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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Twenty-Seven And A Half Years
November 15, 1975, 3 AM on a Saturday morning, two months after my twentieth birthday. When the police came knocking on my door, I was sleeping. I’ve heard that’s how evil comes, in the dark of night. It don’t want to be seen.
June 2015
The Laughter Club
It’s not surprising that trauma is the number-one killer of people under forty, but it had never been so obvious to me before I worked at a hospital.
June 2015
The R-Word
When he diagnosed my three-month-old, Fiona, with a chromosomal disorder, the redheaded, cherubic medical geneticist did not use the phrase “mentally retarded” — thank God, or the gods of rhetoric, or just the politically correct medical school the young doctor had attended.
May 2015
Almost Unendurable Beauty
The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.
May 2015
Enigma
Each year on April 25 my mother calls to remind me that it’s the anniversary of my father’s death, so I should take a moment to think about him.
May 2015
I Am The Star Of A Rock Video
Ever since I turned sixty, my fame has grown — slightly. I became the visiting writer at a college in Albany, New York. An article about me appeared in Metroland, the hip Albany weekly. One of my poems was published in the prestigious American Poetry Review. And a young man named Miles Joris-Peyrafitte asked me to star in a rock video.
May 2015Vote For Jesus
The short story is my brother got arrested. Again. In Pampa, Texas, this time: possession of marijuana and driving under the influence. “A total violation of my rights” is how he put it. They took his passenger into protective custody — “they” being animal control, since his passenger was a snake.
April 2015
The Endless Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Having been a writer myself, I should admire her refusal to give up. Instead it makes me impatient with her. I believe M. lives in this myth of greatness in which her every habit or quirk is worthy of the autobiography being written in her head. It is the endless soliloquy of the interior paramour. Why do I believe this? Because I used to be that way myself.
April 2015
Small Time
From outside, Jumbo’s was nothing more than a black-painted steel door in a brick wall, above which was a sign with a grinning yellow clown. When a customer came or went, the door would open for a moment, and I could glimpse the rich blackness of its interior and smell stale beer and cigarette smoke. Especially in the evenings, the illuminated yellow clown sign called out to me.
April 2015
There Is No Secret
The peculiar thing about adulthood is that eventually you discover there is no such thing as adulthood. There are only best guesses and increasingly permanent results.
March 2015
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