Day 6: Mouth Wide Open - Literary Open Mic, 6/8!

Looking forward to reading some fresh new flash fiction at this event on Wednesday at Jimmy's No. 43. I'm grateful that the organizers are kind enough to include me. This feels good, all this writing I'm doing -- not just songs, either. I'm revisiting essays and short stories I wrote and sifting through them all over again and that's bringing forth a slew of new ideas. They spin out of me in this effortless way and I pick them up, like seashells on a beach. I've never had writer's block, thank God.  I was and still very much am a procrastinator, which is probably why I love a deadline. Quite often, that's the thing that gets it done.

I love words. Writing came so easily to me when I was a kid, I took it for granted. The rest of my life has been running me over for so long and in every direction imaginable, that I never thought I could lean on writing, that it could be as promising or as fulfilling as performance.

Having a chill downtown literary moment will be the calm before a very busy weekend of Black Americana at Jalopy on Friday night with my beautiful band The Blue Crowns and of course singing my heart out at the Jazz Age Lawn Party on Saturday. I have to go back on Sunday to dance -- and of course try to win the pie contest..!

Maybe I'll read Chicken Lips...!

30 Days of Birthday: Day 15 -- (More) Flash Fiction

I'm exploring some flash fiction that I forgot I wrote. Working on stitching them into something more comprehensive. Until then, enjoy.

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Bedtime

Now that I am the kind of insomniac that daydreams about sleep, I sometimes wonder what was so terrible about bedtime when I was little.  At the appointed hour, my mother would walk into the den with a flourish, clap her hands three times as though she were summoning the palace guards and that was it.  Bedtime.  There was no such thing as arguing or tantrums or any of the time-honored tactics that proved themselves effective in other households.  She simply wasn't that kind of a mother.  I resisted with the empassioned fervor of an unjustly incarcerated inmate awating a twelfth hour pardon, feverishly watching the clock, holding out, hope against hope, only to be sent to my room, to my bed, to sleep.  I resented it, of course.  Each night found me wide awake, staring at the ceiling and stewing in my five year old rage.  Later, I could hear my mother's high pitched squeal of a laugh, promptly followed by my father heh-heh-hehing over the din of applause on the TV set: they were watching The Johnny Carson Show -- and I hated them for it.  Obviously, the good life began after bedtime.

Summers in Charleston with my grandparents were basically more of the same, thanks to my grandmother's uncanny sense of timing.  My brothers and I were usually bathed, pajama-ed, prayed up and tucked in before we realized what hit us.  As everyone sat on the porch and ate boiled peanuts and crablegs, their lively conversation would ebb and flow through my open window. I would watch their words fall and crash against the ceiling.  Sometimes I would sit up and lean against the headboard of my bed to look out the window, in an effort to steady myself amidst this sea of verbal chaos.  Within the confines of this strange and powerful lullaby, I fell asleep with wide open eyes, eyes that saw so many ideas unfold within me that I would often wonder, for days on end, how they would emerge.  In my world, dreams were for the sleepless.  I was quite young, but old enough to realize that no dreamlike state could compare to the world I inhabited when my imagination unleashed itself.  This was the time to be awake, I thought to myself each time I fell asleep at that windowsill, while so much in me was alive.  I knew that I couldn't go on like this.  I had to think of something.  I had a lot of living to do.

Strong reading material seemed to be the only available remedy.until adulthood offered other more suitable options, so an innocuous little scheme was hatched: I sandwiched books inbetween the mattress and the box spring of my bed and read them when everyone assumed that I was asleep.  The wee hours of the morning would find me writing little vignettes by the light of a huge industrial sized flashlight that I had "found" underneath the kitchen sink.  The light was so powerful, I would attempt to conceal it by playing "tent", a precarious undertaking which involved propping up pillows against the sheets to create a secret cubbyhole, lined with comic books, typing paper and hardbacks galore.  I couldn't have been happier.  From the doorway, it looked as though the bed was attempting to digest a sunbeam.  I lay there quietly in the light and the darkness, wallowing in a wordy undertow that spun about the room and into my head, languishing there.

I should have known that nothing that good could last for very long.  It took her awhile, but my grandmother caught me one night, sitting amidst a pile of Jet magazines, reading an encyclopedia.  This incident, like so many others I starred in, became something else to sit on the porch and laugh about, but for me it confirmed what I already knew:  being a child meant having to endure the necessary indignity of constantly being told what I could and could not do, where I could and could not go, what I could and could not have, what I was and was not capable of.

