Category: Creative Writing
Will I Ever Become a Man?
He taught me so much, and I don’t even know his name. All I remember is that it was a sunny, hot afternoon at Heritage Square. H- and I had been pounding the pavement and riding the rides all morning. It was time for a break. We headed to the grill area.
There happened to be a vintage motorcycle show on the same grounds as the theme park that day. As expected, there were plenty of leather vests, bandannas, and unkempt beards. Wearing a black leather vest over a black t-shirt and sporting a very unkempt beard, my average sized soon-to-be mentor was even missing a tooth. I can still see the gap now. Yellow, yellow, yellow, black, yellow, yellow, yellow. I also remember that the remaining teeth on his mandible were strikingly tall and thin for some reason.
But what really made him stand out was the rather long sentence that was typed in white font on his black shirt. As usual, I noticed “fuck” before any of the other words. I became simultaneously terrified and curious. What kind of randomly long t-shirt slogan contained the eff bomb? His vest, which cut off the first and last letters of each of the three rows, did not make the task any easier. Attempting not to stare, after several volleys, I finally made out: “Off is the general direction in which I wish you would fuck.”
“So, H-, what would you like for lunch? They have grilled cheese. Do you want grilled cheese?” I queried, the shrinking line forcing the discussion.
“I don’t want a grilled cheese. I want a hot dog.”
“We’re having hot dogs tonight, so it’s gotta be a grilled cheese. Well, I guess there is also chicken fingers, or a corn dog.”
“Corn dog?”
“Yeah, it’s a hot dog wrapped in corn bread. Is that what you want?” I asked, devastated that she found a loophole to my no-hot-dog reasoning.
“I think I want a corn dog. No, I want a grilled cheese.”
“Good.”
Only one more customer to go, I noticed that they had some beer bottles on display, in addition to the typical beverages I’d come to expect. Not just beer, they also had three flavors of delicious Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Debating for longer than I’d like to admit, I decided to stick with soda. I really wanted a Mike’s, and figured just one wouldn’t be weird or inappropriate on a nice afternoon of riding roller coasters with my daughter, but I couldn’t do it. I genuinely feared what the biker behind me was going to think of me for buying a Mike’s. Not knowing anything more than any of us about the guy, I was afraid because I knew that if I was him, I would loose a smart-ass comment on the strange man in front of me whose t-shirt didn’t have the eff-bomb on it and then bought a Mike’s. So I stuck with the combo meal that came with a soft drink.
Even knowing that there was only one line was not enough to prevent me from nearly breaking my neck as I turned to confirm what my ears reported next.
“Will that be all?” I heard the cashier say, as I saw her hand the biker a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Eating Cereal Quietly
“So, George, remind me again what you were telling me last night?” Pete asked upon returning to the kitchen after setting H- up with cereal. “Other things I was doing at the time caused me to miss the significance of the meeting being one-on-one, but I think I get it now. You said you had a one-on-one meeting with your boss and that he asked for your opinion on how your performance should be measured.”
“That’s right. I asked him if he wanted to know how I thought I should be measured, or if he wanted to know how I thought I was being measured.”
“Which was it?”
“He said he wanted to know how I thought I should be measured.”
“And you said that you think your performance should be measured on the quality of your work, but he said that he was going to measure you on the duration of your work?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Pete responded in disbelief, “that’s totally inverse. The goal should always be to get more done in less time–not just to work longer.”
“Pete–I know.”
“So what happened next?”
“He told me that to achieve an excellent on my review next time that I will need to work nights and weekends.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him that I wouldn’t be aiming for an excellent then.”
“Ha.”
George opened the door to leave for work and paused, saying, “You don’t know how close I was to asking him, ‘Do you want to be a soul crusher?'”
“Ha.”
As always, the crack of the wooden blinds against the door signaled George was off to work. Pete then turned to H- who was all the while quietly finishing her cereal.
