents.” “Would you like to come here again?” “Sure.” He said. Spurs were playing the Lakers. Maybe we would get on NBA TV. I would normally have a few beers during the game, but not this time. “How is your team doing in fantasy?” Jim asked during the first “You mean ‘James Harden and Some Other Guys?’ Harden’s saving my ass at this point, but I don’t think I’ll do any better than the third place I’m in. You?” “I got a bunch of talented youngins that were a steal in the draft. Brandon Ingram, Jaylen Brown…” I zoned out a bit after this, dizzy from the heights. I was going to once again take a break from boozing I decided. I was going to be clean-cut, no more vices. Later the next day we were in a Baptist church down the street from the Alamo; Jim wanted to pay his respects on Christmas Eve. I looked at the Cross, no Jesus was on it. I was going to say to Jim “you know, funny story, one time I was in Catholic Church back up in New York…” But even though it looked, sounded, and even tasted real, it wasn’t. I think that that’s the hardest part of my mental illness: itting it’s not real. I didn’t want to lose my faith, but now that I didn’t see God, I was having a hard time. Especially as someone who had dabbled in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths sometimes, it felt like now I had the duty to roll the dice which faith I was going to settle on. But that was something for another day. I did have a good chance to meditate and take a counting of my blessings. You could say with my mother and what she’s going through I didn’t have much to be thankful for, but I did. I was thankful for a more stable state of mind, the fact I had the courage to quit drinking and that I had made friends for the first time in my life. I made the sign of the cross, it felt right. Even without wings and a visit by Jesus Christ himself it felt good to worship a higher power. “Only when you have bathed in the blood of the lamb can you feel the true power of the almighty spirit!” My nerves were suddenly on edge, the hairs on my arms and neck standing ramrod straight. Mostly due to the fact I wasn’t

expecting to hear this explosion in the silent meditative garden that was the church. “And yeah did the spirit come unto Mary and she was with child! She fled Bethlehem!” Yes, choke it all down “Christmas is not about new present or fancy things, it’s not even about family! It’s about you, you and your intrinsic worth. God loves you and all your shortcomings. You are not damned; this system is damned! God Damn America! God Damn the USA.” He threw out his arms and the candles, the only source of light in the chapel, went out. Exhilirating We went to the local soup kitchen. “Take care of your mother before taking care of other people” my mind said. I felt like branching out as it had been my best therapy over everything else. I did a simple job ladling the meal out to everyone. Some people truly repulsed me. But I had to one simple thing: “God Damn America.” I went to go sit with a man who was not only homeless but blind once I was done serving. He was sitting alone, and I felt needed company. But then my big mouth took over. “Can I ask you a question?” I asked; he could see it coming from a mile away “Is it what is it like to be blind?” he retorted. To be fair, he had probably heard that question a million times and was getting sick of it “No, I was just wondering how you became blind. Were you born blind?” “I was at a party, got drunk and crashed my car into a river.” “Do you regret it?” “I’m one to count my blessings. No one else got hurt. This blindness is my punishment for endangering the lives of others.” “What is it like to live like this?” The elephant in the room. “In some ways you learn to get used to it. And I get a lot of sympathy points when begging for money. I’m usually able to buy some crack from what I get.” He went out to go for a smoke, I decided to just clean up and put the chairs away and keep my head down. The next day, Christmas Day, was luckily uneventful. Jim and I were a bit too

tired to go to another Spurs’ game. I prepared for my interview for a couple hours as the day was winding down in the mirror and with a recorder on my phone. I had never done an interview before and had to look it up on Google: “50 Common Interview Questions and How to Answer Them.” “Why do you want this position?” “I need to escape from my past life, and this is a good place to start.” They love honesty in interviews. I’m worried if they have to run a background check if I’d it. Psychiatric issues are not something this country, or corporations for that matter, look kindly on. I got up bright and early the next day for once. The only time I could deal with mornings was never going to bed in the first place. But I got a good night’s rest. Who knows how jittery and anxious I’d be if I was fighting fatigue? The commute, unlike good ol’ New York, was not a complete nightmare. The traffic was decent, the weather warm, and I was still filled with the Christmas spirit (or maybe the Holy Spirit). I found good parking, maybe a little sign from god. I walked upstairs, having trouble finding the third-floor office that I barely made it in time. Nothing quite like the sound of dress shoes clacking against white tile. Sweat was coming up under my armpits. Good thing I always wore black. “Hi, I’m Dan Stevens, head of Comcast for the Southwest division. How are you today?” I was beaming as much as he was. We seemed to genuinely hit it off. “I love that tie.” he said “Thanks, as a matter of fact I was at the Spurs game the other night.” “Oh really, yeah I caught that game on TV. We won.” “Better than the Knicks, I can’t tell you what a disaster they are. I plan to defect to Black and White.” “Let’s get down to business. You work at our New York division correct?” “Yes I do, sir.” “Brass taxes; New York is out finest division, you’ve only worked there for about six months but already think you’re up for a promotion?” “I’ve put in a lot of hard work learning the ins and outs of Comcast, I’ve put in a lot of hours. And I’ve had previous experience.

“It says at your last job, the Visa Card Center, you left after about the same amount of time. Why was that?” “I was going to school to get my Master’s in English Studies and Creative Writing. We parted on amicable .” A bold-faced lie, I silently prayed to the Lord above they wouldn’t probe further. “But I’ve decided I want to make a career out customer service and found a new home in Comcast.” A great way to save face right there. “What do you do on the phones when you encounter a belligerent caller?” He asked, not bothering to write any of this down “I believe wholeheartedly in sticking to the scripts that we are assigned. Read them the abusive caller script, and always speak in a soft, calm voice.” “What do you think you can bring to Comcast as a manager.” A damned good question, one I didn’t have an answer to. As always, I winged it: “I can bring stability. I’m a hard worker and will bring my all into the position.” I went home that night, immensely relieved. I got the job and excitedly shared it with my good friend Jim. “I got the job!” “Congratulations! I guess I won’t be seeing you much anymore. But thanks for bringing me down here.” I was sad that I was going to lose my closest friend, but it was a fresh start in many ways, and I was looking forward to it. I was sure I’d make new friends anyway. I from that night they announced the Oscar nominations, a bit early in the calendar. It was a great year for film it seemed, although of course I didn’t have time to see them right now and wouldn’t see them until I was settled into my new life in San Antonio. In my quaint life I’m setting up for myself I would have all the time in the world to go to the little art house cinemas as long as they were still around in San Antonio. So many nominations tonight; I’d never heard of any of the Best Original Short Animated Films. All I had hoped was one day I’d be up on that stage. Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: “The Stream” by Conner O’Brien (Based on his own novel). But that prospect became fainter and fainter as I settled down. So many people would be crowned the best

