Evil Did I Dwell

This is a story about redemption, the Lord, and the little things that make life worthwhile. It's also about living with a crackhead.

1

I saw Fred Rogers naked in a YMCA locker room when I was nine years old, and from that point on, I didn't talk much for about thirteen years. My grandfather nudged me when we were changing out of our swim trunks, and with the nonchalance that comes with age, he said "There's Mr. Rogers. He's in here quite a bit," and when I looked up, there was everybody's favorite neighbor, in all his wrinkled, fleshy splendor. The aged, naked icon was leaning up against the lockers, stretching into a calender pose.

Then he winked at me.

There are some acts that call for nothing less than sweet revenge, and although Pap died a few years after that scarring incident, I've since spent countless hours dreaming up a suitable retaliation for his well-intentioned, but ultimately traumatizing gesture.

I walked out of the Downtown Y in a stupor; a mobile of puppets and toy locomotives and withered genitalia circled above my head. My day was ruined. For weeks I had been looking forward to swimming in a pool other than the four-foot above ground soup bowl in my neighbor's backyard. I had a different neighbor on my mind. It would be years before I set foot in the water to swim again. The incident had the same effect on me that Jaws had on seventies pop culture.

After that, I pretty much spoke only when necessary. Most people took my laconic contributions to conversation as shyness, and that was fine because it freed me from speaking more than I wanted to. But it still took effort on my part. My sparse dialog was economically chosen, and its precision satisfied almost everyone. I always tried to be subtly complimentary; people walked away from me feeling good about themselves, and this was the beginning of a lifelong habit of pacification. Not only have I never been in a physical confrontation, I have prevented many conflicts from reaching a head. I even take a modicum of pride in this attribute, even though its roots lie in my abject yellow cowardice.

To achieve a balance, I have always surrounded myself with talkative people. I dated a girl for seven years who must have been cerebrally rewired so that the impulse to speak was immediately broadcast from the mouth without the delay that most people use to contemplate, censor or edit their thought before uttering it. She managed to talk more in one day than I would all week.

2

As I grew older, life began beating me down. I started liking people less and less. To cope with my growing misanthropy, I began drinking heavily every day. By the time I was twenty, my recycling bin was a glass card house stacked with bottles of bourbon, a Jim Beam cemetery. I was able to hide my hard partying from my mom and brother until my empty bank account and disheveled appearance forced me to come clean. Mom handled it by blaming herself, but my brother, wise beyond his years for a change, handled it by giving me a thorough, well-deserved ass-kicking. I needed to dry out and take a good hard look at the person I was becoming, and at my families' behest, I checked into a detox facility.

I didn't have insurance at the time, so the clinic I was admitted to lacked the amenities of most rehabilitation facilities. It was on the third floor of a hospital in the inner city, and I was the only white patient there. Most of the patients were recovering from crack addiction, including my roommate Stephan. At first it was novel, as this was the first bona fide "crack head" I'd ever encountered, and he lived up to all of my expectations. However, sharing a room with him got old real fast. Not that I would have been able to sleep much anyway, but Stephan simply would not stop talking; he talked like I used to drink. It was exhausting. Whereas I found his stories captivating on the first night, like the time he walked from Whitehall all the way to Kennywood (at least fifteen miles) for a "jumbo," which I gathered was a lot of crack, by the second day I was ready to kill him or myself, simply for five minutes of peace and quiet; if something didn't give soon, only one of us was making it out of that room alive.

Thankfully, early on the third morning, the facility's therapist knocked on the door and walked into the room. He asked Stephan to excuse us, exciting feelings of love for a complete stranger that I had never felt before.

"Dr. Pomerantz," he said, extending his hand.
"Patient McCarthy."

Like me, he was balding and tried compensating with a beard. Also like me, his facial hair did not grow in thick like I'm sure he wished it would; it was the kind of beard that teenagers try growing to buy cigarettes and beer.

He began with the usual litany of questions.

"Why did you start drinking?"
"I don't know Doc, I suppose I am depressed."
"How long have you been binging?"
"About four years."
"And are you allergic to anything?"
"Life."

He scribbled something in his notebook.

"I see you're taking Paxil. It's not helping?"
"It's like trying to slay a dragon with a butter knife."

