Poe Ballantine
Poe Ballantine has been unknown for so long he’s decided he likes it that way. His latest book is the novel Rodney Kills at Night. He lives in Nebraska.
The Mayfly Glimmer Before Last Call
Jackie was nineteen, a cocktail waitress in Niagara Falls, New York. She worked in a bar on the other side of town and would come into our place with the other waitresses after her shift was up. Jackie was something else, the way she shook her hair.
November 1998Conspiracy And Apocalypse At The McDonald’s In Goodland, Kansas
I left Encinitas, California, on April 1, 1997, with five hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills folded into the secret pocket of my jacket, and sixty dollars in my left-front pocket. I do this in case I get robbed. Spread your cash. If someone robs you, give him the smallest parcel. If the shithead persists, offer him the traveler’s checks. I have been robbed twice, once at knifepoint, once at gunpoint. No one ever wanted the traveler’s checks.
September 1998The Hunt And The Kill
I went on hearing the term now and then, but I didn’t bother myself much about screwing until somebody said that Barry had screwed Maria in the catwalk, a narrow, fenced walkway overgrown with bushes. I pictured a yellow-handled screwdriver and decided that Barry must have fixed something for her: her skateboard, maybe. Barry was three years older than me and Maria was a year older and pretty.
June 1998The Blue Devils Of Blue River Avenue
Whether I was at the Sambeauxs’ or the Millers’ or the Carrs’, or just out in the street with my little buddies, it was always the same. They were like hothouse tomatoes pushing hard for what they thought was the light. We would hide in a bush, or cluster in the treehouse, or lean back among the interstices of the towering, ragged, catwalk hedge, and the topic would invariably arise, spelled out in red letters above our heads: S-E-X.
August 1997How I Lost My Mind, And Other Adventures
I took the bus from Iowa down to Memphis, a funny pressure in my chest, a nervous futility, an unaccountable fatigue. I walked along the railroad tracks and the streets of white clapboard houses, the air smelling of soap and tar.
April 1997Man Standing Under A Rocket Taking Off For The Moon
The lump slowly vaporizes, the chamber tumbles with smoke, and I breathe it in and hit the vault of heaven. I pass the pipe around and watch their expressions change. They lean down like winged monkeys ladling up love from a boiling glass ball.
April 1997Green-Eyed Dog
I am nineteen, a pale pimply suburbanite so thin my knees and elbows knife through my clothes. I have learned almost everything I know from television and Time magazine. I was once afraid of the world, worldophobic, but down here if you show your fear you will be eaten alive.
February 1997Last Day At Lemon Acres
At 4:30 that afternoon Jack was sitting up in a chair, his polished, old man’s legs crossed, eyes staring intently at the floor. My heart turned a little pirouette: it was the first time he’d been out of bed on his own in six weeks.
December 1996Never And Nowhere
You leave Kentucky, with its leaning phone booths and thick green twilight and sloe-blossom bourbon and dogwood insouciance, and you head west on the bus with $984 and some roast-beef sandwiches and some bananas and a bag of trail mix and the usual doubt and the usual set of diminishing expectations.
July 1996The Empty House Of My Brokenhearted Father
It was 4 A.M. and I was walking home from the bar with another man’s wife. I’d been in love with her since she was a little girl, but my good friend had snapped her up very young. I never had a chance.
February 1996
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