in over forty categories. Everyone got their minute speech; everyone would go down in history. Let me be blunt: at one time this is what I wanted. I wanted the fame, power, and money. But now all I want is to work a stable job, come home and kiss my girlfriend on the cheek. Talk about our day, make dinner, watch the game, go to church on Sundays; rinse and repeat. I’ve shot for the moon and come down crashing hard. I’ve burned up in the sun. I want to live on 123 Main Street, Middle America. I want to be normal, because it is the only way I’ll find the peace I’ve been looking for. I can feel it in the dry San Antonio air, this is where I belong, this is where I can make the most of my chance. When we landed home in New York, I heard from Karen’s mother that she had ed away. I knew she had cancer, but we had grown apart so much I was shocked to learn she went so soon. Her mother, supreme cunt she was, said her death was my fault. I went up to her in the wake, everyone staring daggers at me. I honestly didn’t know anyone in her family outside her mother, so I figured it would be best to pay my respects and slip out. In her coffin she still had a full head of hair due to not partaking in chemotherapy. That probably was a coaching tactic I would have given her, fatalist I am, or should say used to be. Life’s not worth fighting for. I my father in his casket, six years old I was. I can tell you then as I do now and as I did in The Stream if you stare at a dead body long enough it will look like it is still breathing. Do I wish I had the powers of John Ewing? That’s neither here nor there, as I may believe in god, but I don’t believe in miracles. I was about to go in and kiss her on the forehead, disgusting though it might have been. My phone going off though, blasting the Superman theme, was the final nail in the proverbial and real coffin. I went off to find myself at the bottom of a bottle at the local bar, I could definitely use the comforts of a nightcap or two right about now.

Chapter XVII

Tireless Struggle

How easy it is for me to fall. I went in and ordered a double Jameson on the rocks. I originally swore I’d nurse it, but nursing turned to downing it and soon eight servings were gone. I could take the easy way out and say it’s my Irish heritage, that it’s in my DNA to be a drunk. My father downed a fifth of Jameson for breakfast, so my alcoholism is hereditary. There I said it, I’m an alcoholic. But I’ve forged my own path. It’s all about me isn’t it? I’m a narcissist, why couldn’t I see it before. I was as blind as the man in San Antonio. If only I had listened to Karen, if only I had listened to mother. Normally when I throw up when I am drinking I get a tingle in my esophagus. This time it was in my gut, deep in my core. I ran to the bathroom, not sure if I was going to make it. I rammed my index finger down my throat to make sure. I had to expel this poison and never partake in it again. I wanted to expel my anger and sadness and anxiety, but all I got was whiskey. I went back to the bar, significantly plastered, the room spinning in two dimensions, so I got up from my stool and went to go sit at a booth. I closed my eyes and feel like I ed out. “You’ve got a little right on your cheek.” I had puke on my cheek, so I wiped it off with my hand (not even thinking of using a napkin) “Mind if I sit down?” “No not at all, make yourself at home.” Who was this figure and what did he want? “I’ve read The Stream. Certainly, very interesting. I have to tell you my favorite part was when John became Muslim. “Oh yeah, and why was that?” Nodding off for five minutes or however long I was out made for both a drunken state and a splitting hangover simultaneously.

“Islam is a forgotten religion in this Christian state we live in.” “Who are you?” I finally asked “Would you believe me if I told you I was the resurrected spirit of Malcolm X?” Preparing to write The Stream I had studied many Muslims, and I was always intrigued by Malcolm X more than any other. I read his autobiography by Alex Haley, saw the Denzel Washington/Spike Lee t. I always thought he was more fascinating then Martin Luther King. But I’d had enough adventures for one lifetime. “No, you are a hallucination brought on acute alcohol poisoning.” I was done with these fantasies. Tomorrow I would wake up, start anew. Check on mom, get ready to move to San Antonio. I’ve had enough of this foolishness; it was bad enough I had let it get this far. I fumbled my wallet out of my front pocket and went to put my card down, when the man stopped me and put his credit card down. He handed me his personal card, said to call me if I wanted to ‘talk.’ I wasn’t sure how I was going to get home that night. I had a couple more double Jamesons’ on the rocks before I left and caught up on SportsCenter. I was in no condition to drive, I was legitimately worried I’d fall down. I fumbled buying my ticket on the subway. I didn’t know how I was going to navigate the grid and stops. I took out my phone, ever on one percent, about to die at any moment, like my mother. I had to pee but couldn’t find anywhere to relieve myself. I had never been so frustrated in all my life. This is what booze does to me. It ruined my relationship with Karen, turned me into my father, and made me have to resort to peeing in the middle of the street. I took a deep breath, oriented myself. Luckily there was an all-night diner on my right. “Can I use your bathroom?!” I pleaded “Paying customers only.” “I’ll have a cup of coffee. I’ll be right back to get it.” I got in, I felt like it was a million lifetimes to get my pants and fly down. But I made it, thank god. I went outside to sober up with my cup of coffee, getting cold. I quickly asked for a warm-up. I spun the card around in my hand, pondering it. 3 AM was a bit early, I didn’t even know if he had made it home yet. If he had a home. Who was this man? What did he want? I figured even though he just saw me, making a call to him at 3 AM was not advisable. So I finished my coffee, hailed a cab, and took a

buzzed nap; restless, like all sleeps I get these days. I woke up in the worst possible manner: hungover. I don’t usually get the pangs in the head, but I feel double the dehydration of most people. I went to take a swig of water, but luckily stopped myself before I gulped down a glass of vodka that was on the dresser. The card was there, and I ed three AM in the greasy spoon. I dialed it: “My name is Malcolm; I work for AA. I scour bars for people who want to get clean. You talked to me last night and said you want to get you sober and I want to help you. “I yeah, you said something about Malcolm X and reading The Stream “What’s ‘The Stream’?” He asked “Never mind, do you want to meet up somewhere?” “Sure, come to an AA meeting, we meet tomorrow night at the Brooklyn Rec Center.” The same AA meeting I had seen when I met Karen writing about Pocahontas and Jerusalem. I walked in, grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in, scanning the playing field. Sad sacks all around, but for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel superior to everyone. We’re all in the boat together and we all have a tragic past.” “Hello, my name is Susan and I’m an alcoholic.” We all gave a somber hello back “I’ve been what you might call a functional alcoholic. I go to work at my job at FedEx and throw my back into loading packages. It’s a killing but I don’t want to take painkillers, so I go home and drink. If I buy a bottle of whisky on Tuesday, I have a third of it that night, a third the next night, and finish it off Thursday. I’m getting tired of going to the liquor store and buying booze. It’s draining my bank . The worst part is the schedule I’m on, I go in at three AM and get out at 9 AM, so I’m usually drinking at 10 AM. I feel guilty every time I drink so early. I tried to quit drinking many times, but I haven’t been able to do it on my own. I recognize I need help.” We went around counterclockwise to other people who also had severe issues and danced the same dance and itted they needed help before landing on me “Hello, my name is Conner…” it took a few beats and an enormous inhale

