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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LAS VEGAS, NV-

The Girls of Bromidrosis

The first night I arrived in Vegas I ate fried-chicken and drank beer. Under normal circumstances this is not a good combination. Hell, it doesn’t even sound good. Fried-chicken and beer. But these weren’t normal circumstances. I had just arrived home after living over three years in the South where nothing - and hardly anyone - made sense to me.

So, I wasn’t looking for harmony. I was looking to gorge myself and get drunk.

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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…)

ATLANTA, GA-

August.

The ass end of summer.

The time of year when I’m slogging through the drudgery of everyday life: the commuting, the second-only-to-L.A. traffic of Atlanta, the smog, the latest Mexican drug-trafficking hub that is Gwinnett County, the belligerent assholes in their giant SUVs with the faded “We’re Proud of You” and “Support Our Troops” magnetic ribbons, the tragic irony of which is no longer worth criticizing or satirizing.

I’ve always preferred the muted light of an overcast day; everything looks calm and friendly in the filtered light, which is strange since I lived in Florida for the first 28 years of my life. You’d think I’d be accustomed to sunshine. But in Florida we had afternoon thunderstorms that skuttled in from the gulf every day like clockwork. I adored those gray cumulonimbi.
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PARIS, FRANCE -

This week it’s mini-society.

They sell cookies, loan each other money, provide services.

I hide behind the mayor’s desk and watch them taking orders from my mother so surely in charge. There’s a tall kid who won’t stop talking. He raises his chin to the teacher, challenging her. He frightens me. Who would challenge my mother like this? She walks to him and kneels down at his desk. She looks him in the eye whispering. He lowers his chin. She touches her hand to his head - a benevolent minister - and mini-society begins.

The brownie salesman sells his brownies.

“Get your brownies. Fresh brownies,” he calls out. “Best in the whole entire world.”

And across the city they’re selling lanyards.

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BROOKLYN, NY-

I’ve lived without a television for just over two months now.

At first I panicked. 

I come from a family who firmly believes that Katie Couric and Alex Trebek are immediate family members and should be laid places akin to Elijah’s at the family dining table.

When I still lived at home, my parents’ Christmas card list should have included Bob Newhart (with Larry, his cousin Darryl and his other cousin Darryl), Sgt. Frank Furrillo, the Seavers, the Huxtables, the Carringtons, the Ewings, and the entire staff of St. Eligius Hospital for the amount of time we spent with each other.

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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…)

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…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

There’s that one line from the new Dark Knight Batman movie that I keep stumbling on. It sticks in all the commercials. I hear it from my family. I read it in grafitti. It squeaks from comic book action figures: “Why so serious?” Maybe it’s because Comicon 2008 in San Diego is a place of spandex god worshippers who want their asses signed with celebrity lightning bolts. I mean, that’s gotta seriously hurt. (more…)

GLENSIDE, PA-

If you’ve never been to one of New Jersey’s fine beaches, I suggest throwing on any Springsteen album from the mid-80’s while reading this, and you’ll more or less get the vibe.

A few weeks ago I rented a house with my wife and two daughters in the gritty shore town of Wildwood, New Jersey.

Family vacation.

Americana.

We spent most mornings on the beach, and most evenings “walking the boards.” Wildwood’s boardwalk, the longest in New Jersey, is a mishmash of roller coasters, carnival barkers, bad tattoos, salt-water taffy, games of chance, loud tee-shirts, and hermit crabs.

And it turns out my two-year-old daughter NEEDS a hermit crab.

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NEW ORLEANS, LA -

Tomorrow morning, the construction company will arrive at our hundred-year-old home in mid-city New Orleans, and some strong men will move out shiny black kitchen appliances and the world’s heaviest television and truck them over to Common Ground where they’ll be used by Lower Nine families who are rebuilding after Katrina. Then the contractor will stage our house for what we hope will be a five-month renovation. Back in our new and updated kitchen just in time for Christmas dinner is what we’re hoping for but everyone I talk to tells me to multiply the months by 100%. Right now I don’t want to think about ten months and I’m going to err on the side of optimism and good ju ju because we haven’t started yet and already I want my house back.

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PARIS -

We’re walking together along the trail beside the river. After a late winter the low hills are still green and there are wildflowers even now. The air smells of sage and dust and pine and if you look north up Highway 75 you can see mountains capped with white.

We’re bare-chested wearing sandals and shorts. It’s my father’s birthday today. He’s fifty years old, six feet tall, thin. His dark curly hair has lightened from the sun. There are patches of grey at his temples.

I’m shorter than he is with dark hair on my legs and arms, hair that my father found unsettling when it first appeared at fourteen - a feature, which seemed to him impossible. It must have been a terrible reminder of time passing. How could this boy with the big brown eyes and the round cheeks be sprouting the body hair of a Sicilian?

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

Recently, my mother alerted me to the fact that, as a child, I “really loved nursing.”

This information was delivered to me via text message. I was just sitting there, cuddling with my cat, Hege, and my phone beeped. For some reason, that afternoon my mother decided it was time for me to know that I loved to breastfeed.

It seems she had been looking at old photographs of me and had been reminded of my powerful need to feed by the size of my face in one picture in particular.

I sent her a text message in reply: “GROSS.”

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ST. AUGUSTINE, FL-

My grandfather was a doctor. And for at least a few hours, he was convinced that I would follow in his footsteps.

I was seventeen years old, and aside from a brief flirtation with veterinary medicine, utterly uninterested in any career that involved scalpels and touching guts. I had discovered the joys of writing snarky op-ed pieces for the high school newspaper, performing in Woody Allen plays for the drama department, and smoking clove cigarettes with my girlfriend in her bedroom as we listened to Smiths’ records and complained about how much the suburbs “sucked balls.”

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GULF BREEZE, FL-

This post first appeared, in somewhat different form, in September 2006 here at TNB. I’m rerunning it for Mother’s Day this year. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! (And to all other mothers out there as well.)

My mother hates cut flowers.

Despises them, resents them, with a power I don’t understand nor know the origins of.

I on the other hand love them.

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