December 26 - Almost Home

Football was on TV.
Bears vs. Jets.
We were waiting for my mom.
She had gone out to run a quick errand.
That was over an hour ago.
She wasn't answering her phone.
We were dressed and ready to go.

In the meantime, Lauren was going over lines.
For all of next month and the first week of February she will be in Louisville performing with The Second City.
While trying to memorize the show, my aunt asked Lauren lots of questions about acting.
Surprisingly, Lauren was happy to answer her questions.
Her family doesn't show much interest in her performing endeavors.

My uncle watched the football with me.
He's not the biggest football fan.
But he watched it with me.
He seemed moody.
I think he misses his brother still.
There's no one to speak Spanish with anymore.
No one that knows Cuba.
I miss him, too.
Every day.

My mom finally returned.
She was holding two big sleds.
She bought sleds.
She thought we might want to go sledding.
We just wanted to go home.
We said farewell to my aunt and uncle.
It would be the last time I would see my Uncle Jose.
In February, an uninsured driver would hit him head-on while he waited to make a left turn.
But I didn't know that yet.
I'm glad I got to see him one last time.
Mom was right though.
We could have gone sledding.

Verdict: Win

December 25 - Christmas Cliff Notes

Christmas was nice.
We ate a bunch, drank a tad.
Didn't drive too much.
Now Lauren wants a cat.

Verdict: Win

December 24 - Santa's Ghost Writer III & A Cuban Nochebuena

I got up at 4:30am so I could write a story for my cousin Michelle.
When she was nine or ten, she had a pet goat.
This story is for her.

SIGOURNEY

            For her birthday, Maggie asked her parents for a goat.  She had wanted a goat because Cheryl Ladd kept a goat on her Hollywood estate.  Star magazine said so.  It sounded glamorous and eccentric.  Always supportive, Maggie’s parents made the effort.  They searched the Yellow Pages.  But there was nothing listed under GOATS.  They tried calling a few farms.  But none of the farms in the area farmed goats.  They went downtown to the pet store.  But the kid at the pet store said goats didn’t make good pets.  Also, they didn’t have any.

            Over dinner, her father suggested the idea of a stuffed goat.  This idea horrified Maggie and she ran into her room and cried.  While her father finished Maggie’s macaroni and cheese, he got an idea.  He called his friend Joe.

            “Hey Joe,” he said with the last remnants of dinner still in his mouth.  “Remember that nativity you did last year?”

            Joe did remember.  He was fond of telling the story.  Last December Joe got a call from his brother Maury out in Sigourney.  Maury was frantic. 

            “I need you to be a shepherd!” he gushed.  “I just fired my shepherd!”

            Joe had no idea what his brother was talking about.

            “For The Nativity!  I’m doing a real life nativity!!”

            It seems the role of shepherd had proven too demanding for Maury’s paperboy.  So Joe drove down to Sigourney.  He brought his brown bathrobe and some rope.  When he pulled into the driveway, Maury went ballistic.

            “PARK BEHIND THE HOUSE!  BEHIND THE HOUSE!!!  THERE WERE NO CARS IN BETHLEHEM!!”  It was going to be a long day.

            Maury played Joseph, who clearly had rented a robe for the occasion of fatherhood.  Kind of like a tux.  His wife Bonnie played Mary, and their four-year-old daughter Kylie played Jesus.  In his brown bathrobe, Joe found himself in charge of an actual living goat.

            “Make sure he doesn’t steal the show,” Maury directed.

            “What’s his name?” Joe asked.

            “He doesn’t have a name.  I just got him yesterday.”

            “Where did you get him?”

            “I DON’T KNOW!” Maury barked, and gestured hysterically at some neighbors who had parked in the driveway.  A handful of locals had gathered to witness Sigourney’s first live nativity scene.  Maury had posted flyers at Casey’s.  The show was free.  It was also quite cold.

            Joe shivered in his bathrobe, and held a potato sack of carrots to keep the goat at bay.  Maury, seemingly impervious to the elements, read all of the lines boldly and loudly over the freezing winds.  Everyone else shimmied and shivered in the scorching, burning cold. 

            During “Away In The Manger”, Joe checked in with the goat.  It was going through the carrots like they were candy.  Suddenly Kylie, who as Jesus had no lines, panicked with stage fright and ran screaming into the house.  Bonnie followed to console her daughter. Maury adlibbed a line about there being “too much frankincense” in the manger.  It would have gotten a laugh if it weren’t so cold.