before I finished “…and I’m an alcoholic.” The same somber hellos that Susan got filled the room “I’ve always hid behind the excuse that my father was an alcoholic, that he ed it on down to me through his genes. My father was a drunk and a cokehead, and he drank and sniffed his way to an early grave. And I fear, even though I’m only twenty-eight the same thing is going to happen to me. I’ve needed alcohol to cover up my mental health issues and like everyone else here I it I need help.” “That’s very brave of you to say Conner. We all have come here because we need help, whether we it it or not. That’s step one of our twelve step program, itting we have a problem.” We continued to go around the room, everyone had similar problems that they needed to deal with in the same ways. One person was dealing with the death of his spouse and drank himself into oblivion to be able to fall asleep without being in tears. Another had severe insomnia and couldn’t fall asleep without booze. In some ways I envied these people, in some ways I’m sure they envied me. “The second step we are going to be working on is coming to believe that there is a higher power than us that can restore us to sanity.” I knew for a fact there was a higher power than me, no doubt. Luckily my time in San Antonio had made me laser focused on Jesus Christ. “Does it have to be Jesus?” I asked “The purpose of saying ‘higher power’ does not necessarily mean Jesus, it just shows that someone, something out there is stronger than us and can help us.” We all have responsibilities and duties, me to Jesus specifically. But if you want to serve Allah like John Ewing than you can. That’s the beauty of the freedom god gives us. I met with our group leader Karl afterwards. “Have you gone through the twelve steps?” “Yes I have, and I can tell you it is going to be hard.” “I haven’t had a drink in two days, is that something to be proud of.” “Absolutely. Every day is a chance to start the fight over again.” Did I really want to keep fighting though? I went home that night, all I could think of was the tequila there would be in San

Antonio. It would be everywhere and there would be no escape from it. The hardest part wasn’t drinking to numb the pain, it was to kill boredom. I was tempted to go to bed at 7 PM. I had the shakes a little but that wasn’t so hard to get through. I had some bizarre nightmares, night terrors more like, waking up in a cold sweat. The next Tuesday I went to the second AA meeting. I saw a woman across from me: I called her Karen II in my head. I could tell by her face what the years of alcohol abuse had done on her. She was about my age though; I could try flirting again. Karen was my only experience with it, and it had gone well enough. But that was for another time. “Hello, my name is Karen, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m twelve days sober…” We all clapped; I had mastered the art of golf clapping; the key is to pound directly into the palms. “I don’t know if I can accept that there is a higher power trying to help me. My parents pretty much beat the word of Jesus into me, but I never let him into my heart. Life just feels cold and meaningless. I want to just get through each day at work and come home and drink to numb the sadness.” Not to be a drama queen, but she felt like my soulmate. But I guess I thought that about Karen too. I guess I fall too easily for people, which is not hard when you are so alone. I went up to her afterwards, the standard would be “can I buy you a drink?” I opted instead for another drug: coffee. We went to the local Starbucks. I got a Frappuccino. I never had much of a sweet tooth so this was like a shot of cocaine. I planned to have many more in the future, I think my father would be proud. “I was really struck by your honesty. I myself am pretty blunt. Can I be blunt?” “Shoot.” she said ively, looking out the window, not making eye . “Why have you become so melancholy. What’s your story, what drove you to drink?” “I was an actress…” “Ah yes, I’m a writer…” “Please don’t interrupt. If there’s one thing I hate is people butting in with their opinions. Not that mine has much more worth.”

“Sorry.” “I was an actress here on Broadway. I got burned out every night having to perform and afraid I’d botch my lines scared me so much I turned to drink to take the edge off. I started to drink before each set and I fell off the stage. Like Susan I didn’t want to turn to painkillers. I used my residual checks to drink myself to death, and that’s the road I’ve been on ever since.” “Why do you bother going to AA?” “No one really gets better, I like to see people fail.” “I wouldn’t usually be this up front, but I feel like this a question you would answer. Are you afraid of death?” I asked “No, whether there is the higher power from Step 2 or not, I will find the rest I need in death.” I could see this trap I was falling into. I was attracted to the misery; I wanted to latch onto it. But I challenged myself, there was a new Studio 54 revival, a discotheque like the old days. I had to get past the significance I would attach it to my father and try to get Karen II to have a good time. I would not get attracted to misery: We would roller skate under a disco ball, maybe even have a few drinks, (but challenge ourselves not to), and by the end of the night I would get her to smile. “Do you want to go to that new Studio 54?” “What on earth for?” “I have a certain affinity for the seventies. So many horrible things happened but we had the best art, bar none. And I think the fact they’re bringing back such a lovely relic is a cause for celebration.” “Sure, why the hell not” I swear I thought a raincloud was going to form and fall over her head. I was undeniably attracted yet saddened to the pit of my stomach where I threw up at the bar. I told her I would pick her up at 7. I was driving into Manhattan, wondering if this Studio 54 was too swanky for our taste. There was only a short line, it looked like disco not only died but had

no hope of a resurrection. And then when we went in, we saw it: the bar to end all bars. Three hundred and sixty degrees, every kind of whisky, rye vodka, and tequila you could imagine from Mexico, Scotland, and yes, Ireland. I felt like a kid in a candy shop. But I held myself back. “Let’s go on the dance floor.” Almost stereotypically it was ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” but I wasn’t shy about that being one of my favorites and threw myself euphorically into trying some moves. We roller discoed awkwardly. It took a long time to master those square brakes on the front. After “Disco Inferno” and “A Fifth of Beethoven” I was sweaty all over. “Let’s get a drink” Karen II said I paused and looked at the enticing selection of liquors and said sure, one drink’s not gonna hurt us. And like it had been at the bar last time when I met Malcolm it was completely botched. I feel like I tried one of everything, afraid if I didn’t get sample everything they would disappear. I drank like there was no tomorrow. The crowd was picking up significantly, I figured after I saw everyone coming in it was just a matter of us getting there too early. A few more drinks and I was making a fool of myself on the dance floor. Karen II didn’t come with me, and it wasn’t until later I realized it was because she was drinking more and more. I had to break the seal and went into the bathroom. And just like the old Studio 54 there was a drug scene going on in the bathrooms. And there I saw it for the first time, my father’s weapon of choice: cocaine. I stared into it, it just looked like a mound of snow. I thought I could see my father’s reflection in it. But if it was anyone’s reflection it was my own. I was disgusted with myself suddenly and ran to the toilet to purge. I purged as hard as I could and made yet another vow that I wouldn’t drink again. When I got back to the bar, Karen II was on the floor in a puddle of vomit. I started sweating again because I felt like this was all my fault, since I was the one to take her to a glorified bar. The bartender said he already called her an ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they started to pump her stomach, which looked like the agony. Once Karen II was gone I went on the dance floor and skated around the rink sadly, solemnly. I jumped a few steps that night in realizing I was helpless against the ravages of alcohol. I planned to go back to AA, but it was going to be awkward to see Karen II there again, if indeed I ever saw her again.

