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For years that old dark wooden bird house had swung from the crabapple, which for years was slowly dying, its limbs dropping like autumn leaves until the tree was just an amputee trunk and one remaining branch that sprouted leaves in the spring and sturdy pink flowers in mid-May as once the entire grand old tree had filled the back yard with its glory when survival was something serious. But its final gasp of reproductive desperation last spring had become not a thing of beauty, not another one of God’s minor miracles, but a death rattle, a last grasp at life like a dying cape buffalo that lifts its head from the mud and darts at the lions that have already had their fill of its hindquarters. And then the buffalo sinks into the mud one final time as the lions chew into its bowels, as the insects and fungi return the crabapple to the mud from which it sprouted.
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The heater hose shower worked well enough, but the computer screen shook, had tremors, and the air conditioner hummed incessantly and louder than the passing motorcycles. The hot hot humid Kansas air reminded Jack of Florida, and the drip drip drip in the kitchen sink reminded him of a rain forest, reminded him of Oregon, of the Olympic Peninsula. Where was she? When would she get there?

The editor said, “Make it simple, see, simple like Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich. Don’t fuck with your generation, and the list goes on, like John Gardner says, simple. I got 22-year-olds coming out of my ears, so don’t fuck with your generation. Harsh words, hey boy?”
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Gloria did not see the humor in the situation.

The night before the raccoons had tipped over the garbage can and hurled barbecued chicken bones, apple cores, banana peels, used tissues and coffee grinds all along the side of the house, and in the morning Gloria was more annoyed at me for not securing the garbage can lid than she was at the raccoons that had created the mess. I told her I did my best. I told her the raccoons were smart, and it was true. They were intelligent creatures. I had used two bungee cords snapped around the handles of the garbage can, but the raccoons had figured out how to slip the cords to the sides of the can and then they had somehow raised and removed the lid. Gloria said my best obviously  wasn’t good enough.
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In the mirror, his bones were too large and his pale hairy flesh too loosely attached to them. So Robert turned away and dressed and when he looked back in the mirror as he knotted his new green and gold tie he looked thinner, stronger in his loose-fitting black pants and crisp white dress shirt. His polished black shoes and navy blazer cut pounds and added muscle to the sleek, dark, clean-shaven reflection.

He’d heard friends complain that black was morose, the sign of repressed power-hungry introverts and of power-saturated extroverts. And then a woman he worked with said that it made her physically sick to her stomach to see a certain shade of washed out purple. Yes, she said, black was wonderful, all purpose, very smart.
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I’ve been reading book reviews - actually just the first few paragraphs and sometimes the first few sentences before the review jumps to another page in the newspaper. Sometimes I read the first two sentences and get bored out of my mind with all the book talk. It’s short little snippets of writing about books. Writing about writing. I read it, but not enough to get sucked into all the literary talk, you know, the motives, the meanings and the meandering plots that the book critics love to talk about. No, I read the names, the titles, and the places: southern Alabama, Tennessee, Maine, Czechoslovakia, and I usually catch the money talk about how much this one and that one earned just to sit down and maybe write a good book, maybe write a bad one.

I’ve been listening to the blues. Oh Mississippi, flood right on into me. I can feel it, woa yeah, goodbye baby.
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The old ones tell me it was easy in the old days to get a drink, to say that you were old when you were young. Back then the famous and the not-so famous could even say they were young when they were really very old. Nobody knew. It was so easy back then.

But now it’s not so easy, because the government knows exactly how old everyone is.