Dr. Pomerantz set down his clipboard. He leaned back a bit in his chair and crossed his legs.
"I want you to try to remember some things that made you happy before booze." Probably anticipating my response, he added "Or at least the things that made life a little more bearable, because it's the sum of the little things that keep us going. So go ahead, give me a list."

The first one was easy.

"Black coffee in the morning."
"Good. Next?"
I closed my eyes and thought about it. Remembering those kind of things was harder than I thought.
"A marinated Delmonico steak, medium rare."
"Ok, one more."

I thought I was tapped. I sat for a while in silence, hoping he would let me off the hook, but another small pleasure came to mind just as I was about to give up.

"Palindromes."

He arched an eyebrow in surprise.
"Ah, there we go. How did that come about?"
"I don't know. My phone number is 833-5338. I know that doesn't really count, but I think that's how it started. I have trouble sleeping too; they're my sheep and fence."
He uncrossed his legs and shifted his weight in his chair.

"Go hang a salami," he said, testing my knowledge. I smiled and bobbed my head in approval.
"I like lasagna too." We shared a wonderful moment of two nerds enjoying the pleasure of obscure wordplay. I was grudgingly beginning to like Dr. Pomerantz.

3

The next morning, he ducked his head in the room at about the same time. He brought me a cup of black coffee.
"Is it leaded?"
"Lived on decaf, faced no devil."
"Nice. Thanks anyway." By then I had gone seventy two hours without alcohol (not that I was counting or anything), and was feeling a little better. Once again, he dropped in the chair, and I sat up in bed, groggy, grumpy, but as ready to talk as I ever was.

"Feeling any better today?"
"Well, I think my body is starting to forgive me."
"I want to talk a bit about religion today if you don't mind."
"It's all the rage in here, isn't it?"
"So where do you stand?"
"On religion, or faith?"
"You tell me."
"I don't like religion for the same reason I don't like the Grateful Dead."
"And that is?"

"The fans."

He was fighting it, but I saw the corners of his mouth turn up a bit before focusing on his clipboard to regain his composure.

"Go on."

"They ruin everything for me. And it's not just the piousness or zealotry, which is enough to turn off any Doubting Thomas. It sours the whole prospect of salvation for me."

"So you're letting other people come between you and a higher power."
"I guess so, yeah. It used to make me sick, sitting in church, sandwiched between these big families trying to out-deed each other...I didn't want any part of it. I don't feel like those kinds of people are my 'brothers and sisters' in the Lord. I don't want them to be."

"You want to be the Lord's orphan child."
"Amen."

I drained my coffee during a pensive silence. I was surprised by how much we had in common. Surprised and a little encouraged. I think he was too.

"And then there are the hymns," I said. He nodded and rolled his eyes.
"Apparently, the Lord said, 'let the Caucasians have music, and let it lack melody, soul and rhythm.'"
"Right! Jesus turned water into wine, but even he couldn't help my congregation keep a 4/4 time beat." We both laughed, and the silence that followed wasn't awkward, but strangely peaceful.

"Well, it seems like your dislike of people is ruining your life."
"And your recommended treatment?"
"You seem to appreciate candor over psychobabble."
"Absolutely. Give me the straight dope, pun intended."
"The straight dope is..." he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Fuck 'em. Try living a week without allowing people to turn you off from the good things in life."

This was my kind of doctor, my kind of person. I shook his hand, and asked him to keep Stephan at bay a bit longer while I contemplated his advice and the most beautiful sunrise I can remember from that window on the third floor. It might have saved my life.

Since then, I've been training myself not to let people bother me as much as they used to. When something pisses me off now, I let it be known. Back when we were exchanging palindromes, Dr. Pomerantz told me to "doom a good deed, liven a mood," and he's right, because ultimately it's healthier to be a sober asshole than a likable drunk.

the Spring Chickens (part one)

I worked in a bookstore for six months after I graduated college, gathering experience that I would need if I ever tried to fulfill my lifelong dream of opening one of my own. It was one of those ubiquitous mall bookstores that make it virtually impossible for an independently owned mom&pop shop to compete without drastically raising their prices.