Chapter XVIII

Snowed in

It was about a week later; January 2nd. Comcast was closed down due to a bad nor’easter. I get paid for the day off, and it counts toward the two weeks worked of my two weeks’ notice. I was originally planning to go down to the bakers’ shop, get some nice fresh bread for a final meal before I left. But from what I could see from the window the wind was whipping ferociously. I didn’t have much in the fridge so I needed something, even if that meant a quick stop off at McDonalds. I was getting ready to go when suddenly the lights went out, we had no power. I needed to keep my mom company. But it was going to be tough to spend the day with the barely living corpse of my mother. The sponge baths weren’t working anymore, and her breathing had become more and more labored to the point I asked the nurse if she needed to be on a ventilator. The nurse said she had to die a natural death. More than anything it was her bad smell. She legitimately smelled like a rotting corpse; it was the most horrible smell I can ever , and I was entombed with it all day. But my apartment is just stairs up to my room, so my only other option was to go outside. I debated it to be sure, but I decided to stick it out: cold, hungry, and being stared down by the specter of death. I’m afraid of the dark, always have been since I was a kid. I was dreading being alone with my mother who was on death’s door in the dark. If I didn’t get my sleep I was afraid I’d lose it again, and I couldn’t risk that after all I had worked for. I looked over the apartment for things that would keep me warm. I found a thick wool blanket and hat, and a lantern. I found an old-fashioned film camera and played the strip on a sheet I hung up. There was my father, playing soccer on the streets of Belfast. Blonde mop of hair he had; I was indeed the spitting image of my old man. I figured the best thing to do was something I had put off for a long time. With just a pen by the light of the lantern I wrote her obituary: “My mother was from Belfast; born and raised. In some ways The Troubles were all she knew. Her

apartment was behind a Peace Line. She saw Bloody Sunday from her window and wanted from that day to become a nurse. She was Catholic, but only went out on Sundays to Mass. She saw my father Aiden from her window, playing soccer as he was wont to do, no fear of anything. She watched him for days on end. I think she was attracted to the aura of peace he brought in his carefree attitude. My mother worked up the courage to go down and talk to my father as he was kicking around the streets. My father was a journalist, he was going to be covering the 1972 Olympics. She told her she wanted to be a nurse. He was a Protestant and she wanted to go to services with him. Even though this was a pivotal moment in Irish history, this divide between Protestants and Catholics, they found each other. It all moved so fast. My mother was only eighteen when she married my father. The wedding was a splendid affair. There was of course some dispute on whether it be in a Protestant church or Catholic, but my father relented, and it was in a splendid Cathedral. After the vows, champagne flowed, cakes were eaten, the beginning of a beautiful marriage. Nine months later I came along, and this is where it gets messy. My father had severe mental illness. He was schizophrenic and heard voices that weren’t there. I was too young to it, but I have a feeling seeing him deteriorate was something you don’t forget. My father died of a heart attack. It was only me and her left. And I’ll be damned if she didn’t do everything to take care of me. She put me through school, helped me through my own issues I had inherited from my father, she was always there for me. Now for the past year, I’ve had to take of her as this crippling illness robbed her of her life and memories. And when she died this past _______ you can be certain preparing her funeral was hard. I think back to the funeral she had to prepare for my father. How she had to hold my hand as I looked down at my father and gazed at him in the front row the entire sermon. He didn’t want a Catholic burial to be sure, and my mother was not afraid to have the funeral at a Protestant parlor.” What I wasn’t going to put in that obituary was what happened when I was five years old. I vividly, I was in the downstairs bathroom and I found my father’s drugs. My mother, worried I was in the john too long, knocked on the door. She opened the door to find me playing with my fathers’ cocaine and flushed it down the toilet. My father upon coming home from another bender

was furious when he found out. My mother raised her voice for the one time I can in my childhood. I ran upstairs and I pulled the covers over my head, hiding from the situation in a style I became accustomed to in adulthood. It was a long fight, but I was too afraid to go to sleep, another thing I would become accustomed to in adulthood. But mummy eventually came upstairs and tucked me in, putting the teddy bear next to my head in a borderline cliched manner. My father left for the bar. I could picture the funeral now: the incense over the coffin, the Latin hymns. I would give this first draft of a eulogy. How many people would come out and hear it? I think my mother would be satisfied even if I was the only one. I went over and dabbed my mother’s head with a wet cloth and kissed her on the forehead. I stayed by her all night in the freezing cold while she slept as best she could. Then the lights came on, but mummy didn’t look any more alive.

Chapter XIX

The Art of Failure

In AA, we have to make reparations. I can’t do it with my mother because she’s almost dead. I can’t do it to Karen because she is dead. And I can’t do it to Karen’s mom because she hates my guts. I’ve decided with my mother and Karen leaving this Earth I will not be writing anymore. I jotted some brief ideas down during the blizzard when we lost power. Consider this work a little going away present for Karen. It’s the best I could give her, and the best way I could say I’m sorry. And the best way I could finally get everything out of my system.

Thanksgiving 1941:

I should be excited that I get to get a paid day off from soda jerking. But I have to play trumpet in the marching band. The wind was whipping; Wisconsin was no place to have afternoon outdoor Thanksgiving games. I thought my keys were going to be frozen. I’m not even very good at trumpet, I can’t read the sheet music. I had snuck below the rafters for a sip of whisky with my friends to warm up. I’m going to leave for seminary to become a priest. I don’t necessarily believe in god, but I’ve been conditioned by my family in a certain way that it’s part of my life. I also didn’t want to become a coal miner and develop black lung. Everyone but me below the rafters had a girl, and that wouldn’t be changing anytime soon. If I was going to become a priest I’d have to take a vow of celibacy. I was extremely jealous of my friends who could get girls with no effort. Sometimes I feel like a drifter because I can’t fit into certain cues. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned after going to church the last couple of years is that our country is on the brink of disaster, and soon there will a day of reckoning.

That night I led the family in prayer over the turkey. After dinner we turned on the radio and listened to the nightly news. President Roosevelt was giving a fireside chat about the war in Europe and Asia. America was going to get drawn in, but that was neither here nor there. Right now it was warm and cozy. Father was smoking his pipe with his loafers on, as we listened to vinyl records.

Thanksgiving 1942:

I thought last Thanksgiving couldn’t get any worse playing trumpet in the freezing tundra of West Virginia, but it did. I turned eighteen in June and was drafted before I left for seminary. Now I’m at Guadalcanal. We’ve been stationed here since June. We had a Thanksgiving meal of C-rations at base before going to take a hill. The strategic value of it I couldn’t bother to know, but I wasn’t scared. I ran, I charged at it as fast as I could while sniper fire was coming down from the camouflaged grass. I had a Jap in my sight, I had never shot anyone before. I cocked my rifle and shot him between the eyes, and he fell. I paused, and I can tell you that more than anything this felt good. It felt good to kill my enemy.

Thanksgiving 1943

This is the best Thanksgiving I’ve celebrated in years. I’m really seeing the world. This past year I was recommissioned to the European theatre and was part of the invasion of Sicily. Before every major engagement I attend the mass that is held. I hear about what’s happening on the Eastern Front and the millions who are dying on both sides and how God could allow this to happen. But I am not one to question God. Hopefully the war will end this year and I can go home to become a priest.