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A wandering, lustful beaming blue eye, a ripping rim shot, beer, cigarettes, some guy in shorts with an unlit cigar in his mouth, he wrapped his lips around it and sucked, didn’t have the nerve to light it and blow smoke in Jack’s face. The Blitzhaus rhythm that night was deep, sharp, fine, the music loud, all the sounds confused with the colors, the bass and all the black merged, emerged, throbbed, and blue eyes flashed like a cymbal, beacons of unwanted delight. Jack had had enough, just wanted to go home with Dorsey. But Bernie and the others were still at it, Dorsey was off somewhere, and Jack couldn’t pull himself away from them. He couldn’t say enough god damn it, he couldn’t move an inch away from the stage, he just bounced, shook his fists, nodded his head, didn’t even smile, he just floated there hardly there at all. Dorsey floated before him and pecked him on the cheek, but Jack was hardly there and her lips hit a numb spot, he didn’t feel a thing, just the flash of strange blue eyes from the girl behind Dorsey, the eyes transfixed, transmuted by some unknowable desire that kissed some numb spot on Dorsey’s smiling, hot, tired lips. She had white teeth, no smile, a bare shoulder, a shock of blond hair and muscular tan shoulders and a blue cymbal crashed all over Jack’s hot, exhausted, flaccid dry tongue.
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It was Halloween morning, and two boys on their way to school, one older than the other, attacked each other with sabers that from our window looked every bit real. The older boy chopped viciously at the younger, who leapt to the right and then to the left like Errol Flynn. The young boy defended himself with his lunch box and avoided the deadly arc of steel, and then the younger boy swung at the older, who also jumped away unscathed. The weather had turned cold and they were bundled up in parkas. The older boy’s parka had a hairy collar that even from our third floor window on Sixth Street I could see was fake fur. The younger boy wore a New York Jets hat that he pulled down over his ears. From up above they appeared Hispanic, but who could tell. Maybe they were Filipino, Chicano, Cuban, Indian, or more Russian Jews. In college they might have changed from Indians into Native Americans or into Canadian aboriginal people. Inuits or Eskimos. Perhaps they were part African American or African African, Caribbean African or African-Argentinian. Blacks or whites or browns or yellows or grays: they could have been any.
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The children think their father is peculiar because he listens to classical music out back in a lawn chair. All the other daddies mow the lawn and paint the house and play basketball with their children.  But our daddy lazes in the back yard, in a lounge chair, listening to classical music from his portable radio. He reads the newspaper. He dozes.
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It’s the end of the world and I am stuck in a corner in my bedroom, cowering, shivering beneath a blanket as the plaster falls by the door and the timbers begin to split. Soon it will all be down upon me and the isolation of this corner will not protect me from the inevitable collapse.

Through the window I can see the trees blowing outside and the twigs falling. Soon the limbs will crack and slump and then the trunks will tower over and blow away into the dust already swirling into devils that whip apart the well-tended gardens and heaps of dirt alike, all of it will be swept up and blasted to a fine dust that no mask can filter.

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The letter from Oscar was sickening, repulsive at best, a soliloquy on the tax burdens of high earnings-to-debt ratio, tedious job-related cocktail parties that his otherwise “cool as hell” boss at the shoe company required him to attend, and limos “every now and then for kicks.” His letter included too many unwanted details of June in Key West at the folks’ winter place, before that a March week in Zurich, where “the shoe talk was dull, but those Swiss women were something else,” and then he wrote something about tentative plans for April in Paris, September in Tokyo, October in Beijing, Bangkok and Sydney, and then “maybe a Christmas reunion in Key West at my folks’ place? Interested? Hey, how’s it going, anyway?”
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Paul’s death was so quiet.

Maybe that’s what was so sad at first. He died exactly as he should have died, quietly, without a speech, without a surprise or a sarcastic comment to lighten the moment, without a woman at his side and without a prayer or a dream for the future, without any witness to see him for what he was: a sleepy,  slightly drunk, unemployed naked college graduate with an undiagnosed heart condition. Maybe it was the death he most feared, but it was the death he could not avoid, alone, at night, confused, afraid, waiting for the terrible moment to pass.

A week before Paul died we sat in his living room and he sang to himself, “I’m Sergeant Pepper’s lonely heart’s club band.” We had shared a joint and planned to leave soon for a party at Claire’s. Paul sat up on his couch and I relaxed in his rocking chair. I watched the bare wall over Paul’s head rock back and forth, closer to me, then farther, closer, then farther.
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Raul Carlos Fernandez could fix almost anything, and in our apartment building at 200 E. 77th St. he was something of a legend not only among the tenants but among the doormen and the other building employees and even among the building’s owners - an investment company based in Flushing, Queens.

