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Friendship
My Father’s Bartenders
The girls who poured my father’s gin-and-tonics were slim, brown-eyed beauties, quick to wipe up his spills, freshen his drinks, and smile at his wisecracks. They looked nothing like him, and they asked for nothing from him. Maria worked in the city bar, where my father drank in the afternoons, and Debbie worked in the suburban bar, where my father drank in the evenings.
October 2001Seymour’s Last Dollar
I knew Seymour owed money because I’d heard snatches of tense conversations from the bedroom, and I felt the aura of fear about loan sharks that surrounded my stepdad — and now, by association, my family. I kept a sharp eye out for swarthy men in suits and sunglasses carrying Louisville Sluggers.
October 2001On The Lake
This was early in the morning, the day after Thanksgiving. My grandfather wore a tan cotton jacket and an old-man’s hat almost the same color. He sat at the wheel of a 1948 Ford he had bought and painted himself. You could look at the lime-cream color from twenty feet away and see the brush marks. He turned the key, glancing at me with the beginning of a smile and with a squint — against Kool smoke — that looked like a wink.
August 2001An Unfamiliar Form Of Solitaire
When I first came to this mountain town in central Mexico a year ago — bored and dissatisfied with myself and my American surroundings — I was eager to learn about a group of thirty or so imigrantes, American expatriates, who gathered daily in the lobby of the Hotel Jardin.
August 2001One Saturday Night
One Saturday night, my father gave me fifty cents to buy the Sunday New York Times. The Times was part of my family’s weekly ritual. Already, at age sixteen, I was bitter about this paper, because I had been born with a love of comics — every type of comic: Batman, comic strips, MAD Magazine. Yet each week, the gray Sunday Times arrived, thick with facts and want ads.
July 2001When I Get To Key West
In prison, despite the stereotypes, I am not raped by a gang of women with a toilet plunger; no muscled-up stud with tattooed tits claims me for her “wife”; no one corners me in the laundry room and beats the crap out of me.
April 2001The Slave Chair
On a spring day in 1958, I circled the table in my grandmother’s dining room, trying to figure out one of her “test tables.” The test-table challenge worked like this: My grandmother set a formal table, purposely committing an array of errors so subtle even Emily Post couldn’t spot them — turning a knife blade in the wrong direction, placing an iced-tea spoon where a soup spoon should be. My job was to do what Emily Post could not.
February 2001Traveling Mercies
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I remembered that wonderful line of Blake’s — that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love — I took a long, deep breath and forced these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”
November 2000Reptile Man
I’ve read that it’s common to be repelled by someone you later find attractive. My attraction to Reptile Man was like that. He hung out at Red Emma’s Deli, arriving at ten every morning like clockwork. He always read a newspaper someone else had left behind and spaced out three coffees over a period of about two hours.
October 2000
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