At first I was elated, but it didn't take long for the luster to tarnish. I was hired as a key-holder, and the tasks required of my position were depressingly similar to any job that payed slightly above minimum wage. A well-trained monkey could have performed my duties with ease; I was one step above the guy who puts the fry bag on the fry scooper at McDonalds. I used to spend my days shelving books while forming sociological theories from the habits and attitudes of the customers.

For instance, I've come to believe that Romance novels are the opiate of the sexually unsatisfied woman, while Science Fiction serves the same function for sexually deprived men. Since Romance and Sci-Fi seem to be cut from the same, celibate cloth, I suggested moving their sections side by side instead of keeping them on opposite sides of the store. Jeanna, my manager, said that keeping them lonely meant keeping them reading, and it was hard to argue that point. Still, I had many daydreams about inter-stellar amour occurring in my bookstore, where the corpulent slug with the Battlestar Galactica t-shirt summons the courage to ask out the shy girl with poor fashion taste buying the mass market paperback of "The Love Whistle." That kind of matchmaking would make my day worthwhile.

The only other validation of my job was selling the rare piece of good literary fiction. For every hundred copies of "Love Bunion" or whatever novel Nora Roberts churned out that month, I'd sell a single copy of "Anna Karenina" or "East of Eden." The really great days were when I would actually convince a customer to buy a good book, like Tom Robbins' "Still Life With Woodpecker," instead of just ringing it up at the register. But I could count those days on one hand, whereas most shifts were spent peddling copy after copy of the latest concocted nuclear or biological threat to America, or something along the lines of "The Viking Pool Cleaner."

Working at a bookstore also showed me how important it is to get along with your co-workers. In my case, when I started working there I loved my job, but had absolutely nothing in common with anyone else who worked there. I was surrounded by books, but I was also surrounded by old women. The youngest employee besides myself was Ruth, or "Sweet Baby," as the old men at the Elks Club called her. She was fifty-eight, and had the thickest southern-drawl I'd ever heard. Then there was Abby, who despite her age and matronly demeanor, could drink me under the table and had a predilection for curse words that would make a sailor blush. Jeanna, the manager and unofficial leader of this motley geriatric posse, was also the oldest at seventy-three.

They accepted me as a mascot of sorts, sending me on missions to the pharmacy for Metamucil and Ensure, and while the conversations never concerned anything that I could contribute to, they never made any attempt to exclude me, either. After a few months of working there, I knew more about osteoporosis than any twenty-three year old man should ever have to know. Since I was working six days a week and had only moved to Wilmington a few weeks before I was hired, the "Spring Chickens" became my social clique, and they proved to be no less fun or danger-seeking than any fraternity at Chapel Hill.

Scratch Fever

I have three smokes and two matches.

At home, un-mailed Christmas cards are scattered across my desk, even though there was a parade yesterday honoring Martin Luther King. According to the checked off boxes on my calender, today is eight days ago.

I'm hunched over in my car, in the sub-basement of the Roosevelt building, and I'm dreaming about the lottery again. I think about it with the same frequency that men supposedly think about sex.

The idea of never having to work another day in my life is worth the habit that even makes some veteran smokers and alcoholics snicker. I know the odds, the comparisons to being struck by lightning. But the game that I play, Win for Life, is much more attractive than most of the others. Each scratch ticket costs two dollars, a buck more than most tickets. It's twice as big as the dollar tickets too, but it's bigger and more expensive for a reason. There are three games on each card, as well as a bonus chance, a blue and yellow keystone that may conceal a prize between four and forty dollars. Also, the top prize for most of the Pennsylvania Lottery games ranges from three to five thousand, and the pot for this one pays a thousand bucks a week for life.

That's all I need. I don't need to be rich; I just need to be able to sleep in on Mondays.

I could be a fast-food journeyman, and bounce around between low-paying jobs. I could assume the wrathful role of spokesman for the minimum wage worker, tell the soccer mom who pulls up to the drive-through every week and orders seventeen god-damned cheeseburgers, most of them needing something added or taken off, to come prepared with a list instead of queuing car after car around the building. I could tell the people who sneak in right before the restaurant closes expecting food what inconsiderate bastards they are. I could be an adolescent's hero.