Nowadays I can watch my dreams come true but bedtime happens whenever it happens.  I have my days, days when I wake up in my loftbed fully dressed and surrounded by paperwork, my laptop still on and running and resting in my lap, the TV going, the phone ringing me into a semi-conscious state.  I also have days when I go through the ritual of bathing and putting on my bedclothes and calling it a night, even if it is noon and I have to pull the shades to do it.  As I lie there, wide awake and dreaming, somewhere in the netherregions of my subsconscious thoughts I can still lean against that windowsill to see bright stars in a blue-black sky.  I realize, as I begin to fade that  in all the years since childhood, there are moments when I have found myself wishing that someone would walk into the room and clap their hands and say that word.  More often than not,  I am left to clap my own hands as I fall asleep to the lull of the cityscape and it's mourning tide.

30 Days of Birthday: Day 10 - (More) Flash Fiction

This is yet another very short story I yanked out of my laptop and dusted off and put in the summertime rewrite bin, an eternal snapshot of my New York City life.  When I say that I should write a book, MPB says I already have -- I just have to organize all of it and give it a good edit. Now that I'm finding pieces like this, I'm starting to believe he's right.

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                                                            TRAIN RIDE

Run for the train.

As you stand at the top of the stairs, you feel the blast of warm air, like the subway is gasping.  You start down the stairs and the whole world starts up the stairs, at you.  It is a tidal wave of people, an endless barrage of old people and baby strollers and small children being dragged around by the wrist that leaves you wedged against the wall, close enough to the train to see it leave you breathless.  The teller tries not to laugh at you and fails miserably.

Wait for the train.

Find yourself staring down that long dark empty tunnel as though you and everyone else on the platform staring with you were attempting to will the train to appear. Know that when you see those headlights, you and everyone around you, with your collective pacing and complaining and the tension that is bouncing around inside all of you, had something to do with it finally showing up. You tell yourself that you can keep this up all day.  And you do. 

Get on the train.

Every detail from every train ride melts into each other until one ride is indistinguishable from the next, and then somewhere in between switching to an express or catching the cross town shuttle, all of it becomes one long ride to nowhere.  You may not be wearing the same clothes but it’s the same train ride,day in and day out. The clean seats.  The screaming babies. The vomit.  The obnoxious tourists. The businessmen. The intimate conversations you didn’t want to hear. The foreign languages you don’t understand.  The walking sickness next to you dying and then in front of you begging gradually becomes the same gaunt homeless faces passing you by with the same story, bony arms outstretched for anything you’ve got, like death on holiday. By midday, you look up at someone in a cheap suit sitting across from you inhaling a gigantic hoagie absentmindedly and you realize you haven’t had anything to eat all day.

Your one constant is the book you are reading.  When you read, you are elsewhere.

Get off the local and transfer to the express line.

It’s an unspoken rule that everyone reads over everyone else’s shoulder.

You give your seat to a pregnant woman and glare at the guy next to you. More confirmation that chivalry is dead. You check that subway map next to the door, the one you think you know like the back of your hand, because you’re not sure which stop is yours. The tangled mass of train lines at the lower end of the city spangle the map like the back end of some wierdo’s psychedelic rainbow trip, As you lean down to get a closer look, the plumber in front of you readjusts politely.  You know that you just gave him something to wank off about later because your blouse fell open for a moment longer than it should have and he saw more than he was supposed to.  You sigh and let it go. 

You know that’s all the action you’re going to get for a long, long time.  For a moment, you are grateful to him for not smirking at you.  You look at him for a moment.  Older. Stocky.  Strong.  A touch of gray.  Pale watery blue eyes.  Filthy hard working hands, the kind you were raised to believe that a real man ought to have.  He looks Czech. No, you think to yourself.  Polish.  You are rewarded for your unfailing powers of observation when he pulls out a Polish newspaper from his back pocket. A moment passes.  You stand over him and lean in, pretending to read over his shoulder.  His friends who are sitting nearby stop talking and watch you.  As he attempts to turn a page, you stop him and pretend to finish a last paragraph, then indicate that yes, now he can turn the page. Everyone laughs. You laugh, too.  He offers you his seat. When you refuse, he insists.  Surprised and grateful, you take it. As he leaves, he pretends to give you his Polish newspaper.  You pretend to take it. You both laugh again and wave goodbye. You will never see him again.  You think to yourself, I love New York.  And you mean it.