            The goat had devoured the entire sack of carrots but was still hungry, and began eating the bag.  Joe and the goat had a tug of war with the bag.  Joe won, but goats are sore losers, and this goat charged at Joe.  Maury, ever the thespian, stayed in character.

            “Perhaps the ox detects myrrh.”

            This time he got a laugh.  Especially since Joe was knocked down by the goat.  Maury smiled for the first time that day, until a station wagon full of late comers pulled into the driveway.  He finally broke character.

            “HEY!! NO CARS!! NO CARS!!”

            The goat charged at the station wagon, but got distracted by Maury’s rented gown.  This time the goat yanked at it, and thoroughly ripped its cheap design.  Maury let out a string of obscenities that began with “Goddammit”.  It would be the last living nativity hosted by Maury in Sigourney.

            Joe gladly gave Maury’s phone number to Maggie’s dad.

It's Christmas Eve.
Lauren, my mom and I drove to Iowa.
We visited my dad's side of the family.
My Uncle Jose was in good spirits.
He played Cuban records on the turntable.
We ate Cuban food.
I made terrible mojitos.
We exchanged presents.
The stories qualified as gifts.
My family seemed to enjoy them.
We played board games.
We argued and laughed.

Christmas wasn't the asshole I thought it would be this year.
So I guess that makes me the asshole.
Oh well.

Verdict: Win

December 23 - Santa's Ghost Writer II

My cousin Melissa works as a flight attendant.
This story is for her.

FLYING OVER IOWA

            She enjoyed the turbulence.  To her closed eyes it felt like a much needed massage.  Baltimore.  Most of the odd ones would probably deboard there.  This leg was packed with oddballs. 

            She pried an eye open to ensure her massage did not become a nap.  A dreadlocked guy in a vintage Gumby T-shirt was staring at her.  He knew he had been caught but continued to stare anyway, like a game of chicken.  She did not avert her eyes either. 

            A large lump of turbulence declared the staring contest a draw.  The sound of snoring suddenly removed itself from the airplane’s blaring mix of white noise.  For a moment she glanced out the window and focused her attention on the perfectly round crop circles below.

            Her attention returned to the passengers.  The dreadlocked guy calmly munched on some ice chips from a plastic cup.  She noticed the ice in his cup was red.  Red?  The airline had discontinued Hawaiian Punch years ago.  So it wasn’t Hawaiian Punch.  He caught her staring at him and gave her a toothy and bloody smile.

            It was her job to assist the dreadlocked man with the bloody mouth.  With a sigh she approached him with routine caution.

            “Sir, is everything all right?”

            “Yeah,” he chuckled with bloody lips, “I’m fine.”

            “Are you sure?  Your mouth is bleeding.”

            He laughed again.  “Don’t worry.  I’m a glass eater.”

            A glass eater.  This was new.  His serene reassurance misled her, and a game curiosity quickly reverted to professional, distanced concern.  She spoke in a stage whisper.

            “For safety reasons, we can’t have broken glass on the plane.”

            He assured her that he did not have any broken glass.  Just hard plastic.  Pen caps and bottle caps.  He was chewing them to reinforce the strength of his gums and his threshold for pain.

            “I perform with a midnight circus,” he explained.

            “Sir,” she persisted, “we still cannot have you bleeding aboard a United States aircraft.”

            A bald, in fact completely hairless, man chimed in.

            “C’mon, Gums.  It’s not like I can practice eating fire during a flight.”

            She gave the bald, hairless man a sideways glance.  He added.

            “I’m a fire eater.”

            She scanned the plane.  The over abundance of oddballs now made more sense.  The facial tattoos.  The vertically challenged twins.  All the scarred and branded hands handing her their trash.  She was traveling with a traveling circus.

            The fire eater continued.

            “We’ve got shows all this week.”

            “In Baltimore?” she guessed.

            “No.  New York.”  The beast man next to him let out a horrid, sour burp.  “But we’re all from Baltimore.”

            “I tell you what,” said the glass eater.  “If you have any more of those dinners back there, that’ll clean up my mouth good.”

            She rolled her eyes and went to get him one of the many dinners declined earlier by the other circus people.  It’s funny, she thought, they’ll eat fire and glass but won’t touch Chicken Parmesan.  She grabbed a warm tin and a set of silverware and headed back down the aisle.