At first, I only bought tickets from the same store, the Co-Go's down the street from my apartment. My initial strategy for buying at only one location was that it would secure me a better chance of winning the smaller hits, if not the career ender. If I dropped forty dollars on the same roll of tickets, the odds were in my favor that I'd win something, a low hit or at the very least a free ticket.

Anyway, that's how I became familiar with Ray, the afternoon clerk at Co-Go's. He is about fifteen years older then myself, and wears thick, silver framed glasses that always have dust on the lenses. They magnify his eyes, making them look enormous. His yellow work shirt is faded and shrunken so much that the bottom crescent of his gut shows. The shirt often has chili stains from the hot-dog station next to the microwave and Cup of Soup display. His high forehead is always moist with sweat, like bathroom walls after a shower. Hair from the left part canopies the bald spot at the top of his head.

Ray glares with repulsive delight at the women who come into the store. He touches their hands too much when he gives and receives change. Once when I was reading the month log of the daily number posted on the side of the newspaper racks, the bells on the door jingled, welcoming a twenty-something blond with a body too curved to be real. She was chatting on a cell phone and using exaggerated hand motions while she bounced up and down the isles. With feline lithe surprising for his size, Ray slinked out of the back office to the cash register. He waved, smiled, and never took his eyes off her as she strutted down the candy and potato-chip section in her summer jean shorts, and he arched over the counter when she bent slightly to pick up a bag of M&M's. When she turned the aisle to get a drink from the cooler, he wandered from the register to the donut case, tracing his finger along the top of the display glass.

And when the two of us would stand face to face, separated only by the counter, those pug-like eyes glaring back at me through a layer of dust, I felt like the desperate looking one. I was becoming Ray's daily confidence booster; it should be the other way around.

The disgust that I was beginning to feel in his presence was especially troubling, because I couldn't take comfort in believing that I possessed any moral superiority over him. I felt those revolting cravings too, and they stirred from their dormancy around Ray.

So now I only see him on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The other clerks aren't so bad. I've even become rather close with one, a defeated looking old woman named Jerry. She has a tattoo on her left arm that I saw the bottom of one day last summer when the store's air-conditioner broke down. Tattoos always look strange on a woman of Jerry's age, but I can think of no better indicator of the kind of woman she must have been when she was younger. I think about what the rest of the tattoo looks like sometimes, and about asking if I can see the whole thing one day.

Jerry is sympathetic to my cause. At the beginning and end of every workweek I enter her store, give her a knowing wink, and browse the aisles while she counts out my tickets. They are already in a plastic bag on the counter before I hand over the cash. This arrangement eliminates that dreaded waiting period in front of the lottery machine while ticket after ticket is pulled from the roll and folded, accordion style. Last month, the woman who lives across the street accosted me during just such a waiting period, and I told her that they were for a grab bag Christmas party at work. I've had that excuse prepared for the Holiday season since Thanksgiving, ready for just such an emergency. It's better than telling her the truth, that every night as I wait for sleep I pray that twenty-eight years of rotten luck will be scratched away with the same quarter I have used since I hit for two-hundred dollars, my biggest hit yet.

I'm still hunched over in my car, in the sub-basement, alternating glances between my face in the rear view mirror and the clock on the dashboard that is an hour fast, even though the daylight savings change was months ago. I'm not sure if I have enough money to cover the fee I will have to pay after the interview is over so that the long wooden arm will raise and let me out of the garage. I look at the ticket before tucking it above the sun visor; there is no charge for the first sixty minutes. I should be ok even if the meeting runs overtime because I purposefully let change accumulate on the floor of my car for just such occasions.

Cigarette butts are delicately piled up out of the round ashtray in the console, like a scoop of nicotine-flavored ice cream. I think about how I'm going to balance this one on top of the heap without having to empty the tray, and if there's a Catholic saint who hears prayers for employment. I strike one of the matches and raise it to the end of a Marlboro.