Flash Fiction: "Last Call"

Whenever I say that I should write a book, MPB says I already have -- within this blog. He's probably right. Until I get organized and publish something substantial, here's a short, swift, flash-y idea that I've been working on, in spurts.  Enjoy.

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Last Call

          Every night, the same scenario.  Last call happened along unexpectedly.  No music.  Bright ugly lights. Big ugly bouncers, moving through the bar like human cattle prods, whistling and shouting obscenities. When only a select few remained, someone would pull the grate down and lock the door, signaling the moment when the evening shifted gears into a higher octane world. Candles were everywhere.  Soft music drifted through the air like chiffon. There were plenty of drugs and whatever else anyone wanted.  It was beautiful and morose.  And then it was over.  Eventually the grate went up again so everyone could stumble back into the full-fledged sunlight and the traffic and their day jobs and the rest of their lives. 

          This was the pit-stop I made on my way home, sometimes several times during the week. It was my way of unwinding so I'd be able to relax when I got to my apartment, which was no Shan-gri-la.  I just got a roommate, a skinny French girl named Claudette who apparently had never heard of deodorant.  Instead, she would douse her armpits with expensive perfume and wonder aloud as to why Americans bathed so much.  The funk that followed her out of the bathroom whenever she bothered to take a hot shower was enough to make my face twitch involuntarily whenever I thought about it. 

          Of course, Claudette didn't smell a thing.  Lucky girl.

          It wasn't just the smelly foreign white girl.  It was everything.  My life had glazed over into a series of hapless misadventures that left me feeling restless and unsatisfied.  I didn't know how to undo any of it so I numbed myself out with cocktails and dead-end relationships and waited for some kind of an upheaval.  A cool guy.  A new job.  A decent haircut.  The Lotto.  Something that would change things so drastically, my present scenario would be a distant memory, like things that happened to me when I was very young.  Something to think back on and remember with such clarity, it's almost as though it happened to someone else.

          The bar was clearing out as I arrived.  I bumped into one of the regulars on my way to the backroom.  She was bobbing back and forth gently, buoyed by a steady stream of drunken freaks who were making their way towards the exit.  She had a pink dress on and she was so high she just stood there in her strappy sandals, her eyes rolled back in her head, her yellowy hair all over the place.  If she had been lying down, I would have assumed that she was dead.  Nice shoes, I thought and I began to wonder if they were my size.

          I slid into a booth and put my feet up, exhausted. 

          The DJ cranked into that song "American Woman".  In my head, I turned up the Butthole Surfers' version and began to sip my first drink.

        Bouncers laughed and exchanged war stories.  Some guy across from me was smoking something that was making him cough violently.  Two girls in the corner were making out and giggling.  That blonde junkie was standing right where I left her.  Some guy had come along and put his arms around her, at first it seemed to steady her, but then as it turned out, to steady himself.  They both began to sway slowly to the rhythm of an invisible metronome, lost in the clicks that seemed to emanate from their bodies.  When the clicking noises fell out of sync with their movements, I realized that the sound was real.  Somebody was doing it in the bathroom.

          Somewhere in between the coughing and the clicking, someone let Jake inside.  He was pale and dark, a writhing tangled mass of bucolic imaginings, of venom and sickly sweetness and vomit and flowers. Jake liked me but he didn't know what to do about it.  Neither did I.  We'd been having a kind of Mexican stand-off of a relationship for awhile now.  No commitment.  No emotional responsibility. The fact that we were deeply in love was a big secret to everyone, especially to us. It seemed to augment our friendship and make us abnormally happy.

          Jake was drunk and he was high and in high spirits. He made his way toward me, spewing one rollicking non sequitor after another, filling the place with spontaneous combustions of laughter.  He paused in the flow of action that swirled around him to slide into the booth and kiss me intently on the mouth. Wide-eyed and startled, I pulled away. Although he smelled like a bar of soap,  his clothes had a slight odor to them that I recognized instantly.  It was my roommate. Clearly, she had been all over him. From the smell of it, she still was.  I could barely stand to share an apartment with her and now she was in my bed, putting her smelly body all over my precious Jake.  And there I was, squished in between them, fully dressed and unable to escape.

          As he held me in his arms, I felt the weight of time and familiarity between us.  It frightened me.  He was a dead end. And yet I clung to him, struggling to hold on to something that wasn't really even there.  He was my situation personified: the day job I wouldn't leave, the roommate I wouldn't get rid of, the myriad of issues I wouldn't face. I saw the world I created in his heavy-lidded eyes, beautiful and arcane, making love to my worry.  Did I know him at all?  How could I.