            Suddenly, a thick patch of turbulence sent the plane jarringly downward.  She braced herself on the overhead compartments, but in doing so sent the silverware flying from her grip.  It soared awkwardly until landing squarely on the nose of the glass eater.  A few of the non-circus people gasped.

            “Oh my God!  Are you okay?” she stammered.

            “It’s okay,” he smiled.  “I’m also a sword swallower.”

My aunt and uncle on my father's side introduced me to wanderlust.
Between ages 12-14, they brought me along on their road trips.
My closest cousin Michelle and I would get into all sorts of boneheaded mischief.
We did things on the cheap, and always on the fun.
This story is for them.

NEW LIBERTY

            The van broke down again.  This time at night.  Almost home.  But not quite.

            The vacation had been fun.  The kids got along well.  They counted VW bugs the whole time.  In Pennsylvania, George decided to venture up the steep, densely wooded hill behind the motel.  His path was choked by pine trees, and he used them like levers until it got too thick.  Audrey followed but got stuck.  George tried to guide her down but she skinned her legs on the sharp rocks.  That hill wasn’t meant for climbing really.

            DC was neat.  They escaped the sun’s oppressive breath inside the museums, spritzing their day with history and education.  The next day Philadelphia would offer more of the same, but the van didn’t want to go.  At least the carburetor didn’t.  George and Audrey didn’t seem to mind.  For two days they hung out at the motel across the street.  It had a swimming pool and miniature golf.  George and Audrey were having fun.

            They watched Philadelphia from the expressway.  It looked grey and mean.  Like a nasty dog.  They decided to skip past it.  Atlantic City promised the enchanting possibility of recouping their losses.  They strolled around the boardwalk, and saw a roulette wheel made out of jellybeans.  The kids bought gag souvenirs.  Liquid-filled shot glasses.  Somehow they amused themselves for hours with those things.

            George and Audrey played at the motel pool while Mom and Dad hit the casinos.  They stuck to slots mostly, but ventured out for the occasional hand of black jack, mostly breaking even.  Then a couple of shiny guys in spacey disco suits hit the jackpot on the slots behind them.  They whooped and danced and swore and gave each other high fives.  The sound of endlessly plinking coins grew tiresome.  Those guys didn’t need that jackpot.  Mom and Dad glanced one last time at the disco jerks and left the casino.  They were down by a few hundred dollars.

            George and Audrey had been jumping on the beds.  Doing flips.  Rough housing.  A particularly graceless somersault by George ended in Mom’s purse getting knocked from the nightstand onto the floor.  Its contents spilled all over the green and yellow shag carpet.  Audrey scurried to scoop up the dollars and coins and put them back in the purse.  George helped.  As the kids hurriedly shoved fistfuls of small bills back into the purse, the door opened.  It was Mom and Dad.  George and Audrey froze, the guiltiest looks of real fear stitched on their faces.  They started to explain that they weren’t doing what it looked like they were doing.  But their folks just burst into laughter.

            It had been a long day of driving.  Probably close to twelve hours.  Almost midnight.  Almost home.  But broke and broke down on the side of the road.  Mom and Dad were worried.  George and Audrey didn’t seem worried.  They just sat in the van and waited.

            A car slowed down.  A white sedan.  It pulled over and stopped in front of them.  A guy got out.  He was a young man, with dirty blond hair and a dirty blond beard.  His button down shirt seemed permanently wrinkled.  It looked fresh from the trunk.  He offered to take them home, just forty miles away.  They cautiously accepted.

            He apologized as he rolled up a tattered wool blanket and brushed several crumpled Budweiser cans from the rear window.  The sedan had become his home of late.  Its windshield housed a generous crack that spidered diagonally.  The upholstery on the ceiling sagged, and the vehicle smelled odd like stew.  But it ran.

            George and Audrey sat in the back with Mom, playing with their shot glasses.  Dad kept the man company up front.  His name was Bobby.  He talked about losing his job at a furniture warehouse.  He talked about trying to get a job at the mattress factory in Coralville.  He started to talk about his family, but Dad made sure things didn’t get too dark.  Dad talked about the casino, and how they had lost most of their vacation money on car repairs.  Every now and then Audrey or George would chuckle from the back, in their own world.  He counted the miles.