I'll worry about the last match later.

the Banalyst

Nick Williams wanted to travel through time. He came into the bookstore one night and asked me if we had anything on the subject. His age was difficult to discern, partly because his face looked more mature than his wiry, adolescent body, and partly because the bifocal glasses he wore were tinted and I had never seen them on anyone under forty.
A boy masquerading as an adult, he could have been twelve as easy as seventeen, and the ambiguity of his age affected my suggestions for time travel.
"H.G. Wells?"
He shook his head, then bobbed it up and down.
"No--real time travel," he said with forced composure.
"Steven Hawkings? Brian Greene?"
Nick's patience burned low, and I wouldn't have even suggested those authors had he shown me his designs for his own time machine first. My heart sank as I flipped through page after page of squiggly lines and wobbly numbers that formed imaginary equations. I feigned astonishment as I mock-examined them.
"Impressive," I said when I handed him his blueprints back. If I had to guess which direction Nick wanted to travel, I would have said the past, and he confirmed that. The store was slow, and I was intrigued enough to put my B+ average in psychology to use.
"Where--er, when do you want to go?"
"Must go back to October 19, 1999. 3:44 PM. Need to stop something."
Damn, I was feeling pretty smart.
"What do you need to stop, Nick?"
"That is none, of your, DARNED, BUSINESS!!!"
He sprayed spittle in my right eye and all over my cheek. I have the nerves of an air-traffic controller during a power outage, and have always startled easily. His abrupt exclamation made both of my hands convulse, and I knocked over a coffee mug of capless pens, sending them rolling off the counter onto the floor. I peripherally noticed curious heads sprouting above the shelves all over the store and heard deep gasping breaths, although I couldn't tell if they were his or mine. We were both sweating by this point, and Nick was crying. My thought process switched to massive damage control and recovery of both my frenzied state and the horrible wound I had opened in the psyche of this poor , fragile boy. I knew fragility too well, and felt tremendous shame from toying with Nick's emotions. I tried to be as soothing as possible, and thankfully, the earnestness in my voice began to calm him down.
"Hey, hey...I understand. I understand, pal. That's classified."
"Darned right," he sniffed, picking up one of the pens and scratching "Clasifyed" on the front page of his blueprints. He wiped the snot that was dripping onto his upper lip with his sleeve and looked at my name tag.
"Thanks, Keth," he said. "If you get any time travel books please call me at 755-9588....and ask for Nick Williams," the numbers sputtered out of his mouth as he rushed out of the store with the same immediacy that he entered it.
"Will do, Nick," I gently assured him as I pretended to write the numbers down on a piece of scratch paper.