Thanksgiving 1944

This is the first Thanksgiving of the rest of my life. The war is over for me. I don’t know what happened. On D-Day I was paratrooping into , but my parachute was jammed. I got it open too late and crashed into the ground and crushed both my legs. I laid there on the ground while the rest of the invasion happened. I was in a daze as the fog and light rain fell down on my face. I fell asleep in the mud, and when I woke up I was in a medic tent. There was so much going on they couldn’t get to me in time to save my legs.

Thanksgiving 1945

I think back to this year and what a joke it was. I watched the end of the war and victory parade from a VA hospital. I was congratulated on every street corner, getting pushed around everywhere. My parents were happy to see me and offered me a place to stay, and seeing as I had nowhere else to go I crashed there. They had to bathe me, transport me, do pretty much everything for me. I used to have a glass of wine with dinner, but that turned to a bottle a night, which turned to whisky. Today I ate the turkey, but it tasted like dirt. I went down to the high school field where I had sipped whisky and took out a bottle and chugged it. I decided I was going to become an alcoholic. I’ve lost my faith in humanity. I feel like I can’t live in this house of ghosts. I’m going to live with the other bums in the street. I’m going to stop fighting this fight. I can’t put my faith in god, and certainly my fellow humans.” I’m sorry Karen, I’m sorry this is the best I can do for you. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that this is the best I can do for you. I can’t help but be a nihilist. I can’t not be a downer, it’s in my DNA. I’m sorry I dishonored you in life. I’m sorry I can’t honor your memory. I can’t make a searching and meaningful inventory of myself. I have failed the twelve steps. I’m going to crumble it up, I’m going to crumble this whole damned journal up when I get to San Antonio. What am I hanging on to? I am a broken record, and how do you fix a broken record?

Chapter XX

The Seventh Seal

“Do you care about me?” I asked Malcolm before our next AA meeting. “Maybe we should discuss this after the meeting…” he started “I need to know now. You saw something in me that night at the bar. Do you think I can be saved?” He took me off to the side “One of the things we’ll be going over more today is accepting that there is a higher power who we need to surrender ourselves to. it we’re helpless to deal with our problems.” “I am helpless but there’s no higher power helping me at all.” I was almost in tears, real genuine tears “Let’s go back in. There’s something else I wanted to discuss with the group.” I wept and wept, And I sat there, and thought a thought I had many times before: “I wish I was dead.” I don’t fear death, he will bring me to my place of rest. And when the day comes when he takes me away, I will not be praying, I will not beg, or trick him into a game of chess to get more time on Earth. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. Death, death is a higher power. I accepted that day death as the higher power. What did it mean? It’s something I would have to go over again, but all I knew for sure is I couldn’t worship these man-made gods anymore. I wiped my eyes then I went back to the group. “…Where we make a full searching, moral inventory of ourselves. And in this inventory we are going to look at our past wrongs and it to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. This will take time, and it will hurt to bring up these past memories, but it is necessary in getting us clean. That is all for today ladies and gentlemen, good luck.”

“Do you want to talk?” asked Malcolm “Maybe next week. I need to figure some things out first.” Time was short, it was time to start making this moral inventory Malcolm talked about. I went to a steakhouse that night because I was too lazy to cook. I looked at the steak: dead. I thought about the characters in my works: John Smith was dead, Kennedy was dead. My father was dead. I’m obsessed with death. I will not worship death though: I worshiped God before, but he has never helped me in the slightest possible way. I don’t worship death like John Ewing worships Allah, or I worshiped Jesus, it’s just a fact of life. It was time to stop being a hypocrite. I would throw everything toward death, and he will not answer. And I wouldn’t expect him to do anything else. After steak I went to my mother’s apartment. I dabbed her on the forehead with a cool towel. Even though she had lost all her senses, I’m sure death could appear and comfort her on the road to a new life. “Malcolm, will you listen to me for step five?” I asked when we had our next meeting and I had had my breakthrough “Of course.” “I’ve written down everything that’s happened to me since my father was my age. My sins are in my words. I brought it, if you want to read it.” “You use the word sins, does that mean you’ve come to accept a higher power?” he asked, almost excitedly “You’ll see.” I had a smile on my face I went down to the YMCA and shot hoops for a while. I was hypnotized doing free throws one after another. Unfortunately my pants ripped, and I was forced to walk home in the frozen tundra in gym shorts. I stepped in the snow and it went up to my knees. But I got home and took a hot shower. Leftover turkey from Christmas was delicious. I could sleep much more peacefully. That night I had a very vivid dream: I dreamed of fishing with my father on a lake, something he never took me to do. We wrestled for a catfish and were going to take it home. I had to go to the bathroom, and I felt like I couldn’t hold it so I let go, and the catfish dragged my father away. There’s that whole death complex again. When I woke up my first thought was why couldn’t I think about my mother, she’d done so much for me. I one day we were walking through Central Park near Christmas. It was shortly after my father’s funeral. The trees were all lit up and

she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be an astronaut. She told me anything was possible if I put my mind to it. It was the one time up until last week I having a nice Christmas. We went out later on Christmas Day even though it was a standard freezing New York winter day. I wasn’t cold, I felt like all I needed was my mother’s love now that my dad was gone. If I had known what was in store for me, the crazy roller coaster young life I lived I would have told my mother to stop kidding herself rather than doing the real dangerous thing: encouraging.” “What did you think?” I asked Malcolm about my writing before the next AA session. “Well, it was certainly a lot to digest in a week.” We both laughed, I more so genuinely as I was coming to this new lease on my life. I had in the past found several new leases in my life, but this new one was going to stick, I could feel it. “But I have to it, more than anything else, I am impressed by your fiction. I know it’s easy to bear your heart on your chest, but there was so much creativity in that book you wrote The Stream. You should expand on it.” Expand on it? I felt like I reached a satisfying conclusion. But maybe I should, I’ll be really busy with my new job, but I should find some time to expand on it. “What about my issues, have I itted them according to the twelve steps?” “I’d be lying if I said I picked up on every one of your issues, that’s why we’re going to share today. Then we’re going to move on to ask our higher power to remove these defects of character.” My heart sank, I couldn’t ask death to remove my defects. That’s not what death does. Susan went first: “I hurt my daughter with my drinking. I swore to myself that I would quit drinking when she was born, but I had such bad post-partum depression I never wanted to stop drinking once I started. That numbing feeling I yearned for was everything I needed. My husband took Alice when she turned five. He got full custody…and I’ll never see her again…” She broke down and started crying; for maybe the first time in my life I felt empathy for her to the point I cried too. Then I was up; every sentence I was choking back tears: “Recently I was ready to give up on myself. For a long time my drinking had hurt a lot of people. My mother is dying of Alzheimer’s Disease and her last memory of me would be in

