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Friendship
Decline Of The Lawrence Welk Empire
I get a postcard from a place called Paradise, and on the back is a note from an old friend that says, “Free lunch under the coconut trees.” It is the season of disco and dope smoking, of long, ramshackle cars built by cocaine addicts in Michigan, of oil embargoes and promiscuity and awful haircuts, and I look around at the girls and boys in their platform shoes and bell bottoms and everybody divorced or pregnant or stoned or listening to disco and scratching their VD sores, and I know the world is coming to an end, so I call United Airlines and order a one-way ticket to Paradise.
January 1996Burying O’Ryan
I brought my shovels to the grave site and marked out a larger area. O’Ryan was a big dog, and I knew that a hole always gets smaller as you dig down.
December 1995Speaking From The Body
I go to readings where writers stand there, in their bodies, laughing and getting choked up as they read what they’ve written about experiences they’ve had, in those same bodies, and I think: I could never do that. I could reveal my life in my stories or I could reveal my body in person, but no way could I ever show myself that much in my body.
November 1995Thirteen
I ’m kneeling in the foyer lacing my sister’s boot when I hear my mom muttering in the hallway. This time it’s not about the shoes in the living room or my father’s late child support. She’s talking about me. “Thirteen,” she says, “and you think you’re all grown up.”
November 1995Grave Love
Bill Pody was our love guru. He drank twelve Pepsis a day, smoked three packs of Marlboros, and occasionally ate — usually a cheeseburger. He was forty-one. He lived in a lime green trailer next to a short, concrete silo. From my farm we could see the silo presiding over Pody’s hill.
September 1995The Color Of Their Souls
There was a tear in our screen door and I would peek through it at the little houses across the street. The house across from ours was purple. There were many wild-colored houses on our block, like a row of cheap drinks; their great snarls of TV antennas were the swizzle sticks.
August 1995I Wish I Had The Energy To Clean My Stove
Since I’ve never had an orgasm, I don’t know exactly how to fake one, but he seems satisfied with my little act. You’re the greatest, he always says afterward. You are, too, I say. It must have been in bed with Les that I learned to be such a liar.
July 1995Oleander
Marie loved the sun so much, she got skin cancers from it, which she perversely believed only the sun would help. Doctors periodically scraped or burned the cancerous cells off her face and arms, leaving her to hole up in her trailer for weeks listening to the radio until they healed.
May 1995Selected Stories
I have discovered that by using a very long straw, I can drink soda from my neighbor’s apartment.
May 1995
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