When in the company of a pot-smoking, Nixon-voting veteran who is drop dead certain to the point of egregious elocution that global warming is a good and beneficial happening for humanity, stick a sharp fork in his foot, as to keep the man from wandering off into the cold and lonely countryside. I have encountered one of these creatures I write of. He is a tender one and should be approached with both care and a soft sense of humor.

Bat invested four grand years of his youth in Vietnam. At least, that is the way he speaks of the war. A war that was never truly a “war.” Beyond it, he has lived a fine life, employed at times as playwright, a deep-sea diver, a honky-tonk guitarist, and a chef of Italian cuisine. Living most of his years between Kerrville and San Marcos, many of Bat’s friends have moved on or died from sudden and sad events. Most notably, a younger girl called Betty, who was struck down by a Ford pick-up at a crosswalk. I believe Betty may have been much more than Bat’s last friend; I believe she was his last lover.

Bat comes down from the Texan hillside to San Antonio every Tuesday and Thursday to teach at one of the local universities. He despises teaching because the youth of today “just don’t get it”, but he claims he needs a way to make a living. I know this, because I share an office with this man. His desk is decorated with pictures of Kinky Friedman, the Jewish cowboy who took a stab at being the next govern-guy of Texas, and South Park characters holding guns. He hates John Kerry, loves dried apricots, and snores when he falls to sleep in the middle of the day. At first glance Bat is a cartoon, too weird to walk the earth, too obvious to breath.

Always looking for someone to talk to, someone to tell war stories to, someone to tell what’s-what, Bat took a shinning to me quickly and without reservation. He invited me over to his casa for breakfast tacos and drinking binges, neither of which sounded terribly appealing to me. But then he offered one invitation I couldn’t refuse: attending a gun show. I jumped at the chance. This is Americana. This is Texas. And who better to be my guide?

“I’ll drive,” I said.

When visiting Bat’s smallish one-bedroom apartment, one encounters several guns. An AK-47. A Browning .45. A .357. Spots and specks of other materials litter an otherwise modest apartment. A Julianne Moore film on top of the television. A framed painting of a cartoon duck over the fireplace. Diplomas on the wall from South Western Louisiana State and the University of Texas, Pan American. A molding spaghetti squash on the roof of a rusted refrigerator. Bat’s computer monitor features saltwater fish swimming from left to right to save the screen. He has two soft chairs my grandmother would adore. For a man who can make a ton of noise, Bat lives in soft tranquility.

The gun show was at the San Antonio International Airport Convention Center, which looks like an overgrown gymnasium. The Center was crawling with pale men, who spoke politely and welcomed me to my first firearm affair. These men sold rifles from England, France, Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. I wrapped my fingers around an old Derringer, and pointed a Nazi Lugar at a wooden target. Bat never stopped talking.

“This was for desert warfare.”

“This one can shoot 3,000 feet.”

He darted in and out of the crowd like a caffeinated greyhound. These weren’t men with guns, they were children with toys. And they were restful with that.

Waiting in line for turkey jerky, Bat told me he had made an attempt to re-enter the military. He wants to see Iraq. He wants to see a war just one last time before he hangs it all up. I don’t understand why, and I believe that to be a good thing. At the gun show, we stopped at the fatigue stand across from a collection of velvet Ronald Reagan paintings. Bat caressed a desert tan uniform with his right thumb and softly said, “Hopefully I will be gettin’ one of these soon.” For all his queerness, Bat is a melancholy modern man. And he is relevant to this America.

As we walked to my truck it began to storm. Rain sat in Bat’s mustache like teardrops. On the ride home we talked about movies I’ve seen, like Full Metal Jacket and Jarhead, and about how human the soldiers in those stories are. Not humane, human. Bat said, “You don’t realize. In a war zone, the air changes.” Then he thanked me for being his friend and coming with him to the gun show. If I had a fork, I would’ve jabbed his foot down, so he couldn’t leave me.

In 1950, Lillian Ross published a profile of Ernest Hemingway in the New Yorker. The story was remarkable largely because it did not strive to be remarkable. Hemingway was an international celebrity, and needed very little introduction. Ross chose, therefore, to follow him around New York for three days, taking careful notes. The action of the article is minimal, limited really to conversations between Hemingway and various characters—including Marlene Dietrich—holding court in a suite at the Ritz Carlton, at Abercrombie & Fitch, where Hemingway went reluctantly to buy a coat and underwear, and finally, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In September, while trying to devise some idea for an article for this magazine, I recalled the playwright, David Largman Murray, whose play, Robots vs. Fake Robots, I’d seen in February in Santa Monica. Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of Ron Howard, had attended the final performance in March, had found the show rather intriguing, and at some point during the summer had optioned the play for film. I considered this development sufficiently intriguing to merit a story, and I drove down to Los Angeles, accompanied by a group of friends, to conduct some sort of interview with David.

We arrived late on a Friday evening to David’s apartment, which he shares with the composer, Bobby Halvorson, and went out to a bar. The next morning, after a late breakfast at a long table with many friends (I grew up with Bobby, and Bobby went to college with David), we decided that it was in the interest of good journalism to go to the horse track. But the horse track had no live horses running on it. In the parking lot in front of the casino at Hollywood Park I suggested that we go to Abercrombie & Fitch, and that I could write about David buying a coat. “Can I take it back afterwards?” he asked. I told him that of course he could.

Our group—which consisted of myself, David, Bobby, Sarah Fihn (Bobby’s girlfriend), Garret Van der Boom (my oldest friend), and Gigi Hoang (Garret’s girlfriend and my smallest friend)—discussed for some time where the closest Abercrombie & Fitch was, and agreed, finally, that none of us wanted to go anywhere near an Abercrombie & Fitch. I had explained to everyone that I had decided to write an article on David that would be in effect an homage to Ross’s Hemingway profile, and suggested, since we could not reasonably get a room at the Ritz, and since we’d decided against visiting Abercrombie & Fitch, that we should go to an art museum.

“We could go to the Getty,” said Sarah. Everyone thought this was a wonderful idea, and we got into our various cars and drove north towards the Tehachapi Mountains. David rode with Garret, Gigi, and me, and on the drive he made a phone call. “Hi, Mom, it’s me. I’m returning your call. Busy day today. We’re going to the Getty Museum, and we just went to the horse racing track, but there weren’t any live horses. So, that was a disappointment.”

The northbound traffic was light, although my iPhone misdirected us and we took the wrong exit for the museum. This was the most minor sort of crisis. We parked in the garage at the base of the hill and then stood in line for the tram that carries patrons to the museum. Standing in line we reëncountered Bobby and Sarah.

On the tram Bobby said, “Is it going to lurch?”

David was either ironically or genuinely excited. I could not tell. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s see what it’s going to do. Wait, will you guys just respect my favorite part? This is my favorite part. Respect my favorite part.”

“Respect David’s favorite part,” said Garret.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to talk on the train,” I said.

At the top of the hill we disembarked and stood looking around the grounds. The Getty, which is made almost exclusively of white stone, was too bright to look at carefully. “Look at how beautiful it is up here,” David said.

We climbed the long staircase to the entry-level of the museum. “I need some coffee,” said Garret.

“Sarah,” David said. “Some coffee?” We all laughed because at breakfast Sarah had drunk a French press full of coffee and had felt sick since.

“Yeah,” said Sarah. “Just give me a French press.”

“Sarah, do you want to split a French press?” asked David. “Or do you want to just get your own French press?”

Rather than entering the museum, we went to a food stand that sold coffee and various food items. “Oh, they’ve got M&M’s,” I said.

“Oh, M&M’s?” said Bobby.

“Don’t tell anybody,” I said.

“Can I get twelve bags of M&M’s?” asked Garret, though he was not yet at the register, and the cashier couldn’t hear him. “Okay, good. Thanks. Oh, now they’re out, Kaelan.”

After we’d all ordered and gotten our food, we sat down at a table. The sun had gone away and the breeze had picked up, and it was rather cool, exposed as we were at the top of the hill. “You know what’s weird?” I said. “How strange this article is going to be.”

“Are you going to put in my two-second panic attack that I had in the tram?” asked Bobby.

“It’s going to have everything,” I said.

“Wait,” said David. “Do you remember, Bobby, in the program for Robots vs. Fake Robots when we did it at UCSB? Bobby did a twenty-second clip of music in the beginning of it—”

“Forty-three seconds,” said Bobby.

David continued, “But the music was just for the introduction, or whatever, but the program said the title of the play, my name, and then the director’s name, and then it said ‘Music by Bobby Halvorson’ as big as every other name on the program.”

“And I did nothing,” said Bobby.

“And there is so much music that is not by Bobby Halverson in the play,” said David. “Most of the music is not by him, in fact.”

David picked up my notepad, took my pen, and wrote something at the top of the second page. “You look so excited,” said Gigi to David. “Is that because your favorite part is over?”

“Yeah. My favorite part’s over,” said David.

“Should we just leave?” I asked.

“You know what?” said David. “You know what the best part is about my favorite part?”

“You get to do it on the way back?” said Garret.

“You get to do it again,” said David. “It’s a zip-line down, actually.”

“Four guys and a bunch of art. Oh yeah, and a zip-line,” said Bobby.

“That’s so funny,” said David. “The Getty is so wonderful. I love the Getty so much.”

Soon we got up from the table and went into the museum. We had seen posters for an exhibit on humorous drawings, and had decided to visit that gallery perhaps out of apathy.

“Can we just go into the museum, and can you just give us a tour?” I asked David.

“Yeah, I would love to,” said David. “I mean, there’ll be a lot of things in this museum that I will know everything about.”

“I have to pee again,” said Sarah.

I recognized a sculpture standing in the lobby near us. “A Giacometti,” I said.

“What?” asked David.

“Giacometti,” I said again.

“His stuff’s around the Statue of Liberty, isn’t it?” said Bobby.

“Wait, you know about this thing?” asked David. “I don’t even know about it.”

“Well,” I said, “this is one of the things David doesn’t know about.”

“I believe this is the only thing that I don’t know about,” said David. “It’s five bucks for the audio tour.” He was referring to the personal audio equipment you could rent at the front desk.

“What do we need an audio tour for?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “We’ve got our audio tour right here.”

Garret and Gigi had walked to the desk and Garret was handing over his driver’s license for collateral. “What are they doing?” I asked, rather dismayed. “They’re not getting an audio tour, are they? What do they think they’re doing?”

“They want to do it that way,” said David.

“We’re going to the funny drawings,” said Sarah, who’d returned from the bathroom.

We walked through a courtyard to the wing housing the funny drawings. I said to David, “Can you put all of this in context with your current body of work?”

“Okay, Kaelan,” David said. “Here’s the thing: Everything’s research. Everything’s research. You never know what’s going to inspire my next great work. It could be funny drawings. Or it could be gettin’ a coffee, you know. Or a coke. Oh, this is another one of those fountains.” In the courtyard was a fountain.

Later, after we’d left the museum, I found what David had written on my pad: “It’s important to note Largman Murray’s enthusiasm for the Getty Center. He simply loves the place.”

__________

This weekend (February 7-8, 2009) David Largman Murray and Bobby Halvorson’s play, Bermuda!, is getting its first staged reading.

By Kaelan Smith

This was New York.

A woman. At the bar. Managing a glass of Cabernet.

My pickup line somehow involved the moose head on the wall. She laughed some. Her chest was flat and she looked older than me. To me, she was the city. I assumed she was off limits.

A man next to her said, “So I said to him, ‘nice doggy,’ while my partner went in search of the company machine gun.”

I didn’t stand a chance.

But she took my number. She called. She wanted to do things. She wanted to walk slowly down the street and make comments. Coffee, sake. A blowjob in the afternoon.

She was in the beauty business and she had a man’s name: Charley. Her job was Closet Aesthetician. She knew a lot. She told me little. I didn’t ask.

I’d just landed a job running food at a vegetarian restaurant on the Upper East Side. The manager was a large Asian man named Danny. He was a superstar at managing restaurants.

I sat down with five aspiring actors as Danny walked us through the code of conduct. Four hours of information. I forgot it all except for one thing: Keep your fingernails neat and trimmed.

Afterwards, one of the actors, a petite man with a pretty chin, offered me a cigarette. I wasn’t a smoker, but I accepted.

“My mother, father, and sister died in a plane crash six months ago,” said Rica.

“Is that why you’re here?” I asked.

“There was no life insurance, if that’s what you mean.”

“You must be devastated.”

“I would have been devastated either way. This is a devastating world. We’re all devastated.”

I looked at his fingernails. My cigarette was minty.

“What kind of performer are you?”

“Improv.”

I didn’t tell Charley about Rica.

My mother was going crazy. She sat in the living room all day, silent. Then she would speak, suddenly, abruptly, as if she were a medium. The wisest and most frightening proverbs any of us had ever heard. It pulled me out to the island nearly every other weekend.

A cycle of us came through that little apartment. My sister, someone calling himself Uncle Charles, my father. It was always one of us with my mother and her aid, Celia, a little brown woman who was the object of devotion of a man much smarter than me, I was sure.

I couldn’t tell if my mother understood that I had quit my teaching job and moved to Brooklyn. I wanted something new. This she could understand.

I followed Charley’s slim legs into a museum.

The first room had a drawing of a giant cockroach wedged into a Japanese woman’s vagina. Charley’s eyes locked on it. My mother once said, “All men and all women, when you get down to it, are all exactly the same, in every way.”

I caught Charley leaning against the black museum wall, glancing down at her own crotch. I could have clutched her.

A lesbian couple was near us. One of them had a Chihuahua poking out from her bag. Charley flinched when she noticed it.