a drunken stupor. I pushed my first girlfriend to give up on fighting cancer because I made her too hopeless. And I pushed my second girlfriend too drink to the point of alcohol poisoning because I pushed her too far at a bar I should never have taken her to in the first place…But through all this I think if I ask the higher power that looks over me for love and forgiveness, he will grant it to me. Then we all stood, hand in hand singing the AA equivalent of prayer to a higher power. I stayed silent, but muttered repeatedly in my head “God, if you’re out there, wherever you are, please help me. I’m helpless without you.” I realized I had gone through almost every god there was “Tonight I want you all to go home and do something you haven’t done in a while: write down positive things to focus on. If we keep getting sucked into a negative void, we won’t get very far until we are right back at the bottom of the bottle.” I went to my mother’s apartment and turned on some Christmas music on the old timey radio. I went to my journal, I poured and poured over it. What was good about me? I could certainly say I was creative, but that could be offset by the negative of I never finish what I start. I was tempted to jump into an allegory, but I had to finish what I’d started: The Stream. There was no other way around it, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. What kind of genre is it? Science fiction, or drama. A story about a sorcerer who can bring back junkies and brokers a peace with aliens. How did I even come up with it? I wanted to write something personal, because the whole point to writing was bear my soul and heal wounds. The truth is I may be creative but I’m no writer because I will never be truly healed. So tonight, in order to focus on the positives, I’m going to rewrite The Stream as it was meant to be and be done with it. “There once was a man who on a dark and stormy night wanted to jump in a stream he was standing over. His father was cruel to him and had now done the cruelest thing and upped and died. He couldn’t imagine a world without him. His mother was sick. He was a failure at everything. He wanted to be successful, he wanted to be famous. He had alienated everyone he knew and pissed away every opportunity he had. And to top it all off he was an overdramatic drama queen. He was standing on the bridge looking over the stream when suddenly someone came up to him. “Go ahead and jump.”

“Who the hell are you?” “Just jump.” So I did, enough beating around the bush. I had planned it out, when I hit the ice down below it would be all black, but then something happened. I woke up, and I was in the back of a cathedral. A massive cathedral that was packed to the brim with people. In fact it appeared to be standing room only. Velvety red adorned the carpets and walls and he could barely hear from the back what was going on. So he walked closer and closer until he saw the woman giving a speech: his mother. “Conner was a warrior in everything he did. He was brilliant, but it was his ability to love that brought us all closer together.” It was my mother, back from the limbo of death that she was hovering in these last months. I couldn’t at first believe she was saying these words about me, but I had been to a couple funerals in my day so I was not moved, even when she started choking on every word. I got it, this was my future, and my guardian angel showing me what life would be like if I jumped into the stream. “It’s not going to work. I’m past the point of no return.” Suddenly, I saw a heat wave going over the mountainous jungle in the back. It was stifling, just by standing there I began to sweat. “Where are we?” I asked “Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. In the world in which you lived you decided to give yourself to a higher purpose in AA and ed the Peace Corps. We went downtown where I was looking over the Killing Fields where over two million people were killed in the 1970’s. It was a long march, but I was an immovable object, cold and icy hearted. Some children were beat to death on trees and some people were hacked to death with machetes, I didn’t know what this was supposed to accomplish. “What’s the point of this? To show me that death is the ultimate victor, I’ve already decided I give myself to death. Death will win in the long run.” I spotted a girl over in the distance, she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and that was no exaggeration. It reminded me in tenth grade when we had to write an essay about if we thought love at first sight was possible. The ever cynical me said it wasn’t possible, but in whatever state I was in I wanted to go an kiss her. An undeniable urge you may say.

“This is the girl you would fall in love with, you ultimately serve two tours in the Peace Corps with her. You would travel southeast Asia and ultimately you propose to her on the Eiffel Tower. Here let me take you further in the future.” I was in the same cathedral where they were giving my funeral. She was giving her vows, to me, to honor thee in sickness and in health, she was bawling her eyes out. I saw my future mother in law, it was indeed a beautiful sight. “Let is go further. Now I had kids: two twin girls named Alice and Annie. I always hated kids, little brats clinging to my leg. But there I was, basking in the love my mother spoke of during my funeral. I always thought in the catastrophic negative: what if something happened to these kids, what if something happened to my wife? You’d think with my father and mother and Karen dying things couldn’t get any worse. I’m already in hell and surrendering myself to death will ultimately accomplish nothing. Now only I have the power to turn my life around.” I laughed and cried simultaneously at the writing of this. It would have been a strange sight to behold for my mother if she was conscious. With the obsession with death I have you might think there’s no way you could call this a positive experience, but it meant more to me than anything. But then again, they’re just words on a page.

Chapter XXI

Eclipse

The first time I saw The Virgin Mary I was but three. I was on the swings, lept up, Fell and broke my knees The second time I saw the mother of god I was flying in a plane Soaring in the stratosphere, I saw her in the clouds, I thought my logic sane The third time was in a moment of crisis I prayed and prayed and the crisis was averted The fourth was on the birth of my child Her with the moon at her feet As the sun rose that day there was my daughter we could finally meet The last was on the day of my death, I said take me Mother Mary once and for all And Mary said I will answer your beckoned call

I’ve been restless all my life Now I come home I can’t find rest even in sleep But under the heavenly skied dome I cried in Mary’s arms as she stroked my hair And Jesus took my arm and said there there I’m going to my sleep and finally get some peace But before I do I’ll pray for thee Hail Mary, full of grace Thank you for helping me finish this race

There was the family at age three, Aiden had got Conner a violin. They were poor though, so when Connor snapped the string with his bow one year later he had to abandon the craft. Another Christmas at age six. Cara got Conner a basketball. It was the first Christmas without her husband and his father. Conner would play with that basketball every day at the local YMCA. He came home, expecting to see his father, but no such luck. Day turned to night, every single day ing by, with his Patrick Ewing jersey getting smaller and smaller until it was the size of a sports bra. Age fourteen, she is at his middle school graduation. Conner es with flying colors and everything is on the up and up. Less than a year later he would be diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, seemingly crippling him in social circles. The loss of his father is hurting him worse and worse the more time es instead of healing him.

Age eighteen, Conner is off to college. Cara re being concerned, if anything she wants him to stay away from drugs, which will be in abundance. If Conner gets into cocaine it will be the final stage of becoming his father. Age twenty-two, Conner is becoming more and more frustrated with not getting a job. He throws plates at the wall and is beginning to cut himself. The cutting does not get deep enough, but there is blood. Age twenty-nine, Cara is fading from Alzheimer’s. Conner is in the throes of madness and pleads for him to get help. Cara is able to convince him though to see Dr. Kemba. Now Cara does not know what is happening. She could pinpoint every moment in her life at any moment, but she had never seen this moment before. She wondered if it was a daze she had been in during her crippling Alzheimer’s. It was Conner as an older man, he was g a book in a bookstore. He looked happy. It was almost too perfect. Once the blinding light faded Cara shouted aloud “Conner? Conner? Where are you Conner?” She saw nothing but blue. “Hello, is there anybody out there.” Suddenly, on her back, she felt a tingle. She maneuvered with her hand and felt around her back. Suddenly she was in agonizing pain. If she could fall to the floor she would, but there was nothing in this void. She was floating in terror when the lump on her back began to move up and down her spine. Then the tumors exploded out of her skin: wings, she was an angel now. She floated up toward the clouds, past the crescent moon, past Jupiter, Saturn, and finally out of our Solar System. The whole time there was a subtle playing of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” This brought back more memories of her time in Ireland, before Conner, before all this. And she felt content in this manner.