Alone With the Radio On

This story is for my mom, whom you can all blame for giving birth to me.
1
Kathy sat at the head of the dining room table, waiting for the boys to come home from school. The amber, afternoon sunshine cast a bright rectangle on the center of the table, highlighting the autumn influenced centerpiece. She bought it a few days ago at the market, along with a small family of wart-spotted gourds and a cornstalk to garnish the front porch. That was when Danny was still talking to her. Even Josh, whose yearning for attention was developing into an addiction, had shied away from her since then. She tapped her nails on the brown kernels of the Indian corn cob as she thought of the best approach toward reconciliation.
The tears were coming back, and the boys would be home soon, so she rubbed her puffy eyes with the back of her sweater sleeve and took an exaggerated sniff in an attempt to break her melancholy. The radio is what did it this time. The soft rock station played the hits from her life, the songs that were inescapable back when she was career-committed and her future was undefined, before she met Captain Jack. She stood up from the table to shut off the stereo and the phone rang as she turned down the volume dial. She answered and knew who it was before he spoke because of the crackling static of his cell phone. He always yelled into it, and Kathy had to hold the receiver a few inches away from her ear because the treble of his voice made her temples throb.
"Hello, this is the Independence Middle School nurse..."
"Hello, Jack."
"Well, how is he?"
"It looked a little better this morning."
"You know, this might not have happened if you just would've let him take the damn class."
"Jack...please."
"Ok ok. I'm just saying, it would have helped to learn it for the same reasons you wouldn't let him take it, that's all. Be over in a half, spark."
She hung up the phone and returned to thinking about what happened, and how to mend the rift that had since formed between her and Danny. When the nurse called Wednesday afternoon and told Kathy about the fight, she knew that he wouldn't say a word to her in the van on the way home, and she was right. She replaced his icepacks and left them at the foot of his locked bedroom door. Now she wished that he had thrown a tantrum, had screamed and cried and declared his hatred of her. Instead, he erected the fortifications, the moat with the alligators and other aquatic sentinels, that now only his brother would be granted passage to. While it used to be the three of them, Kathy was no longer welcome inside Danny's protective shell. When Josh got home that day, he walked past her in the living room and said "Ya see mom? Huh? Do ya see now?"
2
It was Friday, so the Captain was picking up the boys for the weekend. Every week at around four o'clock, the car horn started its rhythmic blare all the way up the street, (he had moved out on unfriendly terms with some of the neighbors), and the ivory Cadillac flashed past the dining room window on its way to turning around in a driveway at the top of the street. At the first blare of the horn, the boys grabbed their bags and raced each other to the first block of the sidewalk, fighting over who will get to sit up front with their father.
It didn't turn out as bad as some divorces do. He only moved a few miles away, and the alimony checks were never late. But despite the utter lack of effort he put into the marriage, and his happy-hour "board meetings" that eventually took precedence over the soccer games, it was impossible to stay angry at the Captain, just like it became impossible to live with him. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and had a flair for coining original compliments, the effect of which left most people feeling good about themselves after talking with him. But the infectious optimism he exuded at the bar faded when he got home and sunk into his recliner for the evening sports recap. At home, he was drained from his workday and barroom antics, and he saved none of his energy for Kathy or the boys.
Sometimes it took all of her discipline to restrain from uttering the occasional snide remark, to let them know that he wasn't the hero that they saw him as. In the past she had bit her tongue rather than telling Danny that instead of witnessing his birth, the Captain was at a Steelers playoff game with tickets that he won in a poll at work, and that when he finally did arrive he was so drunk that she wished he would just go home and sleep it off. It would have been so easy and well deserved to tarnish his flawless image with the occasional cheap shot. After all, when she made a mistake, like something as forgivable as buying the wrong flavor of jelly at the supermarket, she always heard about it afterward.
But she held back, because she wanted them to love their father, even though he chose happy hour over soccer, frivolity over family. She wanted them to love him because he still made the same half-assed attempts at fatherhood as he did when they were married, which was better than a lot of deadbeats that disappear as soon as they are legally free. Now, the first time she made a Captain scale error, she fought herself harder than ever before from dragging a few of his colossal blunders into it.
Even when they were married, his low maintenance parenting enabled him to enjoy nearly all of the freedoms of bachelor life. He drank every day, but that was never really a problem because he held his Grand Dad and waters very well, and was much more pleasant after a few of them. The divorce really couldn't have catered any better to his lifestyle. While he dressed in fashionable clothes and lived slightly above his means, leasing a Cadillac and juggling three different credit card debts, Kathy bought the utilitarian station wagon, then the mini-van, and downgraded her once chic wardrobe to Sears apparel.
After the boys adjusted to the schedule of living on a tight budget during the week only to be spoiled rotten every weekend by the Captain, they began to ridicule her frugality. Running jokes carried on about what became known as the "Sunday Coupon Spectacular," when once a month, Kathy spent the entire afternoon at the dining room table, furiously clipping her way through the bulky savings section of the newspaper, then spent the evening stocking the shopping cart with groceries at the supermarket. The boys would drop to their knees, rejoicing "Colors! Beautiful colors!" after spending so much time in the aisles with the black and white generic brands.
3
The front door swung open, and Joshua scurried in with Danny close behind, the back of his shirt hanging out and his right shoelace untied. They dumped their backpacks on the floor and Josh walked over and sat next to Kathy while Danny sulked over to the fridge. He poured a glass of chocolate milk and sat down at the end of the table, making great effort to avoid eye contact with her.
"Hi Danny." He took a big sip of his milk and kept his eyes fixed on the window. Kathy looked at the purple sickle under his eye; it wasn't nearly as swollen as it was last night, but the bruise still looked fresh.
"How was school?"
Gulp.
The horn started beeping and the kids' faces brightened. Before Kathy had a chance to plead her case, they jumped up and scattered for their things. While they stomped up the stairs to collect their weekend necessities, she enjoyed the commotion as she looked around the room and sensed the approaching quiet that only she would be around to disturb for the next few days. The boys ran out of the house and she followed behind, and as the Cadillac slowed to a stop, the passenger side window descended.
"Dannyboy! Joshman!"
The Captain turned the radio dial from sports talk to the station that the boys liked, cranked it up and mock-sang a bar of the song into his microphone fist. He got out of the idling car while the boys hopped in, and hustled around the trunk toward Kathy.
"Jesus spark, Your eyes look almost as bad as Danny's. Tough week, huh?"
"You know Jack, I'm used to being the unpopular parent. Hell, I'm a veteran. But do you think for once you can give a little support? ...I feel like I'm losing him."
"Like I said, this could've been prevented if for once ya just would've given in and let him--"
"Stop. He is entirely too frail and you know it. He's not even going to be able to play soccer much longer, once it gets more physical. Plus, if he takes it then we'll have to let Josh take it and you know he'll abuse it. No, just--no, Jack. He needs to fight his battles in other ways. His words and actions are much more effective than his fists...believe me, I know."
The horn honked and Joshua, sitting Indian-style in the front seat, rolled his eyes back in his head and pulled on the skin of his cheeks. Then he reached his tongue far out as if getting a throat culture. The Captain looked at him, protruded his bottom lip, furrowed his brow and extended his forehead into a simian scowl. He bashed his chest with a clenched fist and the delighted boys applauded from inside the car.
"You better get going, I guess."
"Yeah yeah, look. I'll say something to Dannyboy, so don't worry. It'll pass, spark."
"Right. Ok, have them back by dinner time Sunday."
As the Cadillac pulled away, she looked for a wave from one of the boys, but saw nothing but the backs of their heads. The overused car horn was silent all the way down the street. Reluctant to go right back inside, Kathy sulked around the front yard, picking up two soaking-wet plastic bags containing the local newsletters and carried the worthless, saturated advertisements to the trash bin at the end of the driveway.
She sighed and dragged her feet toward the house, staring at the violet mums that were mulched in as borders to the sidewalk. Entering the quiet, empty living room, she turned the radio back on and dropped into the couch. She knew the song; it was a great one. It pushed the recent conflict out of her mind, replacing it with the fantasy that she often indulged in, where she never went to the bar that night she met him, and never put her education on hold to have his children, only to bear the burden of raising them almost entirely alone. She knew the song that followed too, and while the radio became the score to her impossible hopes and wishes, it didn't take long before she once again gave way to the dam of tears that was swelling behind her eyes.