We viewed the first recorded come shot. Charley took my hand. Three teenage girls shuffled past us. One of them, as the freckly girl in the video blinked semen from her eyelash, said, “I will never, ever do that.”

“Give her a few years,” Charley said.

In another video, a man wearing a housedress demonstrated how to sit and stand like a man.

We saw this machine that had clamps for attachment to erogenous zones. But it was display only. I considered buying a t-shirt in the gift shop that said, “I come first.” It was made for women. I didn’t buy it.

Charley flagged down a cab. She rested a hand lightly on the back of my neck. She was elegant and uncomplicated about these things.

Danny gave me a tour of the vegetables. I correctly identified broccoli. Rica had been working all week. He streaked to tables four plates at a time. My job was bread. I took long cigarette breaks. None of the customers ever knew what they wanted.

“Would you like bread?”

“No. Yes.”

Danny told me to bring food to thirteen. I had no idea what that meant. I wandered into the seating area with Danny two feet behind me. There was already a plate on the table. I froze. Danny picked it up. They asked me to do it again, on my own.

I turned in my apron and walked out the back. I envied the person walking down the street thinking, “This seems like a nice place.”

I lingered outside a while. Rica tracked me down. We had a drink and he told me a long story involving an adolescent soccer trip and an overbearing father, and then he told me he was gay.

“When did it happen to you?” he asked.

“I’m straight.”

“When did it happen?”

Celia wasn’t around. I think my mother sensed it. She said, “Find me a vase for the flowers procured by my lover.”

I rinsed out a plastic bottle of Coke and presented it to her. She cradled it beneath her breasts.

I thought I might run into my father during one of these visits. But I’ll tell you right now, I never did.

My mother was not an elderly woman. If you had glanced at her unaware of her condition, you may have interpreted her glare as one of intense focus. For all any of us knew, that’s what it was.

I didn’t pick up Charlie’s calls or call her whenever I was out on the island. I called Jay. He rolled his own cigarettes and threw parties. He didn’t own a cell phone. If you wanted to get in touch with him, you had to call the house and ask his father if he was available.

We were in his basement. He had a cigarette in one hand and the cordless phone in the other.

“People in the city,” I said, “would pay a cover charge to sit down here.”

Wires hung down from the low ceiling. The cement floor was exposed. There was a bad smell that was pleasant.

Jay covered the receiver and said, “Shut up.”

He was a walking White Pages. He had the same line for everyone he called, “Basement party. Top of the house is on fire. Come in through the window.”

I thought he was kind of famous in a small way. His shoulders were broad. He slouched when he smoked and talked.

When he ran out of people to call, I told him about Charley.

“Be careful with her,” he said. “I know a guy who banged her. She let it slip one time at a party that she has an STD. This guy banged her raw and was worried.”

“That’s not Charley. I met her in Brooklyn. She lives in Manhattan.”

“She’s from around here. Don’t you two talk?”

“We talk.”

Jay had been sticking labels on boxes full time. He had fistfuls of cash. But he couldn’t have known Charley.

People started showing up. I started drinking. They came in through the window. First they’d bend down and show their face. Then a pair of legs would stick through. At first, Jay and I helped people in. But the more we drank, the less we helped. We laughed at or ignored the people risking injury. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if the legs and butts belonged to men or women. Some of the people I knew, some I didn’t. This was my home town.

Jay invented a game where you take a drink whenever the TV mentions a body part. Soon it became a drink whenever anyone in the room mentions a body part.

I sat next to a girl in a tiara. I had noticed her on her way in. She had big breasts and had trouble squeezing through the small window. I didn’t help her. She told me she was drowning her sorrows.

“He cheated on me with an Asian girl who looks like she’s twelve,” she said.

“That man should be locked up.”

Soon we were in the next room together. A mattress with tousled sheets was on the floor.

I didn’t want to make a show of it. I wanted it to be fast. I didn’t want anyone to walk in.

We were in my apartment in Brooklyn. Charley looked into my closet.

“You have a man’s closet,” she said.

I thought we were going to have sex.

“I have my period,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

A mouse scurried by. I jumped when I saw it. It was black and blurry because it sprinted by so fast.

“Have you been eating in your bedroom?” asked Charley.

“Not that I know of.”

We went out for drinks. It was Sunday night. Charley worked evenings. She liked Sunday nights. She ordered a beer. She drank it fast and ordered another one.

“I could marry you,” I said.

“Why?”

“Why not,” I said.

“I’m already married.”

It was the closest she came to being funny.

I got a call from Jay. I let it go to voicemail, “Basement party. Top of the house is on fire. Come in through the window.”

I envisioned his basement. The girl in the tiara squeezing in through the window. We didn’t exchange numbers. I remembered calling her names like Beautiful and Sunshine. I looked at Charley’s chest.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.

“It’s three in the morning.”

“What’s your excuse?”

My excuse was I wanted to take the subway into Manhattan at daybreak and find a new life. But that wouldn’t have held up.

My phone rang again. The little screen said, “Mom.” The voicemail said, “Hi kiddo, it’s mom. Just calling to say hello.”

Three in the morning. I wondered what time it was wherever my mother thought she was.

We were the only people at the next bar, but the jukebox was going. I liked that kind of atmosphere. But sometimes Charley and I sat and didn’t talk about a goddamn thing and only let the alcohol course through our veins. I got tired of it. I didn’t want to talk about closets, and I couldn’t think of any more general comments, so I asked, “Where did you go to college?”

“A few places. I never finished.”

That was enough. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I thought about Jay’s basement.

“I took a year off one time,” she said. “You know, in between. I had surgery.”

I looked up at the bar wall. There was a moose head up there.

“On my ovaries,” she said. “I had to have surgery on my ovaries.”

On the way back to my apartment, she tripped over her feet and landed awkwardly on her wrist. There was a pretty sizeable scrape. She kept saying, “I’m so embarrassed.”

I was surprised at how generous she was when we got back. I’d never had such a long, drawn-out blowjob before. If I’d had a window in my bedroom, I’m sure the sun would have come up before I finished. My legs felt light when it was over.

I went to the bathroom and looked at my cock. It was tinted with a light coating of blood. I was perplexed. “Did we have sex?” I asked the mirror. Then I realized it was from Charley’s scrape. I thought about the taste of blood. It made me feel close to her, and I rinsed off and rushed back to bed.

“Have any auditions?” I asked.

“No,” said Rica.

“How’s the restaurant?”

“You are the most cruel and humiliating man on earth.”

“I think I want to be an actor.”

“Is this how you seduce all your women?”

The people at this bar were mostly young lesbians and old gay men. It was just like any other bar. There was a jukebox. Someone had put on Queen. The bartender’s name was Manny. Drinks were expensive.

“Do you live alone?” I asked.

“I live with myself.”

“Where are you from?”

“I already told you. I exist here. In my present form. Without connection.”

I pretended to listen. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to make him leave his present form. I wanted to punch him in the gut and come up behind him.

“It was during the time of my mother’s deterioration that I reconciled with my estranged father; it was that time of strife that brought us together as a family; we were tested and now we’re better for it.”

I’ll never say any of those things.

Celia gave me a note, from my sister.

“Did you read it?” I asked.

“I know what it says.”

The note said my sister would be on the west coast for the next few months. Then she wrote and crossed out, “I want to be on the phone if and when it happens.” It was crossed out haphazardly, so it could still be clearly read.

Celia made tomato soup.

“I have no time for this,” said my mother.

Jay was throwing a basement party. When I got over there, he was furious that I hadn’t responded to his previous voicemail.

Only one other person showed up. A guy on a motorcycle named Dave. It was loud in the street. He rang the doorbell and eventually walked in and came downstairs after no one answered. He was a small guy with scruffy blonde hair and he talked nonstop. He was an expert on all topics. His vocabulary was noticeable. He told a story about confronting an officer who had the nerve to put a parking ticket on his motorcycle. “Officer,” he said. “I’m quite nonplussed about this.” The officer was perplexed and ripped up the ticket.

“What a pig,” said Jay. He liked him. Anyone in Jay’s basement was alright by him.

We sat down. I drank six beers and talked about teaching and quitting.

“Good move,” said Dave. “What do you do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Good move,” he said. “There you are, in the crux of the universe. Something is bound to catch.”

I didn’t want to like him. But he was small and charming, in a way. His helmet rested on the couch cushion beside him.

“Tell Dave about Charley,” said Jay.

“What are you, my mother?” I asked. I hated the sound of it. I drank another beer. I didn’t feel drunk, just focused and uncoordinated.

“Charley? Female Charley?” Dave patted his helmet. “What a panic she put into me. Waited three harrowing weeks for the test results. Would have been worth it either way. What a charitable woman.”

Charley’s period was going on its second week.

She unzipped my jeans. I looked at the top of her head.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked.

“No,” she hummed.

The vibrations were nice. But I didn’t have anything else to ask her. I put my hands on the sides of her head and stopped her movement. I kept them there. We were still enough to pose for an artist. When she finally looked up at me, there was a tear streaming down her cheek.

I burst out laughing. Something about it.

She started to tell me things. “Most of the time I’m under control,” she said.

My phone rang. I fished it out of the pocket of my jeans that were on the floor. The way I remember this is the way it must have sounded to Charley:

“Are you going to keep it? Why not? But that kid is one-half mine. Listen, Sunshine, this could be what we’ve been waiting for.” I couldn’t quite get through that last part. My laughter came back.

Rica’s apartment wasn’t far from the park. Here is what I wanted on the elevator ride up: to drop to my knees and show him my pupils. To be confident about it. I was going to be good. I was going to make his world anew.

When we got up to his floor, there was a man sitting on the living room couch reading a magazine. Behind him was a view of Lexington Avenue.

“If there’s one thing to pray for,” said Rica, “it’s rent control.”

He introduced me to his partner. His name was Stanley. He was taller than Rica. Broader than me. He kissed Rica on the cheek and shook my hand. He exuded a kind of warmth. He ordered us to sit while he got us all drinks.

He commented on the couch we were sitting on. The coffee table. The fridge. All the objects had been pondered over. It was my turn to talk.

“Let’s see if the bathroom is as nice as everything else,” I said.

I wanted to find a closet. I wanted to see if it was a man’s closet. But the way the walls were, I couldn’t find any doorknobs. I had to ask twice about the bathroom.

“Here it is,” said Stanley. “We keep it hidden.”

“Intruders,” said Rica.

Soon the three of us were on the couch together. Stanley was talking about Rica’s career.

“Don’t ask him about it,” said Stanley. “He’ll bite your tongue off. He’s actually doing quite well.”

“Lies,” said Rica, softly. “All lies.”

I’d never seen Rica this relaxed. He rested his head on my shoulder.

It was just like anything else. We waited for a pause in the conversation. Then there was a hand on my chest, and another. The lips that touched my neck weren’t unlike other lips that touched my neck. I thought about how lucky I was. I thought about their big steel fridge filled with organic food. Music in the background. A glass of wine. Hands and lips all over me.

“Stop,” I said. “I have herpes.”

“I never would have gone to Europe,” said my mother, who had never been to Europe, who had never left the living room. “I wouldn’t have gone if I knew it would come between us.”

Then she shut her eyes.

Celia searched for a pulse. I began to laugh. Celia’s look grew grim. I stopped laughing out loud, but I could feel it rumbling around inside.

“They told me this is how it would happen,” said Celia.

I felt tickled in all the places I was ticklish.

“She’s dead,” said Celia.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It started and there was no stopping it.

“Your mother is dead,” said Celia.

I was out of breath. I sneezed. I had to grab onto my knee for balance.

“God bless you,” said Celia. She took out her cell phone and hit some buttons.

New York Times. Village Voice. Craigslist. Everywhere people begged me to work for them, but I couldn’t get out of bed.

Charley called and told me she’d bring me soup from a good deli by her place.

I pictured her sitting in a cab or the subway with a little brown bag in her lap. When she got to my place, she set it up for me so I didn’t have to get out bed. There was a piece of bread in the bag. My head was clogged. I had already consumed a handful of over-the-counter pills and liquids. Charley pulled the bread apart into little pieces and dropped them into my soup. It was just a common cold. My insides felt like my outsides had been punched and kicked. The bread sopped up the broth.

When I finished, she cleared everything away and snuck into bed with me. I had to cough. I tried to direct it away from her. My skin was hypersensitive. It was almost painful when her lithe body slid up against mine. She looked young and innocent and willing. I wasn’t sure if she was under control. My fever made everything unstable. My bedroom was cut off from the rest of the earth. This is what I was going to find. Charley. From my home town. We were ten years old and I was slipping a hand under her dress for the first time.

By James Donovan

It looks like an eye. It’s crazy to think of it that way, but he can’t help it. It’s a bare spot in his lawn where the grass is dying and it looks like an eye. It stares up at him from down there, accusing, demanding an answer. How did this happen? What the hell did you do? What did you not do?

It’s visible from the street. He checks, and there it is. From the sidewalk it looks more like a vagina than an eye, only not in a good way. It looks diseased. It makes him think about that commercial on TV with the herpes lady and her goofy boyfriend and that makes him think about those lubricant commercials and how the herpes lady should’ve thought about the herpes before she bought the lubricant. Assholes. Why do they want to show that on TV? From the driveway, the spot in the lawn looks like one of those outlines of a fish with the Greek letters that people put on their cars. Jesus fish. He’s going to have to get in the car and go find a place that sells some stuff to fix his grass. It’s going to be a problem, he can tell.

He sees his kid through the front window when he goes to get the car. The kid’s sprawled all over the couch watching TV with a straw in his mouth and bowl of some kind of crap balanced on his stomach , and every once in a while he lets go of the straw with his lips and turns his head and puts some of the crap in his mouth and then sucks on the straw again and swallows. It doesn’t even look like he’s chewing. Does the herpes commercial make him shudder? It’d better.