Chapter XXII

Goodbye

I have a gold Buddha statue I rub its belly for good luck But there’s another fool’s gold I’m chasing There’s nothing I want more than to hoist A statue of pure gold above my head I’m the king of the world You love me you really love me Maybe I’ll send an Indian to claim it Boos will rain down

I’ve fought through heaven and hell for this Goodbye Ruby Tuesday But it looks like there’s no luck this time I’d sell my soul to Satan himself 30 gold coins are all I’ll get I just want to stand on that stage before all the harlots

Fall off a horse eight times get up nine I keep going back to the well I’m the end of the rainbow standing at that podium But what will it be for? There is no doubt when I’m up there the waterworks will burst like a damned dam Though I’m not usually one for tears My life’s work is nothing to scoff at Or downplay with sarcasm Then I will exist stage left And another’s dream will be rewarded But it’s all a hopeless errand

My mother died a sad death, in her apartment alone with the radio on. I wish I had been there for her, but I was busy getting ready for the big move. I felt like I was so close to getting the condo in Florida for her too just a few months ago, where does the time go? Dying with Alzheimer’s I wonder if she knew death was coming, it came so fast. I at one point was lost in my mind, I could sympathize with her a bit. But to lose a lifetime of knowledge and experience practically over night, I don’t have a word to describe it. I wonder if it is genetic, and if it is then god keep me in the afterlife, fully cognizant. I woke up that morning of her death alone, turned on Star Trek, bingeing it because there was nothing else to do. Probably had seen it at least three times through. I thought at this moment what position would I hold on The Enterprise or the Death Star. I could never be the captain or an iral, just too much responsibility. And if I had learned one thing in the past year, or even since I was a kid it’s that I can’t handle responsibility. It’s my Kryptonite, it makes me sick.

I’m shocked I could even make it through being the regional manager of the southwest Comcast branch. Dating Karen for a year I wasn’t used to starting my morning routine like this, relaxed but lost in thought. I thought having a whole bed to myself would feel good, but it was so cold it was like an ice block. I had a fever and was sweating though the sheets. I never get physically sick so I wondered if this was an occasion to go to an outpatient facility. But that always seemed to be my problem, reacting too much; questioning things too much. Honestly I had to get these words on a page. Like Mr. Kemba says time and again writing is my best therapy. This is the conclusion I came to: I like to write, and I will continue doing it until the end of time. It’s what I’m good at. But I am going to need to take a break after this for a while. I wasn’t lying to Jim when I said I wanted to live a simpler life. I am fully on the mend and am excited to have my whole life ahead of me, but I need to slow down. But more importantly, I had the funeral to prepare for. It was going to be in three days. The coroner came that morning to take my mother. They had a tough time getting the stretcher up the narrow steps. I was terrified that they were going to drop her. I had to take the subway for what felt like a thousand times to go to the funeral home. And every time I was on the subway I thought about her. How bad a son I must have been to her? She wasted her whole life on me, I didn’t deserve her patience and love. Every time I welled up in tears on the subway I motioned like something was in my eye to deflect the gazes of my fellow riders, the classic move. Normally I had other things on my mind, when was the Jets game, when was the Knicks game? And I would have every right to be distracted by my move to San Antonio, a big life event. But I was only focused on my mother. I feel like I was only going to her when she was in the throes of death. Lying on that bed it was all I could think of, there was nothing else. I couldn’t her getting me that bike my father was against getting because New York was too dangerous to navigate. I can’t her taking me to my father’s funeral and walking me up to the open casket. All I could was her panting for air on her bed while Jon Sterling’s voice dinned on the old timey radio.

I had a meeting at the morgue beneath the funeral home about where the wake would be. First I needed to stop off to get some courage. Liquid courage: I was going to have one, and only one drink. No I said, going back and forth in my mind. The best way to honor my mother would be to quit drinking. I went in for a hoagie. I got a beef brisket with fries. It would have tasted divine to wash it down with an IPA. But I resisted the temptation. And as I got further and further away I felt more and more satisfied than if I had gotten buzzed. Going into the morgue downstairs and meeting the mortician was equally difficult. I saw my mother naked on a cold slab, although they only pulled back her head. My mother must have seen my father like this, I wonder what she thought seeing a beloved family member like this. “When would you like to schedule the wake?” “How soon can you have her ready?” I asked “The earliest is tomorrow.” “Sounds good, don’t put too much make up on.” I had to get out of there as soon as I can before I broke down in tears again. The next morning I was tempted to go all out for a full fifth of Jack like my father before his wedding. I hadn’t been so nervous in a long time. But I couldn’t a time when I haven’t numbed the anxiety, the pain, every fucked up part of my body with Mr. Booze. I tried exercise to get something like a runner’s high, I walked all the way to the funeral home. It was freezing, I thought I’d look like Han Solo by the time, but I had to get the juices flowing. When I got to the parlor, no one was there. I don’t know what I was expecting since my mother was confined to her apartment for the last phase of her life. But I was expecting someone! This was like the sellers in A Christmas Carol only coming to Scrooge’s funeral if lunch is provided. I went up to mother, nothing had changed since yesterday. Then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, I felt a breeze of my shoulder. I would have expected a cold chill normally since it was winter in New York. But I turned around I serendipitously saw my physics teacher from high school, the chair of the science department: Dr. Prince.

“Dr Prince, what are you doing here?” I went “I heard about your mother. My mother died in a similar way. I wanted to come and pay my respects.” He went up to the casket, made the sign of the cross, and came back to hug me. “I haven’t seen you in years! What are you up to these days?” he asked “I’m a writer.” I said very nonchalantly. He had such a deadpan expression I couldn’t tell if he was impressed or not “Wow! That’s very cool. What do you write?” he asked, suddenly vibrant and full of energy. “What don’t I write!” I forced out a chuckle. But it was no laughing matter for me. What have I written of substance after all that’s happened? Does this make my life meaningless? I wish I could say I could fall back on God, but I don’t feel its presence anymore. “To be honest though, writing is very difficult. I get stressed out sometimes that I can’t make anything substantial.” “Physics is a lot like that, coming up with things from scratch. In fact in many ways it’s harder than writing from scratch. At least when you get rolling the possibilities are endless, with physics you often bump up against other formulas that slow your work. Dr. Prince, who insisted I call him Bill, was a true savant in every way. He was a doctor at a hospital who delivered babies before going to work at the Rochester Institute of Technology, before settling down in the twilight of his career to teaching in the public sector. “There was a strategy from quantum physics called “The Tin Man Theory.” It’s too complicated to explain in full, but I felt like I was on the brink of a breakthrough. It was like something out of a bad television show: I was working twenty hours a day, double shifts at the institute, addicted to coffee. And I was stuck, made no progress whatsoever. At least if you sit down and type away at a keyboard you’ll get something out of it no matter how small.” It was about 6:45, brings back a lot of memories. I can cold winter

