At the Airport

I picked up my granddaughter at the airport yesterday. After two months traveling through Chad I’d hoped she’d come back changed in some way, more evolved, but the same little punk-rock moppet disembarked the plane looking and acting exactly like herself. I figured she’d endure hardships in Africa and would at least stop cutting her arms but she met me with fresh, scabby slices on her left arm. I noticed she had a new nose-piercing and I worried about infectious diseases (my image of Africa is rife with stereotypical clichés of misery, poverty and puddle-water brimming with exotic illnesses). I’ve never been to Chad and have not researched it. As far as I know it’s as cold and antiseptic as Finland (another country I know nothing about except that they have a rather high rate of suicide).

     My granddaughter’s name is Tiana (for some reason) and she’s eighteen and swears like a porn star. I inherited custody after her mother (my daughter) died of a heroin overdose two years ago. Tiana was the one who found her, two days decayed with a needle sticking out of her leg and dried blood crusted around her mouth. The flies had found her. I can’t imagine the kind of roaring psychological disturbance witnessing such a horror would cause, but little (4’11”) Tiana has still not exhibited anger or despair over the loss of her mother (or the hellish tableau that had confronted her). She seemed to greet it with relief. Being raised by a junkie, I don’t know, it must deform you in some invisible, intractable way. She learned to wear emotional chain mail a long time ago. I love Tiana dearly but I worry about her psyche. Maybe she’s just a lot stronger than me.

     Or maybe she’s waiting to explode.

    “So, how was Africa?” I asked her as we made our way across the terminal, lugging her baggage.

     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Okay I guess.”

     “Okay I guess? You just spent two months in Africa. Can’t you do any better than that?”

     “What do you want me to say? It was beautiful? It wasn’t. It was intense? It ain’t. I don’t know what you want from me.”

     “A good, precise adjective, please.”

    “It was fucking lame. It was fucking boring.”

     “That’s better,” I said, rolling my eyes. We carried her bags out the automatic doors and walked into the parking lot.

     “Are you hungry?” I asked her. “Want to grab something to eat before we go home?”

     “God yes. The food in Chad was awful. I think I lost twelve pounds.”

     “What was it like?”

     “Bland.”

     “M-hm. So, what are you in the mood for?”

    “Ramen noodles, Doritos, Slim Jims and grape soda.”

     “Are you kidding me?”

    “I’ve been thinking about eating that meal for weeks.”

     “Okay, kiddo. Whatever you want.”

     “Cool.”

     And as we made our way to the car I couldn’t help thinking how unlike her mother she was (which is probably a good thing).

Scrambled Eggs

Photograph taken at the Big Event yesterday with legendary artist Lisa Carver and stellar magician Jonas Ignatius Cain. I'm the dissipated-looking fellow in the FedEx uniform trying my best to turn invisible. The strange but rewarding day felt like Styrofoam dissolving in nail-polish remover. Tufts of angel hair pasta under the roar of whirling lawnmower blades. The tragic madness of a scream in a burn ward, and so forth...

 

Everyone Seems Distorted

The last time I was at the barber shop I found an old Men’s Daring magazine from the early 60’s. It was buried under the golfing magazines. I wondered what it was doing there. Inside was an article called How to Sin like Errol Flynn but I didn’t have time to read it before my haircut was ready.

I made a loaf of bread and mixed shards of glass into the dough. Once baked, I placed it on a bread board next to a serrated knife. I tell no one what I’ve done. No one would guess that eating the bread might be deadly. I like having something secret and dangerous in the kitchen.

The little boy was blind and his grandmother led him across the parking lot by repeating the sound woo-hoo! as they walked. It took them seven woo-hoo’s to get to the car.

Josh listens to very pessimistic music. All the songs are about how there’s no hope and we’re all doomed. “The lyrics aren’t what’s important,” he says. “It’s the beat...”

A Public Appearance

I will be appearing at the Holland Public Library on September fifth in support of Lisa Carver's 25 Lives. There will be a magic show and then I will do my Grady Sutton impersonation. Things begin at noon.