He thinks he should get the kid off the couch and bring him to get the stuff to fix the lawn, but then he thinks better of it. The kid’ll only ask how the bare spot got there and then he’d have to either lie or tell the truth and he doesn’t feel like lying to the kid today. How is anybody supposed to know all this stuff about lawns that you’re supposed to know? Use a spreader, the directions said. Fuck the spreader, he said back. And now there’s a bare spot, like a bald spot on his head. It’s grass, for fuck’s sake. It should grow. You can walk on it. Kids play on it when they’re not watching lubrication commercials on TV. It’s supposed to be tough.

He leaves the kid where he is. One day the kid’ll wake up with a bare spot on his lawn and then he’ll have to figure it out for himself. He looks around at the neighborhood. It’s not really a neighborhood. It’s a subdivision, but he calls it a neighborhood because it sounds better to him. He looks at the other lawns. You can tell that most of them have guys taking care of them who got lessons in that kind of thing from their fathers. In America, you’re supposed to learn about lawns from your father. Lawns, how to cook meat on a grill without burning it, how to join clubs and go fishing with your kids, how to find a wife who looks like Laura Petry and doesn’t eat at buffet restaurants. At least he got that last part right. He’s got the wife. He needs to work on the kid a little, but he got the wife part right the first time.

It’s Saturday. It’s a nice day, too. All up and down the street there are guys outside doing things to their lawns. They look like Sims, those little computer people that his daughter, the other kid, is always messing with. Only Sims don’t care if anybody’s watching and he suspects that these guys do. You’re supposed to watch them mowing with mowers that have had their oil changed recently and will be rinsed with a hose before they get put away, like their fathers taught them to do. You’re supposed to notice the guy vacuuming his lawn with a mower attachment that looks like one of the floor cleaning machines your father hauled around in the back of a truck to his job every night.

Vacuuming the lawn. What is that about? What can be down there that needs vacuuming? He would ask the guy, but the guy might offer to lend him the machine and then he’d have to take the offer or get stuck looking like some son of an immigrant who’s too lazy and too ignorant to figure out that his grass needs vacuuming. He gets the car out of the garage.

On the road he’s surrounded by bumper stickers. He hadn’t really focused on them before but now he can’t not notice. He’s the guy with the crappy lawn and everybody’s got advice for him. LIFE, says a bumper sticker on a minivan. No shit, he says out loud. He knows it’s about abortion, but it’s a complicated issue. And it’s not. Herpes and lube on the TV. He doesn’t know what to do about the troops, either. How the hell is he supposed to support them? He knows the frat boy lied to send them over there. Everybody knows. Unlike the abortion thing, it’s not even a little complicated. It’s big, it’s unbelievably huge, but big doesn’t mean complicated, it just means big. He wants to talk about it, to say something. But people don’t want to hear it. He understands. He keeps his mouth shut and takes care of his lawn and tries not to do stupid things that kill the grass in the shape of a vagina.

All the bumper stickers are screaming at each other. It used to be a conversation. It used to be funny sometimes. Now they shout. They threaten. They mock. He sees a decal of a little boy pissing on a flag that says French. It says French, he thinks, because if they put the actual French flag in there the people they’re trying to impress wouldn’t get it. Vote Life, Vote God. God Bless America. Who are these people?

Normally at the hardware store he can’t find anybody to tell him anything about anything. But today is different, and this geek kid in a little red vest and pants the size of a tree trunk follows him around at a distance, stalking him. When he gets to the aisle where they keep the grass-growing stuff, the kid hangs back a little. Good.

Staring at the shelves, his eyes glaze over and he almost forgets about the kid and he picks up a plastic bottle with a nozzle that hooks up to a hose. He holds the bottle out in front of him and pretends to read some of the ingredients and he sees the kid lurking at the end of the aisle by some bags of fertilizer that are stacked like interlocking bricks, like a fortress. On top of the pile, one of the bags is standing upright—King of the Hill, so everyone can see how happy the guy on the label is with his perfect, lush, radiant green lawn.

The kid in the red vest sees him looking and pounces.

“Can I help you?” The kid looks friendly enough, but how much could anybody his age know about lawns?

“No. I’m just looking.” He picks up another plastic bottle. The label on this one is crawling with bugs and grubs. Grubs. He doesn’t want to think about grubs. He turns it over. Billbugs, spittlebugs, army worms, crane flies, cutworms, earwigs, chittabugs, mites, leaf hoppers, ticks, waterbugs and grubs. Grubs from Japan and dung beetle grubs. Hyperodes weevils, hole crickets, chinch bugs.

He thinks about buying the bottle and getting away from the kid, but what if he screws it up and instead of killing bugs he kills more of the grass? He shoves the bottle back on the shelf. Just looking. What a line. Just looking at grub-killing stuff like that’s all he has to do on a Saturday afternoon. The kid probably knows that he’s lying, that he does need help but is too embarrassed to ask for it.

“Okay,” the kid says.

They stand there. The kid doesn’t move. They’re going to stand there, two guys looking at a shelf for a few minutes. Great.

He tries to get some relief by looking at the fertilizer display, but the guy on the fertilizer bag looks like a guy on one of those commercials for erectile dysfunction. That’s what they’re really selling there, soft boners. They just happen to have a pill that’ll cure it when your member goes limp from thinking about the poor jerk on the commercial that can’t get it up with his wife, who’s sitting there in the background in her silk nightie, all ready to go.

The kid finally shrugs and waddles off in those pants. He stares at the pants. He thinks about yelling Fire so he can see if the kid can run in those things. But he doesn’t. He’s left with the man on the fertilizer bag. White hair and white shoes. White teeth and red polo shirt. The fertilizer man looks like a guy who could vote for a playtime cowboy from Texas and not feel bad about it later like everybody else. Boner pills and bare spots and guys chanting crazy chants in the cockpits of airplanes full of people with lawns to get back to, grass to grow so they don’t get bare spots that look like vaginas and embarrass everybody. Everything is coming apart and nobody knows what to do except to try and look like it’s all going to be okay, like we’re still number one. But if we were number one how the hell did this happen to us? People running, crawling under parked cars while whole buildings, pounded into dust, pour through the streets like water. How the hell did we get here? We’re a nation of men with soft dicks and pills to make them hard and lubricated vaginas with herpes and we advertise this on the television so our children can watch it and grow up thinking it’s all normal; pills for your dick and having to look the other way when the lady in front of you in the security line at the airport has the ugliest feet you’ve ever seen, like frog feet, wide and triangular. Freak feet. And everybody’s looking at them and you don’t want to be one of the assholes who can’t help but look and you just want to tell her to get some shoes on, lady, nobody wants to look at that.

It makes us all look weak. All of us. Bare feet and dead vagina grass. It makes us look like we can’t take care of our shit.

They have some grass seed and fertilizer already all mixed up together with some shredded paper that’s painted green. A dummy could grow this stuff. Toss it on the ground and get it wet. But he leaves empty-handed. He can’t buy anything now, not when he just told the kid in the vest that he was just looking. The kid would know he’d been lying just to get rid of him, which the kid probably already knew, but why make it worse?

Outside, the road is a river of bumper stickers and fake ribbons and he’s got to wade through it again. The car in front of him has one of those Jesus fishes. The fish has a cross where its eye is supposed to be. He wonders if it’s a flounder; the one with both of its eyes on one side of its head?

He knows a guy who was drinking in a bar someplace in China when the planes hit. They sent the hostess around to tell all the Americans to go away. The guy was in China looking at a factory where a bunch of women work all day sticking suction cups on glow-in-the-dark plastic saints that people then stick on their dashboards. The guy didn’t know what saints they were. The guy just made sure the saints got made and put on ships and sent around to the people who put them in stores and churches and wherever the hell it is that they sell things like plastic sucker-saints. The guy went back to his hotel and watched the buildings come down on TV; alone in the middle of the night, half way around the world, across the International Date Line. It was yesterday in America from where this guy was. It was happening yesterday. The guy told him all about it.

He crosses the freeway to the other big box store and goes in. The place is enormous and full of stuff. He already knows where all the stuff comes from. The guy with the plastic saints told him about it. But where the hell does it all go? This is something he thinks about for the first time. Not who buys it, this he knows. And not where ultimately it will end up. Everybody knows where it ends up. But what are the specifics of the trip?

He’s looking for the gardening aisle when he sees the woman. She has a kid with her, a girl, maybe three or four, and they’re standing in the aisle looking at picture frames. She’s a young mother but not herself a child. She’s wearing capris, black, with the little slit up the calf, and an olive, short-sleeved blouse, tapered at the waist, showing some figure but leaving much unsaid. She stands with her shoulders back and her chin forward and her hand out with the fingers cupped just a certain way, touching one of the frames, getting the feel of it, stroking it, thinking. She has a memory someplace in her head, he can tell. It’s a memory caught in an image; a photograph or maybe the kid painted something for her. She needs a frame for the image that carries the memory. To preserve it, so that people who see it will know that it means something more than some other memories that didn’t get themselves framed. If you frame a thing, it stands a better chance in the world. The frame tells people to not mess around with this image. It’s not just some picture you took. It’s a memory.

But what’s going to happen is a foregone conclusion. In the long run the frame won’t do anybody any good. Even the woman knows. She knows all about it. In another forty or fifty years, the kid is going to send her to a home or a condo at least one plane ride away. Then the kid will hold a garage sale. Some stranger will find the frame in the bottom of a grubby cardboard box and spend two minutes deciding whether or not to spend a quarter on it and throw away the image and use the frame for some idiot baby picture of another kid that nobody alive now even knows or cares about. The image will go. It’ll end up in a landfill next to a plastic saint whose sucker gave out. It’s a given. Still, he thinks it’s a good thing that people try to save their memories. You have to try. The guy who was in China couldn’t reach his family on the phone even though they don’t live anywhere near New York. When they finally let him get on a plane after a few days, it was empty except for him. One guy on a seven-four-seven. All the way across the ocean.

He realizes then that the picture frame lady looks like one of his neighbors. He isn’t sure, but he ducks around the corner and down another aisle just in case. He finds himself facing a display of chocolate fountain machines. Fountains of chocolate. On sale. How did this come to be? Did he have a part in it? It’s a long road from knowing a guy who makes plastic sucker-saints to fountains of chocolate. The picture frame lady says something to the kid. She coos. He can’t hear what she says, but it sounds nice. Her husband probably tends to their lawn with the same care she takes tending to the image, whatever it is, that stores the memory she’s trying to preserve. Maybe the husband even vacuums the grass. They probably have sex a lot. There’s the kid there as a reminder. Walking proof of sex in the past tense. He has kids too. He knows all about sex. The bare spot in his grass doesn’t make him into some dick-cripple who needs a pill. And besides, it looks like an eye. If you think otherwise, you’re standing in the wrong place.

He finds the gardening aisle and they have the same stuff with the grass seed and the green paper mulch. There’s another kid in a vest and quick, he stares at the label, pretending like he’s reading the ingredients. Amoniacal nitrogen, urea nitrogen, methylenediurea and dimethylenetriurea nitrogen. Do other men actually know about these things or do they just trust the people who make it and put it in the bags? Where do they get this trust? He notices then that all the ingredients only add up to 52 percent. Where’s the rest of it? The kid in the vest is hovering. He thrusts the bag over his shoulder like it weighs something but it doesn’t weigh more than a couple of pounds and he feels like an idiot. He nods to the vest kid and cuts around the end cap.

The store has self-service checkout and he chooses this option. He doesn’t want to have to make small talk with a checkout person about a hole in his lawn. This way a man has some privacy. He stands in line behind another man who was thinking the same thing but it’s all gone bad. He can see that now. The scanner is malfunctioning and he can’t help but look and see that the man is trying to scan a package of hemorrhoid suppositories. He sweeps it past the scanning device and stuffs it in a sack. A computer voice announces in a big voice full of electrons and bits and bytes and no empathy whatsoever that there’s an unauthorized item in the bagging area. The guy’s neck is filling with blood and turning red. He glances around to see who’s looking and his face is draining, going white. He looks like a candy cane. He’s old. There are silver hairs all over the back of his neck and they look like they shouldn’t be there, like crab grass, only white. There’s a lady at a little kiosk between the scanners. She’s supervising the self-checkout lanes and it becomes apparent that she’s got a screen there that shows her everything that’s going on.

“Suppositories?” the woman calls out. She doesn’t care. She sees hemorrhoid suppositories all the time. “Let me try.”

But it’s clear that the man does not want her touching his suppositories. The back of his neck pulses, his shoulders roll and quake. “It’s all right,” he manages to say.

But it’s not all right and the woman advances. Ownership of the suppositories has not yet transferred. She’s still in charge and the machine has gone down and she’s supposed to know what to do. People count on her to know. She shakes her head and passes the package over the scanner again. It beeps. It works fine. The old guy must’ve screwed it up. It sucks, having to watch this. The man puts some money in the receptacle and bolts out of the store without his change. Forty-three cents.

In the parking lot, the hemorrhoid guy gets into a Buick. People drive Buicks around here. It’s a fact.

He follows the hemorrhoid Buick guy. It feels necessary. In the street, a bumper sticker reads, Jesus. Just the one word—Jesus. What’s he supposed to do with that? The hemorrhoid guy’s got no bumper stickers. Not one.

They drive to a subdivision that doesn’t even pretend to be a neighborhood. People are working on their yards everywhere. Some of them have their garage doors open and he can see all the junk they have. He still doesn’t know why he’s following this man. It’s stupid. People go to jail for this kind of thing. The guy pulls into a driveway and a garage door yawns open. It’s a mess in there. A big, hairy mess. No wonder the man’s got problems. Everybody can see his mess every time that door opens.

