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Saturday Matinee

I don’t recall what film was showing that day. I like to remember it as a John Wayne epic, fairly spurting with cinematic testosterone. My platoon was too busy pelting uniformed enemy personnel and innocent bystanders alike with a merciless fusillade of navy beans. The cavernous Birmingham held more than a thousand kids, so there was plenty of chaos to camouflage our bean-shooter blitzkrieg. There’s nothing like the havoc wreaked by smooth-bore bean shooters in the free-fire zone of a dark, crowded, noisy theater.

My Study On Stay-Puts

You can do your studies on us migratory types all you want. My sister Rose came home from school last year saying that’s what you stay-puts call us. I told her you’re probably the same guys yelling White trash bastards go home when we drive through Salem. She says, no, you wouldn’t yell at us.

November 1992

Without A Name For You

Hannah Arendt says a fundamental contradiction of the United States is political freedom coupled with social slavery.

Water

A new lifeguard, a poinsettia-plant-watering mystery woman, a big sister at the birth of her brother

Lipstick

Cherries In The Snow, Plush Purple, Orange Flip

Caste

Kissing In The Movies

In 1961, Nicaragua and I were still developing, both of us unsure of our desperate passions. I knew nothing of politics. When the U.S. Air Force needed my father to teach Somoza’s pilots to fly, my family moved to Managua. The State Department warned of the dangers: malaria, earthquakes, revolution, poverty, sharks swimming in fresh water. They left something out.

Money

Lunch money, Las Vegas, art for the people

Where There Is No Other

Mother

Having to choose, clutching a doll, finding it hard to say goodbye