“Are you a soul crusher H-?” he asked her, using extended, slightly squinted eye-contact to signal playfulness. “I know I don’t want to be a soul crusher. I want to be a soul creator, a soul grower,” he reported, increasing the melodrama with the repetition in an effort to summon a response from the speechless little girl.
With her familiar, lovable earnestness and attentiveness H- responded, “I’m still growing.”
It Took Fourteen Days
It took fourteen twelve-plus hour days, but on his last day before going home, his co-workers bore witness to a sight generally reserved for Pete’s closest relations.
Pete could only shake his head and smile after it happened. Only moments before, he actually felt like he was getting the hang of the job. He was almost able to anticipate the tasks, and he was receiving more and more responsibility. But he should have known he couldn’t hide them forever.
“Peter! What are you doing with your lips?” called the driller from inside the doghouse. The doghouse was a climate-controlled reasonably clean enclosure on the rig where the men who performed the drilling accomplished their work. They had a full view of the rig floor and the derrick, and were responsible for every aspect of the operation, including everyone’s safety. This meant that they scrutinized the floorhands as they, in turn, handled the lethally heavy pipe and machinery.
It was during this scrutiny that they noticed Pete’s lips doing their thing.
“Fart!” muttered Pete. He looked up smiling. He knew exactly what they just saw and while slightly embarrassed, was proud to be among men who were so direct.
Pete himself only became aware of his unconscious lip movements during a night of intense foosball competition in highschool. But little by little, anyone who had a chance to watch him focus on a task was rewarded with an uncommon sight. One only has to picture Mr. Ed (the talking horse) as he cleaned the peanut butter from his gums to get an idea of what they saw. As for Pete, his bottom lip attracted and held the attention, what with its size and agility. But just when it seemed like the performance would be a solo, his top lip took over. Then his bottom lip would jump in on the action once again.
Then, upon discovery–like any unsanctioned contest–the fleshy duel between these kissers inevitably ended. Distancing themselves from each other, the two fighters revealed a set of great teeth that crowned a widening smile. No victor was ever declared. None was ever called for. Everyone knew the money was in the rematch anyhow.
Waking Up
“What are you doing here?” Jim asked, immediately realizing there was only one reason the director would be there to greet him at his bedside. Tara was dead.
“Jim, Tara’s dead. I’m sorry for that,” Frank said. “Your hands were your fault, however.”
“Jesus Frank! Don’t you have any compassion. The man is barely awake and you’re nearly attacking him,” said Jason.
“I don’t care how long he’s been awake for. I’m not attacking him, he attacked me, remember?” Turning back towards Jim, he continued, “You broke my nose asshole.” Frank had a bandage over his nose. Jim also noticed that Frank was self-conscious of his inability to speak clearly. Looking more closely, Jim could see the cause of the difficulty. Frank had to be careful when he spoke or else parts of his lips would unnaturally flap out into view. Jim’s capacity to fly into a rage would not be soon forgotten.
“What about my hands?” asked Jim, confused by both the gulf between Frank and Jason’s attitudes and the medication that was still in his system. He had been so distracted by the implications of Frank’s presence that he totally forgot what caused him to be in the hospital in the first place. Looking down, he saw, in place of his hands, two stumps that were wrapped in white gauze. He was amazed at how sharply the perpendicular lines that gave texture to the gauze stood out, and not surprised to see the classically blood-stained red ends. Then he threw up. Then he passed out.
Jason glared at Frank as two attractive nurses quickly cleaned up Jim’s mess and re-positioned his body. All the many medical monitors indicated Jim was fine, just fast asleep.
Over the year’s Jason had seen a resigned person or two. But he had never seen anything like the look on Frank’s face. Frank looked Jason in the eye one last time, as if to demonstrate he believed words were not useful or necessary, then he turned and walked away. Frank and Jim were never seen in the same room again. And all Jason could do was wait. So he waited.
Tara
He noticed the mask that was over his mouth and nose didn’t seal perfectly. Upon pointing this out to the bedside nurses, he was told, “Just breathe normally.”