The door closes. End of show. Now what?

He parks and gets out of his car and digs in his pocket for forty-three cents and he puts it in the guy’s mailbox out by the street. It’s a weird thing to do. He sees that some asshole’s dog took a shit on the guy’s lawn. He goes back to the car and takes out the bag of grass seed and leaves it in the guy’s driveway and drives away. Nobody seems to notice.

On the way home he stops at a flower place and buys a bouquet for his wife. Roses. Twelve. He doesn’t need any pills. He’s got roses. While he’s at it, he buys a knee-high, ceramic statue of a saint in a little grotto. He doesn’t know which saint it is. Nobody knows what those guys looked like anyway. When he gets back to the house, he sticks the statue on the bare spot. It fits. Problem solved. In the house, the kid’s still watching TV with the bowl of crap and the straw. The roses go in a vase on the table. She’ll see them later. He grabs the remote control and turns the television off.

“Get up,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go make a memory. You sit around like that all the time, you’re gonna need a pill some day.”

To his surprise, the kid says, “Sure,” and off they go. If he had a camera right then he’d take a picture and maybe even have it framed. But he doesn’t have a camera and he doesn’t want to screw it all up by going to get one. He’ll have to remember. And when it’s gone it’ll be gone, and that’ll be the end of it.

By David Dumitru

How Shepard Fairey’s work went from the streets of Los Angeles to the Smithsonian permanent collection, and how he helped elect a president in the process.

On January 31, 2008, CNN held a debate in Los Angeles in preparation for the Super Tuesday Primary. After, Barack Obama, who was to that point still the contender for the nomination, and not the champion, held a rally at the Avalon Club in Los Angeles. He stood on the stage in a dark gray suit without a tie, looking and sounding intellectually exhausted from an evening spent arguing—if congenially—with Senator Clinton. He was delivering an improvised speech, reiterating the themes of progress and change he had brandished during his campaign. He looked down at the stage for a moment, touched his temple with his right index finger, and began, in an attempt perhaps to elaborate on these messages that had grown a little stale, even to him, “[The argument I’m making] is not about change, it’s about hope.” Here he squinted out into the dark crowd and pointed. “I talk about hope a lot,” he continued. “There’s a big sign, there. Very nice graphic, by the way.”

In the audience a man was holding a poster that depicted an optimistic Obama, with his head tilted, gazing at the heavens, or in this unique case, back at Obama himself. Below his bust was printed the word HOPE. The crowd seemed to have anticipated Obama’s acknowledgment of the image, because as he did so they erupted into applause. The man with the sign, Yosi Sargent, felt uncomfortable with the sudden attention. In the footage I have seen of the rally, only Yosi’s hands are visible, gripping the poster on the upper edge and lower corner, as if in that moment the image were his surrogate. “I’m definitely not used to being the center of attention,” Yosi told me in March. “The man on the stage was supposed to be the focus.” Yosi has a high voice and is tirelessly sincere. “It was an amazing moment,” he added, “because what it meant was that a large piece of my life—supporting Barack Obama, printing these posters and putting up stickers—was actually working. The image that Shepard created and the message coming out of Barack Obama’s mouth were perfectly in sync.”

The Shepard Yosi refers to here is Shepard Fairey—agit-pop artist, founder of Obey Giant, and until he saw Obama deliver his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, staunch political detractor. (He voted for Ralph Nader in 2000). If you have lived in a major metropolitan area over the last eight years, or even, say, a bucolic hamlet in Sweden, you may have seen a poster of President Bush looking rather confused, holding a bomb and asking, “Hug bombs and drop babies? Or was it hug babies and drop bombs,” an anonymous but no less ominous face suggesting, “More Militerry, Less Skools,” or later, after Fairey’s taste for exclusively heavy-handed, incendiary rhetoric had begun to subside, the more sedate and thoughtful image of a Chinese soldier with a flower in his rifle. But in early 2008, Fairey revised his approach further. To that point he had made a business of criticizing government propaganda by satirically approximating it. With the advent of Barack Obama’s bid for the Presidency, though, Fairey recognized that he had an opportunity to discard the cynic’s non-teleological anarchism that had always been his edict, and foster positive change by, rather unusually, supporting a presidential candidate.

When I first spoke with him last May, Fairey brought up the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he first saw Obama speak. “I didn’t think that Obama would run. I thought, ‘This guy’s young. And he looks even younger than he is. But he’s got a bright future. I’ll keep an eye out for him.’ Then, when he announced his candidacy, I was still skeptical, thinking that he was too new on the scene to get any traction. And then when he did well in Iowa and New Hampshire, I was like, ‘Hmm. All right, I think I might want to put some real energy into this.’”

In September 2007, at an Adidas-sponsored event in Los Angeles where Fairey was showing some of his collages, Yosi Sargent, who had met Fairey at a handful of gallery openings, walked up and started a conversation. “I saw an opportunity,” Sargent said. “I asked, ‘Who are you supporting for President?’ He said that he was a big fan of Barack Obama.”

Back in 2004, after President Bush had won a second term, Sargent had helped found 008themovement.org—a group dedicated to grassroots Democratic mobilization—and even before Obama had declared his candidacy, Sargent and his cohorts had been planning to get him elected. “After the last election cycle,” Sargent told me, “a bunch of people were fed up. We pooled our resources and our energy and decided to do whatever we could to support the candidate that we thought would be the best for the country. And that of course was Barack Obama.” From 2004 to 2007, 008themovement.org had been preparing, or planning to prepare, some sort of assault on the Republicans. The group was made up mostly of artists, and it follows therefore that their attack, when it materialized, would be a visual one. They eventually decided that they would create, print, and disseminate pro-Obama posters to battleground precincts around the country. What they did not know, though, in the summer of 2007, was that almost every district in every state would be closely contested during the primary battle. If they were going to persuade the public with pictures, they would have to get one in every precinct. Getting one in every precinct would require a sort of pathogenic diffusion. They would use the internet as a vector, but in order to infect the general population, to continue this metaphor, they would need a rather hearty virus.

When Sargent spoke with Fairey in September and realized that they were both on the same political page, he also realized he was speaking with the foremost biological engineer in the world of virally spread guerrilla art. (From his headquarters—Studio Number One in downtown Los Angeles— Fairey designs, prints, and ships his posters internationally. His work appears in cities in all six temperate continents.) If Fairey would do a poster, Sargent reasoned, 008themovement.org had both its virus and a population of self-selected hosts—namely Fairey’s worldwide base of volunteer vandals who had been for years postering cities around the globe with Fairey’s satirical propaganda.

But Fairey was hesitant. “I started asking a couple people if they thought I would be a liability,” Fairey told me in May. “Usually I do whatever I want to do and don’t ask permission, but this was a case where I kind of wanted to have the proper go-ahead from people, because I didn’t want to undermine what Obama was doing. I want to help him.” Fairey, who has been arrested at least thirteen times for vandalism, didn’t expect the Obama camp to receive his endorsement cordially. “I didn’t want to do something for Obama if his campaign was gonna go, ‘Oh, God, why that guy? That’s a terrible affiliation.’”

But Sargent, through his fundraising work with 008themovement.org, had established some ties with the Obama campaign, and was able to broach the subject with them. “Yosi said he would talk to the people he knew and get back to me,” said Fairey. “And then he did, and he said, ‘Green light. Go ahead.’ And that’s when I started working on it.” This approval process did not, as the last few sentences might suggest, culminate in a single afternoon. Rather, from conception to execution, the PROGRESS poster that Yosi Sargent eventually held at the Avalon Club rally in late January, 2008, took four months to gestate. “When I finally got the go-ahead, it was only two weeks before Super Tuesday,” said Fairey. “It was the middle of January.” Before Super Tuesday, most of the country, including Fairey and Sargent, expected a clear Democratic nominee to emerge from the twenty-two scheduled contests on February 5th. Accordingly, Fairey was under a severe deadline to create an iconic image, dump it into the vector, get his hosts contaminated, and help win Obama the nomination.

“I just basically went on the internet and looked for a good photo of Obama to work from,” said Fairey. His tone was decidedly nonchalant, as if instead of influencing a presidential election he’d been researching a college paper on which he only need a “C” to pass. “I do all my portraits based on references, even if I’m kind of splicing together a couple of different references. So, I found an image that I felt had the right gesture, and then, of course, did my thing to it—re-illustrated and simplified it to this really iconic, three-color image.” I had perhaps expected Fairey to speak in more elevated language about the creation of the first poster. He is the seminal American iconographist, the most successful pop artist since Warhol, and as he talked about his crowning achievement—the image that branded the eventual Democratic nominee for president, that may, historically, outlast the solemn countenance of Andre the Giant— he spoke pragmatically. “I made some screen prints. I sold three hundred and fifty screen prints to raise money for the bigger poster campaign, and then immediately did six thousand offset prints, which were the ones that went up in the period before Super Tuesday. Those got distributed right away, and then we immediately did another run of four thousand. So, therefore, within the first two weeks there were already ten thousand posters out. It’s up to like seventy thousand, now.”

That poster has since had an immeasurable effect. I use immeasurable in the vague but denotative sense that there is no accurate way to measure its import. In the run-up to Super Tuesday, after the New Hampshire primary in which Hillary Clinton pulled off a surprise victory in the narrow wake of Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus win, Obama became again the challenger, and not the challenged. Then Shepard Fairey got permission to release his posters. Clinton and Obama debated on CNN on January 31st in California. Super Tuesday arrived and the candidates’ constituents caucused and primaried. Obama won twelve more delegates than Clinton when all the votes were tallied. But he lost California by ten points, and California was the epicenter of Fairey’s postering. Following Super Tuesday, though, Obama rose in the polls, and between February 5th and March 5th, Obama won eleven straight contests and captured the pledged and superdelegate leads. If someone bolder than I chose to analyze these statistics with a bias toward Fairey’s influence on the election, he might say that Fairey’s posters tipped the balance of the Democratic scale away from Clinton. That is, of course, post hoc ergo propter hoc logic, and therefore fallacious. What is indisputable, though, is that no one made a poster for Clinton or McCain, and Obama’s grassroots base was the most active and vociferous, whether donating money, attending a rally, putting up posters of their candidate on the sides of buildings, or, finally, gathering at Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate his election.

“Hillary is fine,” said Fairey last May, as we discussed why he hadn’t ever endorsed another candidate. “I think that she acts a lot better when she’s on top. She’s a lot more personable. But a real ugly, nasty side of her has come out during this thing. But I still think she would be way better than McCain. But were she the only candidate, would I make art in support of her? Probably not.” (Yosi Sargent had made a very similar claim, but even more emphatic. “Can you imagine an artist making art for any other candidate?” he asked. “No, you can’t,” he answered for me.) Then Fairey added, “But Obama is great.” Hillary, by exclusion, in Fairey’s opinion, is not. “Obama is charismatic,” Fairey continued, “but he seems honest and truthful. A lot of people seem charismatic, but they would turn back the odometer on a used car they’re selling you. Obama doesn’t seem like that. But Mitt Romney? Come on. Would you buy a used car from that guy?” I asked him then why he hadn’t supported any other candidates in the past, and specifically, John Kerry in 2004.

“I wasn’t that inspired by Kerry,” he said. “Once again, it wasn’t that I wouldn’t have preferred him to be president. But I think that it has something to do with my own maturity. If someone didn’t jump out to me as super awesome, I wasn’t going to stick my neck out and endorse them because if anything went wrong then I’d have to own up to having been wrong about their character. It’s the whole hipster strategy: just boo everything, and only celebrate it if you’re the first person to discover it. Then if five more people discover it, you have to abandon it. That whole mentality of I’d-rather-just-criticize is something I’ve been conditioned to be part of to a degree. But now I’m like, ‘Fuck that. That’s stupid.’ I’ve got so much more riding on this election than my coolness cred.” He laughed before he went on. “In 2004, I did a lot of anti-Bush stuff—I was very opposed to Bush—which I guess was a de facto endorsement of Kerry. But I also realized that negativity wasn’t the best strategy for uniting people.”

I asked him if he’d finally come to the conclusion that art which attacks is limited if it doesn’t propose a solution. “Absolutely, yes,” said Fairey.

“This time,” I said, “it seems you’re trying to help find a solution, which seems novel, although it shouldn’t seem novel, but it is. It’s sort of unprecedented to say, rather than I hate this guy, I actually think this guy might solve the problems we’ve been complaining about.”

Fairey responded, “People have said to me, ‘That’s not very rebellious or outsider or subversive that you’re supporting a presidential candidate.’ And I say, ‘Well, when it’s somebody who’s going to get into office, and it’s not going to be business as usual, I think it’s pretty subversive, I think it’s pretty rebellious and radical. And if you don’t recognize that in this candidate, you need to start paying attention because this is an important opportunity.”

As an unofficial presidential marketing campaign, Fairey’s iconographic endorsement of Obama was unprecedented in both numerical scope and organic popularity. The image spread from person to person, from organization to organization, right up to Obama himself. On January 31, 2008, Obama acknowledged Fairey’s graphic at the Avalon Club, and on February 22nd, Fairey received a letter, apparently from Obama himself, in which the Junior Senator from Illinois thanked the senior guerilla artist from South Carolina for his encouragement. “Your images have a profound effect on people,” Obama wrote, “whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.” A few weeks later, the Obama website had for sale in its official store Fairey’s CHANGE poster. It sold out by March.