I knew that he'd have the smell of that girl on him, no matter how clean he was.  That was the last straw. It was over.  Somewhere in me, the night had finally ended. Instinctively he held me closer but I was already gone--out the door and into the sun that was waiting to shine on me.

Flash Fiction: "Goodbye, Cruel Richard"

Continuing with NaBloPoMo's theme of RISK this month, here's another flash fiction story about someone who took a big risk -- and got a big payoff in return.

GOODBYE, CRUEL RICHARD

Faye looked up from where she stood on the steps of the front porch. The wetness of an early afternoon found her in the calm before a violent storm. From a great distance, she saw a blue-black mass that churned its way towards her.  Faye thought it looked more like a bruise than a hurricane.  The wind whipped her hair against her expressionless face and began to jostle her. Soon it will be here, was all that she could think.  It would be sudden and frightening and beautiful. And then it would all be over. She returned to her perch, a rusted iron swing by the front door, and kneaded her filthy hands.

Bill had slapped her in the face a few days ago.  Hard. He said that she made him do it, that if she had done things right, there would have been no need to ever hit her at all.  That was the heart of the problem between them as far as he was concerned:  she kept saying and doing things that upset him.  If she'd stop, they could be happy. After he left, as Faye lay on the couch with her head back to stop the bleeding, she realized that after ten years of marriage, she couldn't hear his apologies anymore.  She had shut out so much of what he said and did that in a way, he wasn't ever really there until he took a swing at her.  Which was probably why he hit her so often.

She wished she had the guts to kill him.

They had been happy but somewhere in there, they began to argue a lot. One day, Bill hit Faye and she didn't do anything about it.  The next thing she knew, ten years had gone by.   

When she awoke in near darkness the way she always did, when she felt him reach for her and pin her to the bed and pry her legs open and climb on top of her, Faye thought about having him killed.  But then with her luck, she would get caught and have to go to jail for the rest of her life, or fry in the chair.  So she began to consider other options.

She was watching the weather report one afternoon when she remembered a story she'd heard, about a neighbor's best friend's cousin's ex-girlfriend's neighbor.   She got caught in a hurricane and was found several states away.  Battered and bruised, broken legs, completely disoriented--but alive.  That's when Faye realized that, although she was terrified of planes, she'd always wanted to fly.  She decided that if the hurricane came close enough, there would be a flying lesson.  She could hardly wait.

Faye had taken every precaution.  Everything was unplugged, cleared away, set aside.  Windows and doors were flung open as the wind whipped its way through the house,  searching for something.  Faye scrambled into a pair of steel toed boots, a large woolen sweater and finally a leather jacket.  As an afterthought, she grabbed Bill's motorcycle helmet before heading outside. Maybe it will take me to a Chinatown somewhere, she thought to herself as she put on the helmet and stepped out onto the road in front of her house.  Or someplace up North.  Jersey or something.  Anywhere but here. 

The sky turned sullen.  As the wind shoved her, she stood there, legs apart, arms akimbo, mesmerized by the fury that surrounded her.  When she was small, they gave hurricanes female names but this one was named Richard.

           " Don't that beat all?" Bill laughed one evening as they ate supper and watched Richard's progress on the news. "A homo hurricane."

Faye looked at the back of his head and thought, Who are you and why did I marry you?

The question fell between them like a brick.  She wished she could hit him with it.

Faye leaned into the wind and staggered towards a clearing nearby. This is fun, she thought, and she laughed.  That's when she heard Bill's voice, calling to her from somewhere near the front yard. He was waving to her, then walking towards her gradually, spewing obscenities.  Something about you crazy dumb bitch, are you nuts, I'm gonna beat your ass. Something like that. He came home early from work and how he's going to ruin everything, Faye thought.  So she began to run towards Richard.  As she did, she involuntarily cried out for help and fell into a ditch, with a resounding thud. Startled and frightened, she pressed her face into the soft wet ground and sobbed uncontrollably.  It was the very first time that Faye had ever done such a thing, in all the years that her husband had known her.  Bill stopped for a moment, stunned.

By the time he realized what was really going on, it was all over.

All kinds of things seemed to be going up, up and away, into the darkness above them.  Rooftops.  Cars.  Dirt.  Animals. Bill was carried away, kicking and screaming, lost in the ever-widening swirl of debris that lifted itself higher and higher as it moved farther away until it was finally gone.