"We're all human aren't we?" or, "How one little fart scared off the girl of my dreams."

Wait, it's not what you think...ok, it's probably pretty close to what you might think, but not quite. There's a twist, see. A few years ago, on a day like any other, I had one of those slow-motion tv moments. In hindsight, it sounds unlikely to the point of being scripted.

Basically, I was sitting on the stairs outside of my apartment at school and one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen walked by me, accidentally kicking over my cup of coffee. Could this girl really be a clutz, just like me? She apologized, we struck up a conversation, and for once in my life, it flowed smoothly, completely natural. I wasn't intimidated by her beauty, I didn't stick my foot in my mouth, and I even produced a couple on-the-spot turns of phrase that made me seem witty and erudite. For some reason, I was on a roll.

Her name was Jenna, and we seemed to be mutually enamored with each other. For the life of me I can't remember the rant I was going off on, but I was really making her laugh. I still look back on the beginning of our meeting as one of the best moments of my life. I should have known it wouldn't last.

As my story built momentum, the laughs became heartier, more from the gut, and just as my rant reached its climax, it happened. She farted...loudly. So loud that it couldn't be ignored. We weren't sitting on a couch, so she couldn't use the "it's the cushion!" excuse. Weirdo that I am, I raised my hand for a high five. She was completely mortified. I guess she did the only thing she thought she could do, and immediately stood up and started sprinting down the street, getting as far away from me as possible, never looking back, out of my life forever.

I've thought about it a lot over the years, and I wonder if she has too. I actually get kind of angry when I think about what could have been, until I end up shaking my fist toward the heavens, ala Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. "Damn you flatulence! Damn you to hell!"

The moral of the story is, ladies, a fart is just one of God's ways of displaying his sense of humor. Don't let it ruin the start of something beautiful. See, you thought it was going to be ME who farted, didn't ya? Sicko's...