In 1976, during the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s successful bid for the presidency, Andy Warhol made a print of Carter’s mother which, sold in limited edition, helped raise money for Carter’s campaign. Then, after the election, to commemorate the Inaugural Celebration, Warhol did a portrait of Jimmy Carter himself. But he did not paint one during the campaign, and Carter certainly didn’t use a Warhol print as part of his campaign branding. But Obama has used a piece of pop art, from a notorious and globally recognized agit-pop artist, to help define, quite literally, the face he shows to the world. (According to Yosi Sargent, Fairey is now expected to design Obama’s White House stationary).

At dinner with friends last spring, during my trip to Los Angeles to interview Shepard Fairey, the conversation at my table turned to politics. As this was only a few days after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, both of which Obama had won, there was amongst my rather young, liberal group of friends a sense of collective relief, as if Obama had finally clinched the nomination, even though he hadn’t. I mentioned the article I was working on, and I found most everyone had seen the posters Fairey had made for Obama. (Now, in early 2009, they are almost literally omnipresent). “Can anyone think of a time,” I asked, “when a presidential candidate used an image of himself as a primary campaign logo?” None of us had been alive during the Great Depression or the subsequent Great War, so we agreed unanimously that we hadn’t. Then a woman at the table said, “I suppose you see pictures like that of Castro in Cuba.” That reminded me of a trip I’d taken to Jordan in the fall of 2007. When I walked across the border from Israel I’d seen the huge, benevolent faces of King Hussein and his son, King Abdullah II. In fact, they had been everywhere, from the small, goat-herding villages along the highway, in Petra on a wall near my hotel, and in every shop throughout Amman.

In the United States there aren’t laudatory images of Bush hanging in stores or in living rooms, at bus stops or on billboards. But when Obama gets sworn in next Tuesday evening, thanks to Shepard Fairey’s efforts, his face will already be a ubiquitous, public image, like Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, or King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia.

When discussing this with Fairey, we got on the subject of mock-propaganda—which, if anything, is how much of Fairey’s work might be classified. I said that his image of Obama, though, regardless of whether or not the message was HOPE or PROGRESS, was real government propaganda. “Propaganda has a sinister connotation,” Fairey said. “But I wrote a paper when I was a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design on political propaganda, coming from a position of moral integrity. Whether it’s pro a cause or against a cause, it’s propaganda either way. I see a role for both. It’s always interesting to hear people say, ‘Your stuff is just anti-advertising propaganda.’ It’s really not. Even the idea of using propaganda to encourage people to question advertising and other propaganda is propaganda. Blindly accepting every ad you see and not questioning it is the wrong way to go, and I have a superior alternative, which is getting you to question that stuff. That’s propaganda. Anti-propaganda propaganda.”

(Since I first published this article, Time magazine, for the Person of the Year issue, commissioned Fairey to design the cover depicting their nomination, President-Elect Barack Obama. And earlier this month, the Smithsonian Institute acquired a cotton-rag Obama HOPE collage for its permanent collection. Shit is crazy.)

By Kaelan Smith

My coffee is cold because I’m too involved in my book to touch it. And then suddenly there is fresh chai tea on the table next to me. This is how I meet Sam.

For a long time we’ve been going to the same coffee shop to read. When I am not telemarketing for Stanton Insurance, I am here. It’s one of those artsy places where they serve free trade coffee and soy milk in hand-made ceramic pottery with uneven edges, so you have to watch how you’re holding it all the time. There is new-age experimental art on the walls. All the napkins are recycled from when you were there two months ago and all the tablecloths are from thrift stores.

The people match the shop. They’ve recycled their personalities from the people they had coffee with two months ago and picked up parts of themselves at thrift stores so that nothing ever really matches.

Like the vegetarian who always wears Nikes. Save the animals. Oppress the humans.

One of the paintings on the wall is mine, but no one’s bought it yet. It’s too traditional, I guess. It is oil paint on a black background. Deep blues and intense purples. The picture is of a girl huddled inside the hollow of a dead tree. A pencil is balanced on a near limb. The pencil is blue, too.

Contrast this with the other art:

The giant-sized blow-ups of Superman’s nose hairs.

The magazine collages of Bill Clinton jerking off.

The splatter-paint therapy sessions.

The boy who brought me chai tea says: “I’ve seen you here before.”

I hate chai tea, I say.

“At least we have that in common,” he says, and sits down to share his hot chocolate.

A month later and we’re feeling each other out over hot apple cider.

The guy at the counter with spray-in green hair is always giving me looks. Sam hates it.
We’re each trying to decide, who is more involved? Who stands to lose the most? What are my odds? I keep a straight face when they show celebrity weddings on the six o’clock news. Am I involved? Who knows.

Someone is ordering a latte, and insisting it be made with SOY milk. His belt is leather. Rummage sale morals.

My painting is still on the wall and there’s a layer of dust collecting along the top of the frame. Sam hates it. He says: “It doesn’t speak to me.”

Of course it doesn’t, it’s a painting. But I don’t say that. I tell him I must just see something he doesn’t see.

“Okay, Van Gogh,” he says.

I tell him I’d rather not talk about my artwork that no one wants.

“It’s not the worst piece in here,” he says. He gestures to his cup which is way too thick on one side. You can see the finger indentations from whoever lovingly sculpted it. What a piece of crap.
He is comparing my art to someone’s vain attempt at functionality. I wonder how long this can really last.

It’s been five months and we are annoying the hell out of each other. His idea of a romantic gesture is buying condoms that are ribbed for my pleasure. We never talk about anything beyond the moment. I don’t show him my paintings anymore.

At the shop I order a chai tea for nostalgia’s sake, but I don’t drink it. Sam calls my cell phone from a party I didn’t want to go to and tells me I should come. There are a lot of people there, he says. The pot is A-plus. And am I mad at him?

No. I’m not mad.

I just hate feeling alone when I am not alone.
I have to go, I say. I’m fine, I say.

As it is, I have to scream. A group of lesbians are shouting lines from a play between sips of espresso. It is Julius Caesar and all the actors are women. Take that, Shakespeare. Everyone is wearing togas. Even the director.

Static.

You’re breaking up, I say. Call me later.

The girl playing Brutus is at all the same protests as me, but she works at the Gap.

Et tu?

I look at my painting that’s been hanging there forever and realize that the wallpaper is probably darker underneath it.

Sam is infinite distances away.

It’s been almost a year and I’ve developed a taste for chai tea.

“You’re breaking up with me?” he says.

I hate that he says it like that. I’m not breaking anything. I’m not putting a baseball bat to the time we’ve spent together. I’m not taking the way his pillow smells and backing over it with my car. I’m not running between us with one of those machete swords and chopping at everything in my path. Everything will be intact, just stopped short. This is not a complete amputation from my life. I’m putting everything on hold.

I’m just putting you on hold, I say.

“This sucks,” he says.
No kidding, I say.

What is this, a movie? You have to narrate? I say.
He doesn’t even justify it with a response. “Can I ask why?”
He has to ask if he can ask. At this point, we owe each other nothing.
There are a thousand reasons and then there are none. I can’t think of where to begin and then I can’t think of anything at all. The tag on the tablecloth is rubbing against my leg and I glance down at it.
Made in Indonesia. I roll my eyes.

He doesn’t look at me the way he did when we first met. I haven’t been surprised in months. In college, there are no relationships; only getting drunk and screwing. I don’t say any of this.

I say: I dunno.

He looks like he might cry and I try my best to look like that too. But I just don’t feel it. This was resale love. This was someone else’s relationship. The sleeves are too short or the pants are ripped at one seam. I don’t know.

He leaves and I order a chai tea, but it never tastes as good as that first one.

I stayed away from the coffee shop for a little while. I guess I got sick of those Abercrombie and Fitch types who buy clothes at full price that are faded to look like they came from thrift stores. Plus, I heard a rumor that they don’t use free trade coffee after all.

But of course I missed it. Everything, I mean.

So I go back and nothing’s changed. The head of our recycling committee is throwing his plastic juice bottle in the trash.

The owner walks up to me and drops thirty dollars on the table.

“Someone bought your picture,” he says.
I get excited for a minute before I ask.

Who?

“That lady who has a new palm pilot every week and never tips.”

Oh, I say. It wasn’t Sam. And it didn’t even leave a dark spot on the wall.

It’s like it was never there.

Michael Bible

I was lounging on the patio, halfway through my fifth mojito, when she wandered into my yard. She wasn’t screaming for help. She just walked over near the gazebo and sat on my brand new wrought-iron bench.

I couldn’t get the hose to work. I had to get buckets. I poured bucket after bucket, but nothing happened. Then I tried wrapping her in beach towels, but the towels caught fire. My leather jacket caught too, and I had to take it off and stomp on it. Ruined the jacket. I yelled to her, “Stop, drop, and roll,” but she wouldn’t listen.

She’d picked a pretty crappy day to combust on my lawn furniture. I hadn’t been to sleep the night before. Rent was overdue and I had a plane to catch. I was going to see my manager about my new record. I needed a break, bad. My brother, Ralphey, was on his way to pick me up. He was thirty minutes late.

“You want me to call 911?” Opal, my neighbor, called down from her balcony.

“I think she’s done what she’s gonna do,” I said.

“Well, we can’t let her burn down the neighborhood. I’m coming over.”

The flames were reaching higher and higher, burning the leaves off the low limbs.

Opal walked through the gate. Her little dog, Margaret Thatcher, pranced behind her.

“One of your groupies gone crazy over you?” Opal asked.

“I don’t know who it is,” I said. “Did you call 911?”

“They’re on their way,” she yawned. “You got something to drink?”

Her bathrobe flapped open in the wind and exposed one of her breasts.

“There’s a pitcher of mojitos in the kitchen,” I said, but she was gone before I got the words out of my mouth.

Then it was just me, the girl on fire, and Margaret Thatcher. For a second everything was quiet and still. Then Margaret Thatcher gave a little bark. I could hear the sirens coming through the neighborhood.

Opal came back out, stirring her drink with her finger.

“Why do you think she did it?” I asked.

She took a big sip and watched the girl on fire. “You don’t understand women,” she said.

The fire truck arrived. A shrimpy fireman and a plump firewoman. “What do we got here?” they yelled out the window. “Where’s the trouble?”

They drove into the yard and got out. The firewoman unfurled the hose and the fireman grabbed the nozzle. He was having trouble keeping his helmet out of his eyes.

“Ready?” the firewoman yelled. “Ready?”

“Give me a sec,” the fireman said.

“Come on,” the firewoman yelled. “We ain’t got all day.”

“Okay, fine, ready,” the fireman said.

“Ready?”

“I said ready already. Go. Hit it.”

The hose took off in all directions, lifting him off the ground like he was riding a huge serpent come to life. I grabbed Margaret Thatcher and hit the deck.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the firewoman yelled as she killed the water.

“I’m doing my best,” the guy said, catching his breath. “Lay off.”

“Well, you’re best ain’t good enough, rookie. Keep the hose down.”

“Why don’t you let me do my job,” he said. “And you do yours.”

“Your job is to keep the hose down, dickwad. Do it.”

He threw the nozzle down in the grass, “You know what. You’ve had a problem with me from day one, Nina, and I’m sick of it.”

“Do what?”

“I want to know exactly how you feel about me,” he said.

“You want to know exactly how I feel about you? What are you, twelve?”

“If I could just interrupt here for five seconds,” I said. “We got a girl on fire, remember?”

“Hey, I know you,” the firewoman said, turning to me. “You’re that guy with that song.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m that guy with that song.”

“Don’t change the subject, Nina,” the fireman said, pushing his helmet up out of his eyes. “What do you think of me? Tell me.”

He looked up at her. She looked down at him.

“You really, really want to know,” she said.

“Yeah. I really, really want to know.”

The flames went higher. Pretty soon the overhanging limbs caught the trees on fire and it spread to the gazebo. It went up pretty fast. Then it spread to the grass and went straight for the house. Opal and I tried to grab the hose but it was too late.

We watched the house go up like a tinderbox. People came out from the neighborhood and walked into my yard and put their hands on my shoulder. I held little Margaret Thacker and petted her. She was so scared she was shivering.

About an hour and fifteen mojitos later, my brother found me over at Opal’s. I was in a huge leather chair. Opal was in my lap. I was sucking her nipple.

“Where the hell have you been,” I asked.

“Good news,” he said. “I talked to your manager. Your song is burning up the charts in Europe.”

Then I said something smart and we all laughed. Then no one said anything for a very long time.

David Galef

Let’s call him Steve. In May, Steve graduates from a second-tier college in the Midwest, not knowing what to do with himself. He’s thinking about law school, but meanwhile, his mother’s dad never saw the world and wants his grandson to know otherwise, so the old guy springs for a trip to Japan. Steve knows a guy who spent a year there, in Osaka or somewhere, and he had a great time, so off Steve goes on a cheapo flight, crammed into a coach class seat, long American legs folded up like origami. Onboard are all these Asians returning to where Steve’s headed. They fit in their seats just fine.

Steve gets to Osaka after a layover in L.A. and a two a.m. stopover in Honolulu, at which point he’s lost all track of time. For the first week, he stays at a youth hostel in Suita, eating cheap rice balls and touring a bit—seeing Osaka castle, taking a side trip to view some temples in Kyoto, that sort of thing. And he meets some cool people, including a California surfer dude and an English girl who might have slept with him, but then disappears to Hokkaido. He gets acquainted with a lot of trans-continental drifters—drunks from Australia, exchange students from New Zealand—but sees they don’t speak the language or dig the culture much, and all they want to do is head to Nepal, where the ganja is better and cheaper than anywhere else on the planet.

But Steve’s been bankrolled for only two weeks and is nearing the end of his stay when one afternoon he meets someone in Mino Park who teaches English at a nearby training center—business English for a lot of companies, including those guys who made Zeroes during World War II; best not to bring that up, or, on the other hand, Hiroshima.