Faye closed her eyes and waited her turn but fortunately Bill was the last one scheduled for take-off.  After a few hours, she worked her way out of the ditch and limped towards what was left of the house--her house now.  It would be awhile before anyone found her.  May as well  wait out the rescue effort from the front porch.

Flash Fiction: "Chicken Lips"

  

This month's NaBloPoMo theme is RISK. I've been revisiting some flash fiction that I'd written some time ago and I found this one that seems to have a bit of risk in it somewhere, so here you go.
 

Chicken Lips

 

It was their first date and it was a blind one, rabid with good intentions and interesting talk.  A mutual friend had set them up and Dana figured, why not, it'll be fun.  They both put on a mock game face when they met--for Marion's sake, they laughed--but there was a mutual attraction that neither of them could deny.   After awhile, they were chatting as though they'd known each other for years.

Unfortunately, something was killing her buzz. 

Every time Jason smiled at her, what little was there in the way of a mouth disappeared into the rest of his face, revealing two rows of gleaming whiteness. Dana smiled at him warmly and tried not to think about it but as the night wore on, it was all that she could think about.  The words glowed as they hovered around his head, in neon: chicken lips. After she watched him talk through the main course, she was ready to politely excuse herself and go home.  But to tell the truth, she was having a good time.  And besides--she never skipped dessert.

A question loomed over her thoughts like a cloud: Would he kiss her?  No sooner did this query appear than another floated along behind it, listlessly: If he did kiss her, what in God's name would it feel like?

That she was unlike anything that he had even remotely expected was enough to knock the wind out of Jason's Nantucket sails.  The details she gave him about herself and her life made him sputter with a mixture of bewilderment, confusion and pleasure.  He had driven his car past quite a few, locking the doors carefully as his vehicle came to a complete stop at the red light.  Perhaps there were one or two in his classes at his alma mater that he hadn't really paid any attention to.  This was certainly true at work.  And he'd certainly seen plenty in the movies, on television and those videos--music, sports, porn and otherwise.  But to have an intelligent insightful conversation with one--and a beautiful one, at that--this had never happened.

Jason, on the other hand, was exactly what Dana had expected. 

Jason was wonderful in a New England white guy kind of way.  The kind that can trace his family tree all the way back to Old England.  The kind that likes to go rock climbing on the weekends. The kind that walked through this life with the patented swagger of privelege and entitlement.  Jason had no need to stand up and demand whatever he wanted out of life. He understood from a very early age that clearly, it was already his.  An all-American birthright, if you will.  Somewhere down the line, whether they had any money or not, didn't they all come off like that to some degree?  Doing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, with society condoning them all the way?

If my brother behaved like that, Dana thought, the cops would shoot him in the back 41 times.

As he excused himself and disappeared to the men's room, she sighed and wondered what she'd say to Marion the next day. Dana could visualize the look of disappointment on her face so easily.  How could she get out of explaining this one?  She'd have to think of something.  She always did.  Only someone who'd been in a situation with someone like this would truly empathize. As Dana nibbled on her dessert, she began to count the days leading up to the next night in with the girls and thought about how she'd describe this encounter.

Suddenly, she felt a slight pressure on the embankment next to her.  It was Jason, sliding towards her in the booth.  Here it comes, Dana thought and for a moment she closed her eyes to clear her thoughts.  When she opened them, he was very close to her.  Too close.

"Have you ever seen that movie Annie Hall?"

"Yes."

"You know that part about how they kiss each other at the beginning of the date to get the kiss overwith?  Because if they don't, Woody Allen will be thinking about it for the whole date and then the evening will be ruined?"

"I remember that scene."

"That's how I feel."

Dana looked into his face.  She could see the freckles that speckled his eyelids so delicately, so faintly, she had to resist the urge to touch them.  She wanted to tell him that they were beautiful but nothing would come out of her mouth.  She waited for the words to say and as she did, she held his gaze.

"I feel like if I don't kiss you now, I never will."

As he spoke, he came closer gradually, lowering his eyes to look at her mouth, stained with berries from her half-eaten dessert.  She held his gaze and readjusted, smiling faintly. All at once, she knew. That's why he noticed her.  That's why he harassed Marion into a blind date set-up. That's why he persued her all this time, polite and unassuming and direct.  He wanted a kiss, a real one, from big soft lips like hers that would taste like everything he'd ever wanted.  He got everything he ever wanted, didn't he?   Isn't that why this should be the one thing he doesn't get?

In that moment, Dana felt like the most powerful woman in the whole wide world.  And for a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she was.