He inhaled deeply before realizing that that wasn’t a normal breath. Then he exhaled and tried to think of something besides breathing. He thought about Tara. He wondered if she was dead or alive. He tried to remember first meeting her. It was one of his favorite days.
“Can you believe those guys?” he remembered her saying on the day they met as she stormed into the room after a shift in the containment pod. Her head fully forward, her finger pointing back to the door, a look of disgust covered her face. “They’re acting like this is a joke. One of these days they’re going to get us all killed.”
“What is that little bit of hair called that falls on a woman’s face again?” he tried to remember, the sleeping gas beginning to work. “A tendril. That’s it.”
A tendril had unintentionally dropped from her pony tail as she took off her helmet and oxygen mask that day. He was a sucker for tendrils. When he noticed that she had some fire in her to boot, he became weak in the knees. He would never forget her first words to him.
“And what the fuck are you staring at asshole?”
She asked him that question, she later told him, because he failed to heed her nonverbal social cues that told everyone that while she was used to being ogled, she was not in the mood at the moment.
Jim laid there, waiting for sleep and thought about women. For him, a woman needed to be so much more than a pretty face or a fit body. Like any man, he knew his preferences for exterior qualities, but unlike any man, he could also list all the internal qualities a woman should aspire to have. At the top of his list was a backbone. Tara clearly had one. Number two was a passion for living. He needed a woman to love all the nuances of life as much as he did. He needed her to fight for life. The gas taking effect, he chuckled at his word choice. “Fight for life. Yeah, that’s my girl,” he mumbled. “You better be fighting now woman. You can’t fly yet,” he said, only noticing the slip-up as it entered his ears. “Of course you can’t fly. No one can fly,” he said, laughing at his own joke. Then with a forced seriousness, he said, “People can die though. But not you. You can’t die yet,” he ordered, the last “t” not quite being enunciated. Finally succumbing to the anesthetic, his body was ready for the amputations.
I’ve Had More Fun – Part 2
Jim pounded more slowly now. The endorphins were wearing off, and his hands finally began to hurt.
He couldn’t stop watching her–watching them–lay there, likely dead. His tears ran dry and his wail fell silent as he let his forehead come to rest on the bloody glass. He shut his eyes and hoped to wake up from a nightmare. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to see the pink cloud rapidly ascending to towards the ceiling and then towards the two vents that were specifically designed to be used if there was a mishap. Not entirely the same as waking from a nightmare (though a close second), he saw the light over the door turn green and heard the familiar click of the door unlocking. Not waiting for anyone or anything to stop him, he opened the door and rushed to where Tara lay.
He reached for her suit and in touching it, he collapsed in immobilizing pain. The chemical agent was out of the air, but not out of the suit, it seemed. He kind of wished he hadn’t destroyed his hands as he stared up at the ceiling, becoming the sixth victim of the mishap. What can only be described as the friendliest looking firemen imaginable suddenly appeared. To Jim, who laid there in agonizing pain, they looked like a cross between his childhood mother and Kurt Russell from Backdraft, shaky cheeks and all. Jim counted at least fifteen of them as he was lifted onto a gurney and rolled from the room.
The last thing he saw as they wheeled him away from the danger was the glove-wearing rescuers cutting Tara and the others out of their protective suits.
I’ve Had More Fun
“I’ve had more fun in my life,” she said, attempting to rise from the prone position in her XB-2134 chem-warfare suit. She understood why it had to be so heavy, but at the moment, she couldn’t believe they never trained for this. She was on her back and knew she couldn’t sit up. That meant she needed to roll over. The trouble was that the arms of the suit were so heavy that the designers built into the suit a feature which took some of the weight off of the wearer’s shoulders. The feature prevented the arms from lowering past 45 degrees. In effect, they were sticking out, both to the side and front. Through her helmet’s face shield, she could only see a slight cloud of pink smoke thickening and the ceiling. “No more effing around, Tara, you have to get out of here,” she told herself.