They like the same retro-grunge rock groups and hit it off pretty well. This guy has been here for almost five years and is finally going back to the States, but he’s got all these connections and passes his job info along before he splits. Since Steve’s got nowhere to go but home and nothing but the prospect of a boring law job if he’s lucky, he makes a quick decision that leads to an interview two days later with a Mr. Nakada at English Pro, who offers him tea and asks a few questions. According to his mother, Steve always did have good, clear English, and he was an English major (of course), but this is the first time in his life anyone told him that his major was good for anything. Mr. Nakada offers him a teaching job starting the week after, with a special salary in escrow until his new visa gets approved.

Meanwhile, Steve sells his return ticket for some quick cash. He uses it for key money and the first month’s rent on a place in Fuku, and yes, he knows a joke when he hears one. Getting a cell phone here is a big deal, so he uses his landlord’s phone to call his folks and let them know what’s up, and they say okay, it’s your life, though his mother is, always will be, a bit concerned. In a few weeks, he’s commuting to work like all the other straphangers on the Hanshin line.

It amazes him that he can already teach, standing in front of a class and posing as an expert. After all, he never got great grades, but here he is, a certified native speaker, laying down the law. After class, the students like to take him out and talk about American culture, picking his brains for dirty words and slang.

One weekend in the park, Steve meets a girl named Junko with two other chicks who soon melt away because Junko is bolder, chats him up, laughs at all his jokes, even the dumb ones. Her English is fluky but not too bad. She says things like “Do you have chance to see Ryoanji in Kyoto?” and “I want go to America one day.” They go out for a coffee shop date and the next time to a movie, where she lets him roam a bit. The third date, it’s back to his place and his narrow bed—jackpot. He never had such luck in the States.

This is such a familiar story, and her name is always Junko.

Junko turns into a steady thing, teaching Steve the language, cooking for him, giving him cultural tips like how to place his chopsticks or the several kinds of bowing. He develops a taste for yakisoba and eel. He even likes listening to some of the tinny Japanese pop; plus, he gets paid just for talking, practically. Hey, he thinks, when he thinks about it at all, this place was made for me. He embraces Japanese culture with a passion, or several passions, getting into aikido and calligraphy, tea lessons (these don’t last), and learning the language, but after mastering hiragana and katakana, he finds that kanji are awfully hard and stops at twenty or so—so long as he doesn’t get lost riding the subway. He does know the characters for Junko’s name, which mean “pure child,” and they have a little laugh about that. She calls him Suteivu, which sounds like “Steve” if he sort of slants his ears.

Steve looks up one day to find that six months have gone, with Junko happily nestled in his arms. Bits and pieces of Junko reside in his apartment: her Love Me Tender shampoo, a toothbrush with a blue mermaid decal. Things seem to be getting serious, and once or twice she’s mentioned taking him to see her folks in Chiba, though so far it’s just talk. Junko’s still a college student at Kobe Jogakuin, and he’s met some of her friends, who all seem, well, kinda young. They even had a scene or two about that, the closest they’ve come to an actual quarrel, but he’s resolved to try harder. This could be it, he thinks.

His friends back home are surprised, but hey, what do they know about what life’s like in Japan? Or what life’s like for a gaijin, which isn’t the same, as Junko occasionally points out when he gets annoyed over something they can’t do, like walk around downtown Umeda with his hand jammed into a tight back pocket of her You-Me jeans. What he’s got, she tells him, is Gaijin Power, the ability to make your own way in a closed society, to be taller, stranger, or just different. Which is kind of funny, since he’s making every effort to fit in, even going to the sento on Sunday.

It’s hard to spot where the downturn begins. He finally realizes that his job is going nowhere, so he gets irritated at his students and lets it show. He gets sick of rice one day and binges on bad pizza and burgers. He has a fight with Junko, sweet Junko, over absolutely nothing. She makes some comment about how he could at least make some effort to conform, and then it hits him: The homogeneity of this culture—why has he never noticed it, all those brown-eyed, black-haired people and their patient faces, bodies in lockstep on the sidewalk? He needs air.

Also, it’s been almost a year now, and he feels that he’s not utilizing his full potential, something a guidance counselor once told him. Hell, he could be teaching bonehead English to tired office workers for the next twenty years, and a few incidents have made it clear to him that he’ll never be Japanese. He hasn’t even met Junko’s parents.

He feels as if he’s just drifting here and figures it’s time to go home and get a real job. A few of his friends are already partway through law school or training for something or other. He buys a plane ticket—at least he’s saved some money here—and packs up, surprised at how little crap he has accumulated. At the airport, Junko (with whom he’s already broken up twice), gives him a daruma and tells him to make a wish by poking out one of its eyes,

“—and when your wish come true, then poke out other eye.”

He nods and half blinds the round doll, but he doesn’t tell Junko what his wish is. She stays at the departure area a long time, though he remains at his gate.

Back in the States, he finds that just riding a bus is strange: so many different kinds of humans. And so many things to do, things he put on hold while he was away, like a career. He applies to law schools and gets in at a third-tier place in the South. He’ll try again. That will be his goal, to get in somewhere half decent, and it helps fight against the aimlessness he felt during his final months in Japan.

For the next year, when he’s still living at home, trying to find his connection, late at night, he thinks of Junko, who has emailed him uncountable times and called him twice. She even wrote him some real letters—calligraphy like her black hair flowing down the page, and he knows he really should answer her more often, but instead he likes to pretend that she’s there in bed with him, calling him Suteivu and running her slender white fingers up and down his body as he closes his eyes and wills himself to sleep. For the rest of his life, long after he has become a mediocre lawyer with a wife and a mortgage and two kids, he’ll dream of Japan and tell himself that one day he’ll go back.

Desiree Parker

From my vantage point of near-omniscience, I can give a clear account of what went wrong. You see, I accidentally discovered something about her that ought to have remained hidden in the dirty folds of her private self.

Her name is Meg. I can barely think of my mouth releasing that syllable without feeling a tremor of the heart. Yet I wouldn’t call it love. There is an undercurrent of disgust and fear and shame that accompanies this tremor and makes it unpleasant. Still, I am thinking “Meg,” right this very minute.

I am working through a way to explain it all to her while I walk this crumbling sidewalk that my feet have known for two years. I am unflinchingly narrow-minded. I am a selfish man. I am walking to her office carrying a bunch of daisies and I am going to apologize. It is quite a story, if you care to hear it.

After sex one Sunday morning, not so many weeks ago, she went to the bakery across the street from our place. She went to get me a birthday bagel and weekend paper that we liked only for the crossword. She answered the literature questions and the political stuff; I got the pop culture ones and the history. We cheated on the rest, but we still felt as though we accomplished something by filling in all the neat, intersecting blocks. Together. Moments like this—all our poignant acts of domesticity—they reminded me that I could have sex with her at (nearly) any time I wanted, and this made me blissfully happy. Plus, we did not argue about anything and we had enough money to survive and have this little bit of excess for the paper and pastries and other random things that help to pass the time. We were at the point in the movie where things are too perfect and something needs to happen in order for the plot to progress, in order for the hero to be challenged, and this is always good fodder for a story.

The catalyst for our conflict came in the guise of what I thought at first was a moldy cookie left over from Halloween. It was a porous, crusty-looking black triangle of a thing that I found under the guestroom bed as I was looking for her diary. It was almost too heavy to be a cookie, although I am no good at judging these things and it felt more like a doorstop than a cookie. I did know Meg to be a rotten baker, and a too-dense cookie was a likely outcome of one of her kitchen endeavors. The thing was wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into a shoebox, though; this was not really a place where a stray cookie might have disappeared to, but certainly a place where a diary would have been.

That was as far as I got with my investigation. I was on my knees with her cookie when she found me.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I found this,” I told her.

“I mean why are you looking here? Why would you look in my box?”

“Why do you have an old cookie in a shoebox?”

“That’s not the fucking point. I don’t look in your shoeboxes.” She flipped her silky hair over her shoulder in a gesture reminiscent of a bull pawing the ground. A charge was imminent.

“I don’t have any shoeboxes with weird trash in them,” I said. Women are often very illogical when they want to argue. I think that maybe men’s cool reasoning might make them feel a little bit inadequate. To soothe her, I said, “You can look at my things. It’s okay.”

She took the cookie away. “I don’t want to see your shit. I want you to respect my privacy.”

“You didn’t tell me that the cookie in your shoebox was private.” I have had these discussions before, or similar ones, with my sister when we were children. It was unnerving to be in the same situation with my lover.

“It’s not a cookie. Okay? Just go eat your damn bagel.”

“Okay, so it’s not a cookie. Good. That would have been weird. What is it?”

“It’s none of your business. Get out.”

“How about you get out. Maybe I want to eat my bagel in my own guest room on my birthday. You get out.”

She did what I asked. She was easy to get along with in this way.

I didn’t see her again until that night, right before dinner. She came in and got dressed so we could meet some friends at our favorite café, but she didn’t say much while she did it. She put on her blue pants with the black pinstripes that make her ass look phenomenal. She also wore her gray sweater that her ex bought her one Christmas. I thought it might be a good time to ask about the non-cookie.

“So what is it, if it’s not a cookie?”

She started to cry. “God, I don’t understand you at all.”

“The thing. In the box. That looks like an old cookie.” I said it very slowly.

“Fine. You want to know? Fine.”

And so she told me. Her dad was a paleontologist, which I knew, but I didn’t know that he had worked at the Natural History Museum as the head of the Marine Vertebrates for eleven years, which I didn’t care too much about, but I saw where this was going so I listened relatively closely. The non-cookie was actually a Megalodon tooth that he had stolen from the museum before she was born, as a souvenir of his obsession with the giant prehistoric shark. It was a big fucking tooth from a big shark, fifty feet long. He had talked about it constantly when she was a girl. He was known back then as a sort of Ahab of the museum; he had gone so far as to spend most of the small inheritance from his dead mother to fund an expedition to find an intact fossilized skeleton of the beast, and he nearly accomplished his task, finding the entire torso and lower jaw near a fishing village in Greenland. I lost all interest after discovering that the thing was a tooth. That was really all she had to say: “It’s a tooth.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are you ready to go?”

“That’s not why I had it in the box. Not just because my dad was really into these sharks.”

“Okay.” I thought maybe I should wear a blazer, since she looked so nice.

She sat on the bed.

“We’re going to be late.” I pulled my navy blazer off its hanger.

“I was named after it. The Megalodon. It’s on my birth certificate. It’s my name.”

“Huh.”

“Really.”

“What’s your middle name, Tyrannosaurus?”

She opened her purse and handed me her ID. Megalodon Elizabeth Murphy. “He named me that because when I was born, I had a tail and a fin. A caudal appendage and a benign schwannoma. They’re just normal medical things that, you know, happen, and they take them off. No big deal.

“They didn’t show mom. Just him. Like it was some big scientific joke, that Doctor Murphy would have a fish baby because he was so crazy about the friggin’ sharks.” She blushed like a virgin, not looking at me.

“He told his colleagues. That’s all. He told my mom that the little scars were from small lesions that had to be removed. And then he told me when I was in high school that I wasn’t just named after a creepy giant fish, I was one.”

I thought about having that name in school. I couldn’t get past that at first. “Did they tease you about your name at school? Did they do the shark movie music?” I do it for her. I hum the theme from JAWS.

She doesn’t laugh, which makes me want to snicker.

“Nobody knew. They called me Meg. Mom never put my real name on anything but my birth certificate. She hated my father for it, the stupid fucking name, but she never fought him on it. I didn’t care. It’s no big deal, really.”

If it wasn’t a big deal, there would be no cookie-looking monster shark shrine under the guestroom bed. I was polite enough not to say as much right then. I did the boyfriend thing that you do when your girl looks fat in her dress, you ignore it and try to forget about it. Fah-gedda-boudit, you know, like Al Pacino would say.

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll keep calling you Meg, then. Let’s go.” Quick peck on cheek, coats on, out the door, under-rug-swept.

Okay, so she had some growths. Some cells that went a little haywire. I was telling myself it was nothing all through dinner, trying not to picture her with a giant gray fin and feral, pointy teeth while I watched her get drunk in the candlelight. But once we got home and she passed out, I snuck off into the bathroom with the laptop and checked out some stuff.

When you Google Megalodon, this movie poster picture comes up of a giant shark eating a submarine, like Jaws on steroids. Of course, I wrote the name of the flick down for later, just to fuel my growing sicko fascination with this new information about Meg. Megalodon. I looked up ‘caudal appendage’ and ‘schwannoma’, and despite my poor estimation of the spelling, I found what I wanted.

They are not typical infant problems. They are rare. And nowhere in the eleven pages that Google brought up has there ever been a case of both occurring on one child, except for one in 1978 in Brooktown, Ohio: a little girl named Meg Elizabeth Murphy. There is a medical paper on her. Seriously. But there were no pictures of her freakish growths aside from the ones that were materializing in my mind.

At this point I was giddy with the new perspective I had gotten on my girlfriend. I wished that she had never told me, that I had never asked about the cookie, and that instead I had pulled back the curtain myself and revealed a circus sideshow of freaks in their little formaldehyde jars—the two-headed babies and mermaid children that were too weird to survive in the world.

Needless to say, I rented the movie and watched it at my friend Evan’s place two days later. Imagine a Great White’s beady eye coolly appraising you, and then triple the size. It is not an M&M, but the lens of a camera; it is the glowing eye of HAL, the murderous machine in space. It is a black hole.