 Go here:

Holland Public Library
23 Sturbridge Road
Holland, MA 01521

Confessions of a Hallucinating Patient No. 1

The convex mirror above my hospital bed had become a giant eye that reflected a hidden, bipartite universe. Behind it, backwards manifestations of unearthly beings slithered and grew. Silently. Slowly. Gathering. Moving with the steady invisible advance of a minute hand. Time was freezing. Closer. Clearer. Moving like a glacier. A grotesque, aberrant emergence. And when they were close enough to touch me with their squirming, fluctuating tendrils, I turned around...

     And there was nothing there. The room was empty.

     So I rang for the nurse and gave her a hard time.

25 Lives

25 Lives by Lisa Carver 

I'm one of the twenty-five people that were interviewed for this book. 

I talk about cancer, drinking and suicide.

Cheers!

Feast your Eyes! Glut your Soul!

Your humble reprobate

Sketch by Lisa Carver

Jughead

When I was a kid, my friend Tommy told me he had over two hundred comic books. I went over to his house to check it out. They were all the same issue of Jughead.

EASTER EGGS IN JULY

Found an old Paas Easter egg coloring kit while cleaning out my kitchen cupboards. I figured, what the hell and spent the day coloring a dozen eggs. It was a lot of work and now I have to make egg salad or something.

Harpo and the Doghouse Tattoo

Working on another collection of stories. Tentative title: Leaves from the Smorgasbord. Watch this space for details.

 Mustard Play

Another Positive Review!

Read it Here!

Two of My Books Discussed!

Right Here!

Excerpt from My "Slop" Novel, "Anosognosia"

It started with the worms. But not really. I’d been drinking relentlessly (religiously) leading up to my Big Psychiatric Appointment and my reflection looked like a scream in a movie theater. I’d switched from Steel Reserve to a cheap boxed wine called White Burble. I hadn’t eaten anything more than a few pistachio nuts in five days. I surrendered to morbid fantasies of lynching myself (even going so far as to hang a necktie noose from my closet clothesrack), or suffocating myself with Glad Wrap or buying a cheap box of helium from iParty and poisoning my lungs with funny Mickey Mouse gas.

     I prayed for the cancer to return. No surgery, no chemotherapy this time. I would nurse the little black cells like a protective mother with a fragile child.

     My first meeting with the psychiatrist and I was already an emergency.

     It was warm when I set out toward Evergreen Mental Health Services. The sky was bright, cloudless and intense. A sky so blue I wanted to shoot holes in it. Assault the environment. My head was filled with a loud, thirsty crowd, screaming, screaming like angry villagers in a Frankenstein movie...

     I began my weary, Don Birnam[1] trudge feeling every agonized stride like a new wound. Every footstep carried the threat of imminent death. My liver hurt. Two miles stretched ahead of me like Death Valley. After five minutes of walking I knew I was doomed. I considered turning back and cancelling the appointment but then what? Drink more wine and get sicker? I’d reached the end of another rope. I needed help, stat. My desperation both clung to me and tumbled from me like a parasitic twin with a disease.

     Outside the puzzling young woman’s apartment, by the steps there, I noticed a dried-out half-a-mouse (the hindquarters) a spent condom and a bent spoon. More pieces to the puzzle.

     A sudden sandstorm whirled, blinding and granular, into my mind and I had to stop and close my eyes a few seconds for fear of fainting. My mouth had gone dry. My tongue tasted (probably) like the dead half-mouse at my feet.

     I can’t do this.

     (All you have to do is get there).

     I kept walking, forcing my weakened, burdensome organs forward. Sweat started. I wished for a handkerchief so I could mop my brow like Louis Armstrong after a taxing solo. Instead, I brushed the sweat from my forehead into my (already oily) hair, pasting it back. I wished for a pair of sunglasses. The sun was so assaultive I could feel cataracts developing over my eyes like lenses of milk. All of my internal personae are weak and desperate. There’s nothing to hang onto. Clark Kent turns into another Clark Kent. Nothing under the business suit but flabby flesh weakened by kidneystones of Kryptonite.

     And then I had a seizure and fell into the street, right in the path of a huge, lumbering truck...

     Just kidding.

---

[1] The besotted main character in The Lost Weekend (1945).