AMHERST, MA-

Last night I took down a number of what I think of as “internet angry guy” posts on my blog that I’d put up over a few weeks, posts that are the equivalent of me being like my mom and shouting at the television–something that worries me about her only because she never had high blood pressure until, well, the last 7 years. I took these down because I realized in the most recent one I hadn’t really done what I wanted to on the topic of the anniversary of women’s suffrage, which happened on the same day as the Democratic National Convention kickoff and the beautiful speech Michelle Obama gave.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

G R E A T  G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S  B U L L E T  The escape to California took weeks.

Renaldo had difficulty hiding that he was one of Poncho Villa’s soldiers and was constantly questioned as they traveled toward northern Mexico. Handsome, Renaldo had a broad nose and full lips. He wore a great sombrero high on his head and had a full mustache to match. His eyes were of a deep red-brown like cherry wood. He wasn’t tall, but looked it as he sat straight on his horse. (more…)

PACIFIC GROVE, CA -

A month after he left, I realized I hadn’t gotten my period. I thought that this sucked. Not because of a perhaps potential child (which sucked in its own right in such a way that there was no possibility I’d have been prepared to wrap my head around it at the time), but because of the fact that I’d probably have to call him.

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Chestertown, MD-

8-25-2008 2:38 p.m.

The dream that I had last night is staying fresh.  Most don’t.

I’m here to measure the floor in Mr. Hash’s house.  He wants Karndean. Karndean is faux flooring, it displays many of the natural looks of slate, or ash, or walnut, or anthracite, but it’s not.  Karndean is an LVT or luxury vinyl tile.  The representative for the company who distributes Karndean said to me once, “It’s green because no trees are killed to produce the product.”

Uh, what?

So I called his bullshit.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

L E G A C Y  There is a story in my family that tells of the rape of a young girl faraway in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. It takes place in the early 20th Century. It might have been 1917. The year isn’t important as the shadow remains heavy across my family’s history. (more…)

ATLANTA, GA-

In our room that morning as we changed into our bathing suits, stuffing towels and Coppertone into the souvenir Pan Am flight bags our father had gotten for us on a business trip, Glen told me how it would go.

“Answer her questions, but don’t start a conversation.”

“But Dad told us what to say last week. Remember? He said when we meet her to smile and say, ‘I’m state your name, very pleased to meet you, Kate.’ ”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Glen. “You can say it, but you don’t have to mean it.”

“Okay.” I watched him put a book into the bag and then slip a small white bottle of roll-on deodorant in after it. “Why are you taking that to the beach?”

“Don’t want my pits to stink.”

“You think girls from school will be there?”

Glen’s face went red as he zipped up the bag, then mumbled, “You never know.”

“I think she’ll be tall,” I said. “Taller than Mom, probably.”

“If you’re nice to her I’ll punch you,” Glen said, tucking the towel under his arm. “Hard.”
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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

S E P T E M B E R The next morning was September 11th.

I had given up on the idea of hitchhiking and now wanted to take a Greyhound bus from the Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas across the Mojave Desert to Bakersfield. (more…)

ATLANTA, GA-

The snow was piling up outside, a white blanket six inches thick and gleaming in the moonlight, reflected up through Darla’s bedroom window. I had just finished reading a story to the girls from Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Treasury about sledding down a steep hill. Toad, the pessimist, is leery of such a dangerous undertaking, but the eternally optimistic Frog assures him they will be safe and have lots of fun.

Flying down the hill they hit a bump and Frog falls off. Toad keeps talking as if Frog were still on the sled, but a passing crow tells him he’s talking to himself. Toad looks back at the empty sled, freaks out and quickly crashes into a snow bank. Later, he tells Frog winter is fun, but staying in bed is much better. Safer too.

“I like that one, but it makes me cold,” says Emma, hugging her shoulders. “Can you tell us a Florida story?”

“Yeah, a Florida story!” Darla says, scrunching down under the covers.

So I begin as I always do.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

I was in a full panic before my mother said anything at all. I didn’t want to ask what was going on, because her face and her shaking hands were confusing me. Usually, when I was in trouble, my father looked at me a certain way, and then it was clear, I’d been caught. But Dad wasn’t there, and all I had to go by were my mother’s ambiguous signals.

Finally, she spoke. “Your grandmother tried to kill herself today. She put a bag over her head and tried to suffocate herself.”

God, I was so relieved.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

B O N I F A C I O The weather was a little windy and the sun was beating its fists onto the desert floor. It was the day before dia de los rascacielos, the name I later heard a man on a bus give for the attacks on the World Trade Center. (more…)

MADRID, SPAIN-

She is standing on the sidewalk, three floors below me, holding a plastic bucket over her head. We use the bucket for the mop—we clean, sometimes. No cleaning now. I sit out on the balcony, three floors above her, smoking, shaking hands, laughing nervously at a joke in Spanish I don’t understand. They tell the joke in English, I understand even less. Some joke about a priest. I look over the balcony and try to aim the best I can—don’t want any wine to spill on her, or miss the bucket. I upend the glasses of wine over the edge of the balcony to the awaiting girl and the awaiting bucket below. He sure drinks a lot of wine, they’re saying. And I do. For every glass I empty, some going in the bucket, some going on the street, much going on her head, I drink one. “This is one really special night. Hector is going to really shine at Stanford. Thanks to you,” they say. “No, no. He did it all on his own. He’s a smart kid—really. I have to go soon. This is one hell of an apartment.”

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

It’s time for a breakdown.

The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.

H A U N T “There will be strong memories, my brother,” smiled Bonifacio.

He held his arm around me and hovered there in the room like an archangel. Still dressed as he was while waiting tables at the local bistro, his white waiter’s uniform had big round buttons that dotted a double-breasted waistcoat. (more…)

SARANAC LAKE, NY- 

The plan might have been flawed from the start.

What you might have seen, if you were driving along Highway 84 in Montana that day was a Subaru Outback rental car so new it had no license plates, followed by a Toyota pickup circa 1982, so old it had no shocks and no fixture on which to hang the license plate.

Seven innertubes undulated in the wind, occasionally breaking free and flapping against the rusted side panels of the truck.

You might have been cursing their slow progress or witnessed the convoy pulled over on the side of the road, a huddle of muscled women trying to retie the load with a single, thin rope.

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BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The orange truck came speeding south on H Street. My kid Landen, 17, said, “There’s that orange truck. I see it everywhere. It’s following me.” He was half joking, but it’s true. I recognized the orange truck’s driver. He lives with his wife in a little bungalow on Blanche Street, close to St. Francis of Assisi Church.

Sometimes I see the same person everywhere. There’s a disfigured man who seems to haunt me. He passes on a bus, walks past on streets. He once roamed campuses while I attended local colleges. He appears in libraries and grocery stores—even on Internet sites. I’ve seen him for nearly 20 years and have pointed him out. He’s everywhere. (more…)

PARIS, FRANCE -

Raffaele says those home for the summer never order water at Il Fosso. Instead they ask for empty bottles and take them out to the spring where the water comes cold and sweet. He says it reminds them of their former lives.

He says in the evening serpents glide across the road, that there’s snow in winter, that here it’s not people you meet but characters.

Raffaele says that the village over there humbly glittering in the night, the one up at the end of the valley, is the town whose name no one will pronounce for fear of evil.

He says he doesn’t even know the name himself but I don’t believe him. It’s “that place” he says.

We stand quietly looking out across the dark at the glow of “that place” where once there lived a sorcerer.
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