fires at our old house when I was a kid before my father died. I my father telling me on those icy nights when he first moved to New York City there were thirty arsons a day. I was lucky to only have to grow up during the end of the crack epidemic that plagued the city. I guess I’d call myself lucky because I love fire, burning it all down. If I had grown up during the arson epidemic I’d probably make it thirty one fires a day.” “Wanna smoke?” Dr. Price asked me. I don’t know how he could tell. My nicotine stained teeth maybe, I tried to keep my nasty habit a secret. I always felt when I got to his age I would quit before it was too late. He looked like he was pushing seventy so if he was smoking a pack a day, he might not have long left. I took the Marlboro Red and lit it and looked longingly in the eyes of my professor. He had lived a stable life it seemed, but did I want a stable life? If I did the time to start was now. I started with a dramatic question: “What’s the most incredible thing that ever happened to you?” I asked very abruptly, the conversation taking a drastic 180. “I delivered my two twin daughters personally. That’s something you like it was yesterday. I when there were complications, we had to go in with an emergency C-section, but ultimately that was the only thing wrong.” “I during school Mr. Patrick once talking about when his son was born it was like the sun rising…Can I tell you something? I know it sounds like I’m all over the place and this is going to sound like a bizarre tangent, but it’s something you need to know and that I need to get off my chest.” “Absolutely.” “I had a teacher before I came to high school here. He yelled at us every day. And I had crippling anxiety every day. I just wanted to thank you: even though I struggled in physics I’m glad you never lost your temper at us.” “When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I had a teacher like you did. He lost his temper with us every day: if we didn’t walk quietly to lunch, if we spoke out of turn, he had a conniption fit. But he took it one step beyond that. I ed the first time I got beaten, it was stuck in my head for months and I felt like complete shit. I thought at the time with Ted Bundy and Vietnam and the Oil Crisis that the 70’s was truly a terrible time to grow up in. Then my father who fought in the Second World War, thought Kennedy was the antichrist and all

that, thought the same thing. And his father fought in the muck of World War I and he came to say the worst was behind us and all that jazz. “They probably had a duty to serve their country, or at least giving meaning to their lives. “That’s not the point I’m trying to get across. I guess if I’m trying to convey something to you in my own way it’s that it gets better in the end.” “It gets better in the end?” I felt this almost as another slap in the face. What is that supposed to mean? “When you die you go to heaven? I’ll only be happy if I have children?” I almost started stammering ‘What? What is it? What’s the key?!” “I used to be like you. I worked my ass off trying to make a name for myself, but I wasn’t happy. All that work and for nothing. I understand more than you can probably ever know trying to get meaning out of life. But sometimes there are no explanations, and I certainly don’t have them all.” Dr. Prince sighed and began gesturing more and more with his hands, as if he were reaching something out in the great beyond. “I had to take it easier on myself. That’s why I took a lower scale job. More intimate and all that. I get to spend more time with my family. And I also love to see nothing more in life than my students succeed.” “Then you must be really unhappy with me, huh?” “No, no I am so proud of you. I envy where you are in this point in your life. When I was growing up in the 1970’s, I wanted to be a big-time movie director. And if there was a time to do it, it was the 70’s. People were just dropping out of college and going their own way. I one night went to see The Godfather Part II, a three-and-a-half-hour movie. I felt like going to an Italian bistro and getting a glass of red wine. But it ended up being something much more than that. My buddies who saw the flick with me decided to go to Studio 54.” I almost had to stop him right there and asked if he went with my father. I hanged my head. “I knew in high school you were dealing with some underlying mental issues.” He continued “I could tell with your headaches you had and having to go to the nurse’s office all the time something was wrong. But you decided to take care of yourself. You’ve come a long way in a short time dealing with your illness. I lost my father to cancer, your father was gone too when you were a kid, I know that.”

I don’t know why he was trying so hard. He seemed to be in his element, after decades of giving motivational speeches to thousands of students. He seemed to have honed the craft. He was the one to pivot the conversation this time “You’re a big movie buff right: Let me try this: I once read the writings of Bruce Lee. His martial arts films were huge when I was growing up. He explored the idea of yin and yang as a divisive push and pull of the universe. When things went too far one way, they would return to their balance. What you accomplish has little bearing on the yin and yang of the universe. Be like water, flow with the ways of life.” I pictured the stream at the Brooklyn Bridge again, not too far off… “Eastern philosophical jibber-jabber.” I began shaking, possibly from frustration at the universe, possibly because I hadn’t had a drink since yesterday, and possibly since it was freezing cold. “Conner,” he put out his hands, almost going in to shake me out of my entrenched beliefs. He didn’t have an answer to my fatalism though and simply said “Let’s go say goodbye to your mom.” He stopped me cold in my tracks “Conner, you’re shaking!” “Must be cold.” We finished our cigarettes and moved to the parlor inside. It was almost time for me to say a few words. Mr. Prince sat down, it was only me and him. I went up to the casket and kissed my mother on the forehead. I took out a speech I had written on that cold, snowbound day in early January. I decided to fold it and put it in my blazer pocket. A new season, and a time to make new amends. Time to do what I do best, wing it. “I could tell you all about how my father and mother grew up in Belfast during the Troubles. How they met on the opposite sides of the tracks. I could tell you how my father died when I was six years old. I could tell you about all my troubles. But we’re not here to talk about that. The only thing that matters today is what a strong and loving woman and mother Cara O’Brien was. She wasn’t the kind of mother to spoil me rotten, and I am grateful for that. She was born from humble beginnings and wanted the same for her child. And if I had children I would follow her example.

I every year going to Yankee Stadium with my mother, her one splurge of me. We all know the Yankees are a staple of New York life, and I think this was her way of wanting to indulge me in a healthy manner. Or maybe she wanted me to know nothing of the terrors of the Troubles she went through as a child. I may not have been a parent or may yet never be a parent, but I know that every parent wants better for their child then what they had. 8th grade was an especially difficult time for me, but she was there for me. Then after college she was there for me when I couldn’t find a job. So when this beautiful soul was struck with the most deadly of diseases, Alzheimer’s, it was my turn to be there for her. And I wasn’t. I was too busy focusing on other things. Looking out on the horizon and never where I was. Where I needed to be, taking care of her and not being selfish for once in my life. I hope she can look down on me, smiling. That I may have turned out to be a functional, stable adult, and in that knowledge she can rest in peace. There I sat together with my former physics teacher for an eternity, basking in the moment. I saw the American flag horizontally zipping just below the full moon outside above my mother’s casket. I sat and watched my mother for the last time with someone who reached out to me in my time of need, and I can tell you in that moment I’ve never felt the peace I needed, wanted, and begged to get before. Sitting there I finally received what I could only guess was the best that god would allow me to have. It felt like going back close to the beginning, at a time my teachers didn’t yell at me, things like basketball were great forms of relaxation, and the most I had to worry about was my studies. Judge me through these memoirs all you want but I will ignore all criticisms. The reminiscence ends now; that’s the best you’re going to get.