The film itself was campy, but, fueled by the evidence I had seen that this creature had once existed—did exist in my own apartment in some small way, in a giant hunk of a fossilized tooth—I was spellbound.

At home that afternoon I decided to skip giving my last lecture and instead I lay on the guestroom bed fondling the tooth. I drifted in and out of a heavy doze and I dreamed of making love to Meg, running my hands over her slippery skin, kissing her salty neck. In the surreal brightness of my fantasy she began to writhe like a fish, jerking her torso right and left. A lithe mermaid struggling to get back to the ocean. Of course, this turned me on. There is nothing like a helpless beautiful creature thrashing against you—two slick, hot bodies working to get whatever it is that they want from one another. Then the wet hotness turned almost too slippery, and when I looked down at my chest we were both covered in blood and I saw that she had little, ridged fins sprouting from her upper body. They were digging into me like when you try to catch a fish in your hands and rub the fins the wrong way. I pushed away from her and she opened her mouth to protest, but when her lips pulled back from her face there were rows and rows of little black-cookie shark teeth, each one glistening with saliva, and now my sex dream was a horror movie and I was going to be consumed in a purely undesirable way.

“What are you doing?” I heard Meg’s voice, sharp with reality.

I woke up. There she was, watching me. With her eyes. They were a dark brown—how could I not have noticed it before?—almost black. Almost beady and predatory.

“I—I was resting,” I said.

“With my tooth?”

“Well.”

“What is your sick fascination with that thing?”

“My sick fascination? I’m not the one who hid it in a treasure box.” I put the tooth behind my back as though I could hide it from her.

“Look. You know that it has a sentimental meaning in my life. That’s all. Just—you’re creeping me out now with it. I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“Me too.”

She scowled and her scrunched eyebrows emphasized those eyes. The JAWS theme started up in my head.

“You were the one rifling through my stuff! I’m the one who should be upset, not you! What the hell is your problem? You don’t like my name? Fuck you!”

She lunged towards me and made a grab for the tooth, but I held it up out of her reach. She jumped onto me, panther-like, in a squat position. She used her sexy legs to thrust herself upwards like a superhero and I thought for a moment she might go airborne but she just leapt up and snatched the tooth from my hand.

I knocked her onto the bed and tried to pin her with my weight, but she was writhing around and it was just like my dream. I was scared. This was a woman that I didn’t know. There are things about her that I might never know. Maybe she was a terrorist spy or maybe if we got married she would lose her job at the marketing firm and get fat and surly. I didn’t know any of this, any of what might happen, and then she had the tooth and she was standing above me holding the damn thing up in the air like a torch, like she was the Statue of Liberty, beautiful and aloof and powerful, and there I was sprawled on the bed, defeated, deflated.

I grabbed the first thing my hand touched on the nightstand. Unfortunately, it was a soapstone sculpture of an elephant, one that no doubt her father had given her, because it was just the kind of thing he was always getting her and she put his crap all over the apartment even though she hated it all. I threw it at her head, crack.

It hit her forehead and landed on the wood floor. Slivers of the fragile stone exploded in every direction. The tooth fell from her hand. Her hand drifted down to her side and she fell slowly sideways and onto the floor. She was out cold and I thought, shit, she could be dead and then I would have had to hide her body, and then I realized the sickness of what I had just thought and then I thought for an instant that maybe I wasn’t the center of the universe for anyone but myself.

She was a Megalodon. She could devour me.

I scrambled off the bed and knelt beside her to see if she was, indeed, dead, but she groaned and moved her head left and right. There was a gash on her forehead an inch or so across that was bleeding like a horror-movie stab wound, and my heart was pounding like I was in some Edgar Allan Poe story.

“Fuck you,” she mumbled, and I was so pleased that she was alive and that I hadn’t killed her that I said, “Thank God.”

“Get out.”

“You’re bleeding,” I pointed out.

“You threw a fucking rock at my head.”

“It was that elephant sculpture. You hated it anyway, admit it.”

She began to cry. “My dad gave it to me,” she said in a loud voice.

“What is it with you and your damned father?” I yelled at her.

“Don’t yell at me!” she yelled. “Get out!”

So I got up off the floor, snuck the tooth into one of the pockets of my cargo pants, and left.

I have been at Evan’s ever since. She hasn’t called me and she hasn’t called the cops. While I was at work, she dropped off my favorite duffel bag filled with all the things I need: my razor, my lecture notes, clothes, deodorant, my meds, and the book I had been reading that is by my favorite author in the world. And she packed my mail. My God, she is so wonderful. Who would do that—who would be so thoughtful when I had stolen her most prized possession and tried to kill her?

This morning I was drinking Evan’s over-roasted, muddy coffee and looking at the tooth, and I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad that she was named after an extinct, colossal, predatory shark. And of course she loved me, how could she not?

I am somewhat recovered from my attack of self-awareness that was precipitated by that fight only a week ago. I feel bold enough to be here, now, walking my own Trail of Tears to her office, but I am not crying because I do not cry.

I am distraught enough that I would cry, though, if I were a woman. I want her back desperately, enough to go back and try to explain myself to her, to apologize.

In the pocket of my coat is her tooth, all wrapped up in newspaper. I can feel its satisfying weight by my side and it is like our child now. This thing is bigger than the both of us; we have to stay together for the sake of the kid.

I walk through the door of her office and she looks up at me from behind her desk. She is wearing the brown suit I got her last fall. She does not look devastated; I do. I am scruffy with the bloodshot eyes of a wino and the breath of an old dog that licks itself too much.

“You,” she says. “You took it.”

“Hi,” I say. I show her the pitiful flowers, but I know instantly that it is not enough.

“Get out.” She does not look at me.

“You say that to me a lot”

She doesn’t answer or even look at me.

“Nice stitches,” I say. “They make you look like you don’t take any shit.”

“I don’t.” She stands up and then leans forward on her desk, showing off the ragged row of black cat intestine holding her damaged skin together. Now she looks at me.

“Right.” I take out the tooth and lay it gently in front of her. It peeks out of its newsprint blanket, the black point aimed accusingly at me.

She starts to cry a little, and I would, too, if I weren’t a man. Instead, I touch her hand, just the fingers.

“If you come back to the apartment, I might kill you,” she says.

“That’s better than being at Evan’s place.”

She scowls and pulls her fingers away. “Why the hell are you even here?”

This is where I should say how sorry I am, how I never meant to hurt her and all those other things men say when they really screwed up, but these are just not things I would say, ever. “I don’t know,” I tell her. It’s the truth. “I need to be around you.”

“I still might call the cops,” she says.

I nod at her, defeated for the first time, and not interested in running away.

Her scowl becomes a little less dark. “I was gonna have lunch before I decide what to do with you. You want some pizza?” she asks. She sniffles.

“Okay.”

“Three-cheese?”

“Whatever you want.”

“That’s your favorite,” she says.

“Just no anchovies,” I say. “I’m done with fish. Little ones, anyway.”

She laughs. So do I. Her teeth are in me fast.

Mark Barkawitz

“How much, Marty?” Sarah Fields asked. She lived just down the block. She had come to his house to buy some pot.

“Twenty-five bucks.”

“Is it good?”

“Wouldn’t sell you anything I didn’t smoke myself.”

Sarah looked closely at the Columbian weed at the bottom of the clear baggie. The living room was dark with the curtains drawn on all the windows.

“That’s the last of it,” he said. “You can have it for twenty. I give pregnant women a discount.” He smiled.

She took the money from the pocket of her flowered muumuu and gave it to him. It was just about the only thing she wore now that the baby was almost due. She was a big woman anyway, almost a head taller than he. And the springy, black hair, which rose inches above her dark face, made her appear even more so.

He sat down on the couch and counted the money. There were a lot of ones.

“I’m glad I got this from you before you ran out.” She put the baggie of weed in her pocket where the money had been. Leaving, she leaned on the door knob a moment. “I haven’t been feeling myself lately. I was just about to get a little wine from Sal’s Market to see if it helped any, but then I thought of you.”

“You’d better not,” he said. “You know you shouldn’t drink while you’re pregnant. Take a toke. It’s better for you. How much longer till the baby’s due?”

“Not for three weeks yet?”

“Boy or a girl?”

“I’m hoping for a girl. I already got Lamar and Joey.”

“Yeah, I guess two boys are enough for anyone.”

“Anymore likely to kill me,” she said. “I better get back before they wreck the house. Thanks a lot, Marty.”

“Take care of yourself, Sarah. And no booze. And don’t go smoking your brains out either. One a day. Just like the vitamins.”

“Yes, doctor.” She laughed and went out the door.

He looked at the money in his hand. Marty Hepp sold pot to his friends and other smokers he had become acquainted with on the block. Someone had to. But that was all he sold, no pills or blow or anything like that. He didn’t like any of that other crap. But pot he liked. And he was between jobs. So he sold enough to help pay the rent, monthly bills, and tuition down at the community college, where he had signed up for classes next semester. The rest he smoked. And he liked the neighborhood. The people were friendly. Just last month, when old Al and Rose, who lived next door, were painting their apartment, he and a few of the other neighbors had pitched in and helped. Al had lung cancer from too many cigarettes and Rose was a bit dimwitted, the result of brain surgery years before. So he and the others hadn’t charged them for their labor. He picked up the tray from the coffee table. There were a few buds and some loose pot on it. More than enough for a joint, so he crushed one of the buds between his fingers and sifted out the seeds. Taking a paper from the Zig-Zag pack, he rolled a jay and was about to light it when someone knocked on the door.

“Yeah?”

“It’s me—Lamar,” his small voice answered from the other side of the closed door.

“Lamar? Just a minute.” Lamar was Sarah’s oldest boy. Marty put the pot out of sight in the roll-top desk next to the TV, then opened the front door. “Hi, Lamar. What’s up, man?”

“My mom wants to know if she can borrow a couple a’ papers?” He was tall for ten and dark-skinned like Sarah.

“What kind of paper?”

“You know, rollin’ papers. My mom don’t wanna walk to Sal’s Market, and he won’t sell ‘em to me.”

“Oh. Okay. Wait a minute.” He pushed the door half-closed, walked over to the desk, and pulled a few papers from the Zig-Zag pack, though he wasn’t sure at all if he should give Lamar the papers. Little kids had big mouths, and he wasn’t sure how Lamar would feel about someone who sold pot to his mom. But he didn’t want Sarah walking to the store in her condition and having a miscarriage or something. So he went back and laid the papers in Lamar’s open palm. The boy’s long fingers closed around the thin, white papers like the legs of a crab.

“Thanks, Marty. See ya’.” Lamar ran off the porch and down the street. It was just getting dark.

Marty closed the door, got out the joint, and lit it, then turned on the TV and sat on the couch, smoking.

The next day, he was up early because he had to drive down south to John and Casey’s house to pick up some more pot. He put the sixteen-hundred dollars he kept stashed under the corner of his bedroom rug into his pocket, made himself a smoothie for breakfast, and filled a thermos with coffee. Wearing shorts and beach flaps and with a joint in the pocket of his denim work shirt, he left the house. He climbed into his ‘68 Ford Fairlane and drove to the freeway.

Going the other way, into Los Angeles, the rush-hour traffic was bad as usual. Across the freeway the cars were already backed up. He was glad he wasn’t on that side. Going towards San Diego, there wasn’t so much traffic. At nine a.m., it was already starting to heat up and get smoggy. Typical September in L.A. He poured himself a cup of coffee, turned on the radio in the dash, and lit the joint. The news was on. It was mostly bad: bloodshed in the Middle-East, a hole in the ozone layer, raw sewage in Santa Monica bay, and the AQMD predicting a stage-two smog alert for L.A. county. He smoked and listened; his eyes glazed and became heavier with each puff. The world outside became softer—less real. As if someone had honed-down the edges.

Because he preferred the slow lane whenever he smoked (Life in the Fairlane, he often joked.), it took two-and-a-half hours to get to the Leucadia off-ramp in north San Diego county. He got off the freeway and onto the familiar streets—many without sidewalks—of the little coastal town. Back here, a mile or so from the beach, there were still green avocado orchards and hothouses filled with red and white and orange and purple flowers and even some billy goats in back yards. But the condos were spreading inland like a disease from the coast. It was almost noon and it was hot, but not oppressively, like in L.A. The sky was clear. No smog alerts down here. He turned the corner of a small street and pulled into the dirt driveway of his connection’s house at the end of the block. Primo, a large German shepherd, and Duke, a Dobie, came growling out to meet him. As he stepped from his car, the hair was already raised on their backs, even though they’d met him a few times before.

“Hi, Primo and Duke.” He offered his hand for the dogs to sniff. “How you doing, boys?” The dogs wagged their tails when they heard their names called and recognized his scent. But they were still suspicious and moved stiffly around him. He patted both dogs. “It’s okay, boys.” They accompanied him to the front door. The hair was still up on their backs, and Primo, the shepherd, walked in half-circles, eyeing Marty as he knocked. “Hey, John, you home? It’s me, Marty. Let me in before your dogs eat me.” From inside the door, metal clicked on metal as the dead bolt slid open. The door opened about six inches. John’s suntanned face stared back from behind the chain. His eyes, yellowed and bloodshot, darted from Marty’s face to reconnoiter the area behind him. John shut the door, slid off the chain, and opened the door all the way.

“Hi, Marty.” John shook his hand, pulling him through the doorway as he did. He locked the door behind them. He was wearing new, blue overalls with no shirt or shoes and he reeked of fresh pot. All the shades were drawn on the windows, as usual, so it was dark inside. There was a strong, piney fragrance in the house.

“Come in the back room.” John led him to the door of a closed room and knocked. “Hey, lemme in, man. It’s okay.”