Up until she found herself on her back, she had been working on a new chemical weapon and been payed very well to do so. Rocking back and forth, back and forth, she finally made it to her stomach. She was on her stomach, arms extended over her head. “I’m not sure this is any better,” she thought. For the first time since she was knocked off her feet she felt a pang of fear. And now on her stomach she couldn’t see anything but the floor. It was smooth cement. She had never really looked at the floor before. It reminded her of the skating rink where she used to play roller hockey with her brothers.
Deciding that perhaps her side was a better position to start from, she rocked and rocked some more, gaining more and more momentum. She did it. She made it to her right side and was able to use her extended right arm to keep her from rolling back on her stomach. It was then that she noticed no one had said anything over the suits comm system since she woke up. Scanning the room from her new vantage point, she saw her four co-workers struggling to stand back up just as she was. There was no noise beside her own breathing. And the pink cloud was not only thick now, but starting to attack the suit.
“Jim! Jim, do you read me?” she shouted, hoping that anyone listening could hear her distress. She realized what part of the room she was looking at, and quickly decided to at least turn towards the containing door, with its one small window. She had to rotate clockwise about her right shoulder or else she’d end up back on her stomach. Feeling as foolish as she imagined she looked, she began to make progress. But not faster than the pink cloud. As she began to make out the hinge to the door, the chemical came nearer and nearer to eating a hole in her suit.
“Help! Anybody!” she screamed, totally aware of what was coming. She kicked her feet harder and harder.
Outside the door, Jim’s hands bled. It wasn’t until they smashed against the program director’s teeth over and over again that he even became aware of the blood. But now that he heard the squishy sound of pummeled flesh smacking against an immovable object, he realized the deep red substance that obscured the window he watched her through was his own blood. He frantically tried to wipe the blood away with his fingers. Making little progress, he saw Tara and the others speed up their movements the way ants walk faster on a frying pan over a flame. Then, just like the ants, everyone stopped moving at the exact same time. Everyone except Jim.
Caught!
“Heyyyy!” said H-, her head rotating up in order to look him in the eyes. Slowly peering into his soul, she couldn’t stop her bottom lip from quivering. Her face flushed red, and she loosed a single, crippling tear. “Why did you do that? Why did you take off my band-aid?”
“H-, come on now. You saw that it was already starting to come off on its own. How long had it been on for anyhow? Two days? You didn’t even have a bleeding oww-ee,” he said, meeting her eye-contact and rubbing her shoulder. “Plus, I keep telling you that band-aids aren’t stickers-”
“Look! It’s red. Can I have a band-aid to put on it?” she asked, her tone revealing that she believed she had presented sound reasoning.
“No, H-, you cannot have a band-aid to cover the mark left by leaving the last band-aid on for too long,” he winced. “Can we stop talking about band-aids for the rest of the night at least? Please?” he asked, appealing to her well-developed sense of give-and-take.
“Okay. But tomorrow morning I want another adult band-aid,” she asserted, her persistence approaching a level generally reserved for the possessed children in career-making horror classics.
“We’ll see. For now, let’s get back to bed so we can continue reading about King Aaathuh,” he said.
****
“Daa-ddy! Daa-ddy!” sounded his own personal alarm clock exactly twenty minutes early.
Climbing out of his bed, he opened her door and let her know that it wasn’t quite time to get up yet.
“Can I play quietly for a little bit?” she offered.
“Sure. I just need twenty more minutes,” he said.
Only a minute passing until guilt overcame him, he reappeared in the living room, much to her surprise.
“I’m going to rest a little out here while you play,” he informed her.
“Rest a little?”
“Yeah, rest a little. Here on the couch. It’s not time to get up yet, but when my phone goes off, I will. You can play though.”
“Okay.”
No sooner than he had closed his eyes, he heard her walking towards the bathroom. Eyes still closed, he asked, “H-? Where are you going?”
The entire essence of her being still moving forward, her corporeal body came to a halt. He opened his eyes just in time to see an empty face betray that all available energy was being redirected into deciding how best to play this one out. No less sudden than when light vanquishes darkness, her widening eyes and resultant raised eyebrows signaled that she had made her decision. Turning towards him, she slowly nodded her head in the vertical plane, raised her index finger, and casually informed him, “I’m just going to get one band-aid.”