Henry, the day doorman, told me of an occasion shortly before I moved into the building when Raul went up to the 20th floor at 2 a.m. to unclog Irma Radcliff’s toilet. Raul found the problem was a decomposing hamster that Irma had flushed six weeks earlier. Irma had a heart attack when she saw furry little Felix the hamster, somewhat dissolved and thoroughly putrid and jabbed through the stomach on the end of Raul’s plumbing snake. Raul performed CPR on Irma and saved her life.
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Roman Ash stood out on the hot sidewalk for a minute and he took a deep breath and rubbed his rough hands on the legs of his blue jeans. Then he pushed open the glass door and stepped into the darkened air conditioned tavern. His eyes adjusted to the light and he picked out his three friends sitting around a wooden table in the back corner near the men’s room, staring at each other. Roman walked to the table and his friends looked up and watched him approach.

“Hey stranger,” one of the men shouted, and the others joined in the chorus and waved their hands, urging him on. “Pull up a chair. Have a drink,” another said. “Been a long time. Let’s get us some nachos.”

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It had been swelling, and Anne knew disaster was imminent.
The air had stilled, the birds had nestled into trees or flown away, the insects had curled up and abandoned the necessary rituals, and for these last five months time itself had stopped altogether as the bubble Peter once mockingly dismissed as a growth on Anne’s empty heart grew to a round balloon, pulsing, protruding.

Anne could see it now with her own eyes, in plain daylight, as clearly as all the global village would see if only someone would bring a video camera. It was no longer the overactive fantasy of a crazy girl who lived in the woods and dreamed of disasters. This was real, this was happening, now, and maybe someone somewhere would take notice and sound the alarms to save the children and the cows and the kitty cats. The Oopsy Daisy nuclear reactor was going to blow. Read the rest of this entry »

The lights were dim, the air choked with smoke, and the room was expanding. The walls throbbed as they stretched so far beyond their bounds that Jack gave up hope of ever reaching the exit on the other side. So instead of trying to escape he stared at the vague image of a cracked colorless ceiling panel that floated over semi-conscious Ed’s curving back and shoulder blades slouched against the gray carpeted wall. Ed’s cheeks shuddered with the thump of bass and drums, and his legs, flat against the sticky floor, twitched and twisted while his limp head floated and brushed Jack’s left cheek and then dangled over his own chest, his mouth drooped open.
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On the beach. Our fingers just touched in the sand between our towels. The lemonades were hot. Our skin was hot, sticky. We should have brought the cooler and the umbrella.

“Griz,” I said. “Toss it over here.”

Our fingers parted as he reached for the tube of sun screen and tossed it. It landed near my head. I rubbed the cream into my face, arms, chest, legs, stomach, neck - whatever spots I could reach.

“It’s hot,” I said.

“Go in the water,” Griz answered.

The tips of our fingers touched again as we resumed our tanning positions, both of us on our backs, staring up through sunglasses and closed eyes into the clear blue sky that might have been a million miles from anywhere but was actually only 250 miles from the nearest islands, 500 miles from any continental land mass. A hot tropical spring day, near the end, and I remember thinking, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
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Frankie had to bang on the  door of the motel office to get our key.

She had called ahead and warned the manager that we would be late, and he had said no problem, we’ll wait for you, but I could tell he was angry when he unlocked the glass door. It was midnight.

The manager was Indian, or Pakistani. He wore a white cotton night shirt.

“You are the Blooms?” he asked, his voice rising in pitch as he spoke our name.
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1. It was sweet, yeasty warm bread fresh out of the oven in the kitchen just behind the swinging door and it filled the entire house with its moist perfume late on a wintry Saturday afternoon just after sunset. The dog, Spot, had settled into his tartan ceder doggie bed near the fire that crackled in the stone fireplace, Vivaldi whispered out of speakers up on tall stuffed cherry bookshelves and Jackson, stretched in the black leather lounge chair, struggled to keep his eyes open. The comfort of a perfect existence lulled him deeper and deeper into a contented doze, and his eyes fluttered, the book dropped gently from his hands to his lap and he began to drift… Read the rest of this entry »

Picture a young man with a pony tail. He wears light blue shorts and sandals and plastic sun glasses and a silver watch on his left wrist, and it is mid-afternoon and the early August sun is high overhead. The young man sprays a young Japanese maple tree with a hose. The tree is planted near the curb in a hole dug in the middle of fresh sod that is still not firmly rooted to the earth. The young man keeps his right thumb over the mouth of the hose so that the water is forced out in a jet to the base of the tree. Read the rest of this entry »