The door opened and they walked in. Casey, the guy who’d opened the door for them, sat back down on one of the three, wooden chairs at a wooden table—the only furniture in the room—and began trimming one of the plants with scissors. Marty had seen him the last time he was here. He was John’s partner, barefoot and wearing swimming trunks, a typical So Cal surfer/seller. His hair was very blond and he, too, was very tan. There were pot plants hanging upside down in every corner of the room. Plywood covered the only window. A bare bulb on the ceiling lit the room. On the kitchen table with some dried plants were a triple-beam scale, another pair of scissors, and a large pack of zip-lock baggies. On the bare, wooden floor were more baggies filled with pot.

John locked the door, then walked over to the table and picked up a bud that Casey had carefully manicured, cutting away all the large, green leaves and uncovering the fat, purplish-green bud. He handed it to Marty.

“How’s that look to ya’?”

Marty held it up to the yellow light in the center of the room, then under his nose and sniffed its piney fragrance. He bit off a small piece with his front teeth. Chewy. Sticky. It was definitely good pot. Just how good would determine the price. “Have any papers?”

“Already got one rolled.” John pulled out a reefer from the breast pocket of his overalls.

“I’d rather roll this one, if you don’t mind.”

John laughed. “Sure, man. Still don’t trust anyone, eh? Papers are on the table.”

“I buy for a lot of friends.” He sat down at the table and began to break up the bud. It was sticky and hard to pull off the stem, so he used the scissors to cut it up. Taking a leaf from the Zig-Zag pack, he rolled the pot into a thin reefer. He lit it, took a hit, and exhaled slowly, tasting the sweet smoke as it blew out over his tongue and lips. He took another draw, then inspected the end of the joint. The resins were already starting to build up.

“Very nice.”

“Dose a’ the good stuff,” said John.

“How much?”

“Two for a half-pound.”

“Two-thousand?”

“Yup.” John smiled.

“You guys are killing me. I know it’s strong medicine, but two grand is a little steep.”

“It’s dangerous these days.” John took the jay from Marty and took a hit. He explained as he exhaled: “The Man’s bustin’ fields every day. We’re damn lucky we got this crop in. Right, Casey?”

Casey nodded. “We can’t grow much here, but what we grow is the best. That’s a deal, bro. Once you break this up, you can turn it to those friends a’ yours for an easy grand profit an’ some head stash.”

“I don’t know if the smokers on my block can afford this stuff?”

“Don’t worry about those chumps,” Casey added. “They take no risk. It’s just like Prohibition in the Thirties. Cops mostly bust runners and distillers, guys like us. We get caught, we go to jail. You, too, Marty. They’d make a real she-man outta ya’ in there,” he joked.

“Eighteen,” Marty said.

John looked at Casey, then back at him. “You have cash?”

“I have sixteen with me. I can bring the rest in a couple days.”

“Do you believe this guy?” John asked. “Credit and a break, too. Nineteen. And make sure you’re back here on time. Our rent’s due next week.”

“I’ll be back.”

“We know,” John said. “You have a good credit rating with us.”

“Besides,” Casey added, “you’ll need your prescription refilled for those friends a’ yours.” He smiled. There was a little piece of green pot—like spinach—stuck between his front teeth.

A couple days later, around midnight, there was a knock on Marty’s front door. He’d fallen asleep on the couch, his shoes off and only his Levis and socks on. He wasn’t sure where he was when he first awoke. The TV was still on. An undercover cop was dressed like a fag, but he was beating the hell out of some poor guy. There was more knocking at the door.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” He yawned and rubbed his neck, which was stiff from the position in which he’d been lying. He opened the door. It was Lamar.

“Hi, Marty. You sleepin’?”

“Naw, man. Not anymore. What’s up?”

“My mom’s havin’ the baby an’ she wants to know if you can drive her to the hospital?”

“What? She’s having it now?”

“Yep. That’s what she told me.”

“Now, huh? And she wants me to take her?”

“Uh huh. She called Auntie Barbara, but she’s still out on a date or somethin’.”

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

Lamar leaned closer to the screen door. “You all right, Marty?”

“Me? Yeah, man.” He yawned again. “Tell your mom I’ll be right over.”

“Thanks, Marty.” Lamar broke from the porch like a greyhound. He was tall for ten. In the yellow moonlight his thin frame looked like a shadow as he cut across the grass and down the block for home.

Marty turned off the TV and put on a sweatshirt, then ran out of his house and across the front yard towards the old Fairlane in the driveway. The grass was wet and now so were his socks; he’d forgotten to put on shoes. What the hell? He was just driving her. And it was still summer-like in L.A., so his feet weren’t cold. Just wet. He backed the old car out and drove to Sarah’s place, where the porch light was on. The front door opened. She was wearing the same muumuu with a green Army jacket over her shoulders and fuzzy, purple slippers on her feet. She waddled towards the car. Lamar ran out of the house to help her. Marty opened the door for her and slid the bench seat all the way back, so she had more room, even though his feet barely reached the pedals now. She plopped into the seat.

“How you feeling?”

“Not real good. I’m very close.”

“Which hospital?”

“Huntington.”

“Lamar, you coming?” he asked the boy.

Lamar closed the car door for his mom. “Naw. I gotta watch Joey.” Joey was standing in the open, front doorway now. He was only four, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to be tall like Lamar. And his skin wasn’t dark like Lamar’s. They really didn’t look like brothers.

“Okay, man.” He put the transmission in Drive. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Bye.” Lamar waved and his mom waved back, as Marty accelerated away from the curb. He raced to the corner, but had to stop for a red light. He wasn’t sure what to say or ask, so he turned on the radio but kept it low. He looked over at Sarah.

“You okay?”

She nodded, then her faced tightened. “Contraction,” she explained and a little groan passed through her clenched teeth. “You better hurry.”

“Okay.” The light was still red. He looked in both directions. There was no traffic, so he drove through the intersection. He didn’t care that it was illegal so long as it was safe. He needed to get Sarah to the hospital on time. As he sped through the streets, he began to imagine the worst. What if she had it now? In the Fairlane! He stopped for another red light, checked the cross traffic, then drove through the intersection. He imagined the cops red-lighting him. Where’s the fire? He imagined the Fairlane escorted behind a flashing cop car. Then he imagined himself handcuffed and in their back seat. Sarah groaned again. This time louder. Another contraction. They were just minutes apart. He didn’t know much about pregnant women but he knew that meant she was close. Really close. He kept his foot pressed to the floor on the accelerator pedal and the tires squealed around each corner.

It was normally a fifteen-minute drive in traffic to the hospital from their place. He cut the drive time almost in half. He tried parking in the Emergency Drive-In area—he figured their predicament warranted it—but the security guard wouldn’t let them. “Ambulances only.” Marty explained about Sarah, but it did no good. He had to park on the street.

Sarah began to climb out of the parked car. “Thanks, Marty.”

He ran around the car and helped her out. “Want me to go in with you?”

“I can go alone.”

“I’ll go with you. A lady should have an escort when she’s having a baby. Come on.” He put his arm around the back of her waist. She put her arm around his shoulder and leaned on him. They walked into the Emergency Room together. A dozen or so people, sitting or standing around the waiting area, turned and stared at them. He was aware they made a strange-looking couple—he a small, white man in stocking feet; she a big, black woman in flowered muumuu, Army jacket, and fuzzy, purple feet. They walked up to the reception desk, behind which sat a middle-aged woman in wire-rimmed glasses with tightly-bunned hair.

“She’s having a baby,” he said to the receptionist.

The receptionist took out a form and laid it on the desk.

“Now,” he said, disregarding the form. “She’s having it now.”

The receptionist looked up and Sarah nodded, then groaned—another contraction. Within thirty seconds, a male nurse had Sarah in a wheelchair and was pushing her through the swinging doors marked “Emergency” in red. Marty waved until the doors swung shut and he couldn’t see her anymore, then turned and started to leave.

“Just a minute, sir.” It was the tightly-bunned receptionist. “You’ll have to fill out this form for your wife. They’re taking her right up to Maternity.”

He walked back over to the desk. “She’s not my wife. Just a friend.”

“And the husband?” she asked.

“I don’t think there is one.”

“Insurance?”

He shrugged. He didn’t know, but doubted it. Sarah hadn’t worked outside the house since her pregnancy.

“Are you responsible for her then? Should we call you if there are any problems?” She was scribbling something on the forms.

“I’m not responsible for anything. You can call me if you want, but it’s like I said—I’m just a friend. I know she has a mother somewhere. And a sister Barbara. But I don’t know their phone numbers.” So he left his name and number. Just in case.

He drove back to Leucadia the next day with the three-hundred dollars—the high-end bud was selling fast—that he owed to John and Casey. It was another nice day. He took care of business quickly, then decided to go to the beach. That’s what he liked most about his job; it left him plenty of free time. Most of his friends and customers were in the nine-to-five trap. He was glad to have gotten away from that for awhile. Even if it were only a temporary respite. He parked his car in the lot on the cliff overlooking Beacons, one of his favorite surf spots. There was a small swell running with waves breaking about three-and-four-foot with nice shape. A slight breeze blew out of the north, but it wasn’t enough to cause any ocean chop. He cursed himself for having left his surfboard at home on the garage rafters. A poor decision made in haste (he hadn’t felt like taking the time to put the roof racks on the Fairlane) as he was leaving the house that morning. He chalked it up to a lack of sleep from the previous night’s emergency escapade. But he figured a joint might get him a ride. So he put a pack of matches and a couple jays in the pocket of his T-shirt, grabbed his towel, and headed down the zigzag steps that led down the cliffs to the beach below.

The sun was sparkling on the water. It was mid-week, mid-day, and school was back in session, so there weren’t too many surfers in the water. He spotted three young surfers with their sticks on the beach, sat down near them, and lit one of the joints. When they looked over, he held it up and asked: “Want a hit?”

All three came over. By the time they had finished the joint, he’d borrowed one of their boards and a shorty wetsuit. Even though the water was still pretty warm this time of year, he liked the insulated security a wetsuit offered. He spent the rest of the day in and out of the water—catching waves, getting high, joking with his new friends, Tom, Larry, and Kevin, who had wild, curly, red hair and liked to be called Neptune. Marty didn’t leave the beach until late afternoon. Instead of rush hour traffic on the freeways, he drove the coastal route, as the sun began to set—bleeding red, gold, orange—over the ocean’s horizon. He was in no hurry; Life in the Fairlane, he sang to himself—a take-off on an old Eagles’ song. He stopped in Laguna Beach for a late lunch at a natural foods store: an avocado sandwich with sprouts and tomato on wheat berry bread with a big glass of orange juice. He was famished from surfing all afternoon. He remembered a girl. They had had lunch at the same wobbly table. Had almost married. He wondered where she was now? Didn’t matter. That wave had crashed and washed over the sands.

It was dark by the time he got home. He took a shower, read a little, and had started making a late dinner when the phone rang. He turned down the heat on the zucchini and covered the rice, then went in the front room to answer.

“Hello.”

“This is Huntington Hospital. I’m Doctor Davis. Is this Mr. Hepp?”

“Yeah.”

“You brought a Miss Sarah Fields into the Emergency Room last night?”

“Yeah. How is she? Boy or girl?”

“It’s a little girl.”

“That’s great. Sarah was hoping for a girl.”

“Mr. Hepp, we’re trying to locate Miss Field’s mother. Do you have any idea how we can get in touch with her? I’m afraid it’s rather urgent.”

“Urgent? What’s wrong?”

“We need to get in touch with her mother.”

“I don’t know how to get in touch with her mother. Is there something wrong with the baby?”

“I’m afraid I can’t give out that kind of information unless you’re a relative.”

“Look. I’m her neighbor. I brought her in there. She doesn’t have a husband and you can’t find her mother. I’m about the closest to a relative you’re going to come up with presently. Now, what’s wrong?”

“Well,” the doctor paused, “maybe you can help. Miss Fields died this morning.”

“Died?” He felt his legs weaken. He sat down on the arm of the couch.

“I’m sorry. We did all we could. There were complications with the birth. And she had a violent reaction to the anesthesia. She went into shock. We couldn’t resuscitate her. The baby’s fine though.”

He didn’t say anything, so the doctor continued:

“Her two boys were in here earlier. Apparently, they had taken the bus down here. I sat them down myself and tried to explain. I asked about the grandmother, but I’m afraid I couldn’t get much out of them. I left to get a nurse to watch them but when we returned, they were already gone.”

“They probably went home. I’ll go down and check.”

“And would you try to get their grandmother to call us?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hepp. And again, I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah.” He hung up the phone, but just sat there awhile. Dead? Then he remembered the boys, grabbed a shirt, and hurried out the front door.

The evening outside had turned cool. His hair was still wet from the shower, and again, he didn’t have on any shoes. He hurried past the Fairlane still parked in the driveway. Down at Sarah’s, the front porch light wasn’t on, but there was a light on inside the small house. He put his shirt on as he knocked. Lamar answered the door. His eyes were swollen and red.

“Hospital just called, man. I’m really sorry about your mom.”

Lamar didn’t answer. He just stood there, staring back at Marty.

“You and Joey all right?”

“We’re okay.”

“The hospital’s trying to get in touch with your grandma.”

“I already did. She’ll be comin’ over soon.”

“That’s good. Want me to stay with you guys until she gets here?”

“No.”

“You sure, man. I don’t mind.”

“No, I’m sure.”

“Well, okay, if you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

He nodded and Lamar closed the door. He began to walk home. His feet were cold now. So were his ears. His hair was still wet. He felt like smoking a joint when he got home. Nothing else to do. For some reason, he thought of that old Eagles’ song again, then remembered his supper was on the stove in the kitchen and he began to run.