Winn the Great, Redux
“Of course he’s a doctor. Of course,” Pete thought to himself, the online search result’s reflection illuminating his glass’s lenses. As he thought back to first meeting Winn, now Dr. Winn, all those years ago, shame overwhelmed him. The poor kid had done nothing wrong, unless taking an elective math class two years earlier than normal was a sin.
He remembered seeing Winn sitting alone on the first day of statistics class. An elective, the class’s description and teacher only seduced enough students to fill just over half the seats. This made it all the more easy for the band of underachieving smart-ass seniors to gain the strength numbers offer so readily. More than in response to the layout of the room, though, these students acted in response to the primal fear of the unknown, a fear provoked by a spindly limbed, one-size-too-big-t-shirt wearing, buzz-cut sporting, wire-rimmed-glasses-at-the-time-of-contacts bearing pasty white kid who didn’t seem even remotely aware that he would always have the upper hand. He would always have the upper hand not because of his intelligence, though his brain always operated near-capacity notwithstanding it originated from a culture infatuated with lowering standards, no. It was because he was free. Free from posturing, free from politicking, free from maneuvering. While everyone around him struggled to fit in, he simply stayed the course. He embodied Mark Twain’s “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
Despite having to display his driver’s license to prove the spelling of his name to the groupthink, Winn never lowered himself to counter-attack. And his focus never faltered. Almost a machine, one day he was tasked by the seniors to further elucidate a particular problem’s solution. He approached the chalkboard as if unaware that public math was never good math, and proceeded to slowly draw a for-all-intents-and-purposes perfect circle with the chalk. The display silenced everyone, until the sound of two palms rapidly and repeatedly coming together overwhelmed the smack that accompanies jaws quickly dropping.
The highlight of that semester, however, came when Winn surprised everyone, including Mrs. Tietz, with a piece of mail. Antagonistic, he was not. Yet, when the opportunity came to prove that Nielsen ratings did not come from set families as she thought, but instead from invited and bribed self-reporting as Pete knew, Winn took the side of the truth. And in presenting the envelope, dollar bill still packaged within, he not only climbed the social ladder, but advanced hope. Long live Winn!
Winn the Great
A kid who could draw a perfect circle free-hand on a chalkboard deserved better. But we were bad and he was good, so he pulled it out for everyone to see.
Holding his driver’s license in his right hand, he said, “See. Told ya.”
Winn’s problem was not so much his weird first name, but talent. He had too much of it. As only a sophomore, there he sat in our senior level math class. This was high school. Applying oneself was never a good idea. I often wondered how many of us really saw how special Winn was. And I envied Winn for his patience with us, with the morons. But that didn’t stop me from seeing only a nerd.
The teacher, Mrs. Tietz, naturally defended him from any attacks. Little did she realize that rather than protecting him, her efforts only further marked the target.
This was a lady who publicly professed that using Rain-X eliminated the need to turn on windshield wipers while driving in the rain, a lady who believed the Nielsen ratings were gathered by specific families with special boxes hooked up to their TV sets which automatically recorded which stations were being watched.
How did we know these things about her? Because she didn’t like us any more than we liked her. And one day, for some appropriate reason I’m sure, I volunteered to the class that years earlier I had used the time my family got to submit our watching habits to help tilt the scales away from Rosie O’Donnell and towards Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series. After all, Nielsen would never know the difference. They just trusted that one dollar would acquire honest reporting.
Mrs. Tietz wouldn’t budge. Believing me to be a liar, she maintained that there really were specific “Nielsen Families”. To this day, I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe he didn’t like her, either. If push came to shove and I had to guess, I’d say that he did it because he was noble. He was righteous, in the purest sense of the word. So later that semester, when his family happened to be mailed the paperwork and accompanying one dollar bill, he brought it in to class the next day. And in doing so, he redeemed not only me, but hope. Long live Winn!
Captain’s Log 