            Bobby pulled into their driveway.  The dogs went wild, not recognizing the strange vehicle and its strange but also familiar scent.  George and Audrey hugged the barking, snarling beasts and tiredly lugged their bags into the house.  While Mom and the kids lit up the house, Bobby asked if he could stay the night.  Dad gave him the last twenty dollars.

I prefer writing stories to being a sad sack.

Verdict: Win

December 22 - Santa's Ghost Writer

Undeterred by my recent failure at the Ray's Tap Reading Series, I came up with a solution for the whole gift-giving-without-having-money bit.
I'll write short stories for my family and give those out as gifts.
Stories inspired by the recipient.
I think it will say more than something apathetically selected from Target that I can't even afford.

My cousin Josh was raised on a farm in Iowa.
For the time being, he sells cars in Muscatine.

MUSCATINE

            He could tell they weren’t going to buy anything.  Especially a car.  They already seemed to have one.  A late model Kia.  And they were using it to cut through the dealership lot.

            Where were they going?  And why were they in such a hurry?  Muscatine was a bigger town.  But not big enough to be in that much of a hurry.  The music blaring from within suggested they were in their teens.  Some sort of hip hop.  Not his thing.

            He stood up.  It was what he was supposed to do when a potential customer approached.  Also, he just wanted to stand up.  He had been sitting on his ass all day.  It didn’t feel like work.  But it made him tired nonetheless.

            They weren’t teenagers.  They weren’t even a they.  It was a man in his forties.  Driving a Kia.  A Kia Soul.  Weird.  He smiled and tried to make eye contact with the man, but the man was wearing sunglasses.  They looked expensive.  If you’re into that kind of thing.

            To his surprise, the man slowed to a stop in front of him.  Time to do his job.

            “Hello, how can I help you?”

            The man in the sunglasses wouldn’t turn down the music.

            “Do you guys…”  The rest was inaudible.

            He had to crouch down closer in order to hear the man in the sunglasses.  But it also made the music louder.

            “Sorry?”

            The man used his sunglasses to look around.

            “I thought this was a gas station.”

            “No.  It’s a car dealership.”

            The man in the sunglasses turned the music down a fraction.

            “Do you know where I can get some tacos around here?”

            A purse and its contents were scattered across the interior of the Kia.  Credit cards, lipstick, some jewelry.

            “Well, there’s Taco John’s down on Grandview.”  He noticed a few fresh scratches strewn across the man’s face.  “But if you want to have a good sit down dinner, then go to Mami’s.”  He memorized the man’s features.  “That’s the real deal.”  White guy.  Dark hair, going grey, long on the sides.  “It’s on 2^nd Street downtown.”  Moustache, goatee.  “They’ve got killer margaritas, too.”  Masculine nose.  Kind of big lips.  “Do you want directions?”

            He didn’t mean to use the term “killer margaritas”.  The man in the sunglasses turned up the music louder than it was before.

            “No.  Do you have any air fresheners?”

            Medium build.  Black trench coat.

            “Let me check.  I think we do.”

            They didn’t.  He knew they didn’t.  In the lobby, he pretended to futz around for air fresheners.  Red Kia Soul.  Mid to late 40’s.  He scrambled for a pen.  The muffled hip hop pulsed against the lobby windows.  The man in the sunglasses suddenly sped off.  South Dakota plates.

            “6RC..”  But he missed the rest of it.  He called the police.

            “Red Kia Soul.  White.  Mid to late 40’s.  Dark hair.  Moustache.  South Dakota plates.  6RC…”

            It felt good to work.

As an only child, I played by myself a lot.

Football entailed tackling linebacker pillows.

And making lots of gnawing, beastmaster noises.
Baseball meant tossing a wiffle ball at the batter (my bicycle tire), and throwing the ball to first base (the wall to my left).
All the while announcing the plays in an excited Al Michaels head voice.
Everything was highlight reel worthy.

Adventure also occurred.
The hallway in our apartment became the mausoleum corridor in Dragon's Lair.
The space between the bed and the wall became the junkyard where The Incredible Hulk wasted a punk.

So when we visited my aunt and uncle's farm one blustery winter in the early 80's, I was delighted to find their yard piled high with mountains of well packed snow.  I played GI Joe and Automan all day in blissful solitude, taking dramatic death plummets into the forgiving, white trenches.
Also, my most recent forays into self-absorbed patheticism helped influence this story for my farming aunt and uncle.

CLARE COUNTY

            He had pulled the trampoline out of storage and placed it next to the twenty-foot tall snowdrift.  It was probably more like eleven feet.  But it had become known as the twenty feet of snow.

            From the bedroom she watched him bounce up and down, building momentum.  He had almost retained the confident posture of the athlete she once knew.  But forty new pounds and a tattered pair of pajamas had removed the notion of professionalism.  Nevertheless, it was the happiest she had seen him in months.

            He was getting up there.  Almost as high as the bedroom window.  She hoped he would snap out of his doldrums.  Lately he remained a fixture of the couch, obsessively watching ESPN.  The network had rejected him as a commentator.  They were polite about it.  Said they were going in another direction.  Yet every day on the screen sat a thinner, younger version of him.  Analyzing statistics.  Making observations.  Joking around with the guys.

            He wanted to stop brooding about it, too.  Hence the trampoline.  It reminded him of summers at his aunt’s house.  It was a simpler time.  He was eight.  Football was still a dream waiting to come true.  So was drawing cartoons.  He had almost forgotten that he used to draw.  And was actually quite good at it.  Could have gone on to be a professional if the lure of football hadn’t been so shiny.  While bobbing through the prairie air, he finally smiled.

            Just then a gust of wind shoved across the plains.  He lost balance in mid air, and lost his footing back down on the cold mat.  His once mighty body sprang wayward, and plopped awkwardly atop the twenty feet of snow.

            She rushed to the backyard.

            “Honey!  Are you okay?”

            “I’m fine,” he said calmly while writhing in pain.  He had broken his ankle again.  The same broken ankle that had cut his career short on a Monday night two years ago.  “Go back inside,” he tried.

            “Can you get down?”  Her bare feet danced on the uncompromising cement deck.

            He didn’t want to get down.  He welcomed the pain like an old friend.  He wanted to stay there all day and rehash old war stories.  But he knew this was an impractical tactic.

            “Call an ambulance,” he managed.

            They were new to this rural expanse of Iowa farmland.  They hadn’t gotten to know any of its residents yet, and hadn’t really tried.  So they didn’t know that they shared their gravel road with the head of the volunteer fire department.

            “It’s gonna take forever for an ambulance to get out here!” she protested.

            “Then start building a casket, I suppose.”

            She ran into the house frantically and called the fire department.  She told them her husband fell on twenty feet of snow and couldn’t get down.  “He used to play for the Vikings!” she added, hoping that would speed things up.

            He stared paralyzed at the grey sky as the snow began to soak through his pajamas.  The clouds ran flush against the blankness like hospital sheets.  He drew cartoons on them.  A group of  guys joking around the water cooler about the football player that broke his ankle on a trampoline.  He chuckled to himself between bursts of excruciating pain.  It seemed he would soon be seeing his face on ESPN after all.  Albeit from the hospital.

            A familiar looking pick-up truck pulled into the driveway.  It was the guy who lived down the road.

I worked at the bar tonight.

It was dead enough for me to start on another story for my cousin Melissa.

Verdict: Win

December 21 - Electronic Distraction (Not Video Games Or Porn)

How do you shake a depression?
With distraction.

I woke up bright and early and drove north for one day of work.
A commercial shot on location at an electronics compound.
A store, their offices and the warehouse all in one spot.

I was the craft services PA.
I lugged around coolers all day.
"Anybody need a water?"

Around 8am I was dispatched to pick up some camera gear that had been accidentally left behind downtown.
An eighty mile round trip.
The roads were dead.
Cold and dead.
It wasted less time than I had hoped.

We filmed all over the compound.
Interviewing employees.
"Anybody need a water?"
Around 1pm I was dispatched to get some coffee and Emergen-C.
GPS said there was a Starbucks on some railroad tracks in the forest.
There wasn't.
Just some railroad tracks.
And some forest.
They didn't have Emergen-C there, either.

It would be a long day.
My fellow PA Atom complimented me on a recent Facebook status.
"Depressed = deep rest"
He liked that.
Hey, I try.

We filmed all over the warehouse.
Everyone screamed over the noise.
"ANYBODY NEED A WATER?"
Around 8pm I was dispatched to pick up second meal.
I almost ate shit on the ice holding a stack of ten pizzas.

We got done around 9, which meant 10.
It was a long day.
But it prevented me from exploring more depths in self-loathing moronism.

Verdict: Win

December 20 - Ah, The Holidays

Ah, the holidays.
God's way of reminding you that your father died an early, painful death.

Verdict: Loss