Live Unhated
Bottle of salty ocean
Take seventeen years worth of pirate slang
Add a dash of 826 Valencia
Read the first ten pages of Moby Dick
Purified to the max
In a deep rinse of kraken blood
And scurvy
Stunning all the onlookers for miles around
Nearly blinded
McDonald’s thought you were hated enough
To make the Happy Meal Toy lineup
On your little windup Spanish Galleon
Adrift in 100% Apple juice
Poked until chipped
Mystery lying just beneath the surface
A solid blue mannequin instead of bones
A sculpt, not a skull
Leather beaten
Tanned
Pulled
To fit the consumer-based mold
Doesn’t matter if it hurts
Pebbles sell if you’re a smooth enough talker
Keeping track of the time and singing along to the same whistle in your hollow
Noggin
So wide and empty a tornado goes
Silent in between your ears
No I’m not calling you stupid not by any means
I just want to know why you’re so gullible as to believe
That I was there for you
I’m not your goddamn scratching post
Let me wither in room temperature
Connect the dots to make a wish
But you’ve got a bit worse than a bald spot at this point
And the handkerchief is starting to chafe
Consciousness sliding round like a badly made
Cruise liner dining room
Free mimosas at ten
If you can stomach being around your friends for more than an hour
But I said too much
Please leave
Next?
Next to me was no one
Then you were
But I never asked to be the subject of your pity
I don’t even like it when I’m the subject of your still life.
It’s only because when I hold my breath
I look as if I’m ready
To be born amongst the sea
And forgive you politely
Saying
“I was never much of a poet anyway”
Any further questions?
No?
I sat cross-legged on the carpet and watched my mother in the mirror as she brushed my hair with the antique silver hairbrush Nana had gifted her.
“Comfort is a fleeting phenomenon,” she said.
“Oww. Mommy, you’re hurting me.”
“Just need to get this last tangle out.” She tapped my shoulder. “Sit still, Linda,” she said and went back to yanking on the end of my hair with the hairbrush. “Look. I got it!” She held up a tiny snippet of balled-up hair, placed it on the side table, and continued brushing.
“What’s a phenomenon, anyway?” I asked.
“It’s a…a… condition,” she said. “Like a situation that is observed yet perhaps not fully understood. You’re eight years old. You should know that word. Having a wide breadth of vocabulary will give you an edge in everything you do.”
She sat on the sofa behind me in her powder-blue turtleneck and navy-blue pleated skirt. She wore some kind of turtleneck every day, either short or long sleeved, no matter what the weather or season, hiding her neck where she had a thin vertical scar that went from just under her chin down to her collarbone. Her eyes were like two dazzling gems, an exquisite blue-green mix with tiny flecks of brown. Her eyelashes were long even without a hint of mascara. Her short, dark, curly hair parted in the middle and finished at the chin of her perfectly-shaped oval face accentuated by high cheekbones and the dot of a black beauty mark to the right of her upper lip. I remember thinking she was beautiful as I watched her in the mirror yet tried to get the thought out of my mind. She annoyed me with her strange behaviors much more often than impressed me with her beauty.
We were both brain-gifted. I was in a special progress class at school based on IQ and other tests, and had been selected to skip a grade. She’d often remind me of that particular similarity between us. My mother could talk to anyone on any subject for hours, spouting her broad knowledge of science, literature, history, geography, theater, politics, even quantum physics and the concept of parallel universes.
At first, the person would smile, their eyes wide in amazement at the depth of my mother’s detailed grasp of the topic at hand. She’d converse non-stop, go on and on with strangers on the bus, on the street, in the supermarket, at restaurants, at my school with teachers, until they had to make an excuse to leave the scene, somehow get away from her. She seemed to be unaware of their need to retreat. Was that why my father left us? I was well aware of my mother’s flaws. Her serious flaws.
She stared at me in the mirror, her head tilted to one side, hairbrush in hand. “You are a beautiful girl,” she said. “I think you’re going to be a star! Linda Springhorn, Tony Award winner!” she declared and spread her arms out in the air.
Watching her in the mirror, I thought she might drop the hairbrush.
“Thanks,” I said. “Can I go now? I’m gonna meet Patty and play cards.”
“No. You’re not doing anything with that Patty.”
Geesh, why did I mention her name?
I rolled my eyes, pulled away, and got up from the rug.
“That girl is unkempt, nasty.” My mother’s face contorted like she smelled a dirty diaper or something worse. She tapped my arm firmly. “Sit! I’m not finished brushing you.”
“Patty is my best friend,” I said as I complied but sat further away from her reach.
“Her sister is even worse,” she went on, and then she tugged my sweatshirt for me to move back closer to her. “The bad language both of those girls use. Shameful! I hear them out there on the street. Very bad influence on you.”
“But…”
“Absolutely not. I don’t want you playing with her or her sister.”
I curled up the corner of my lip as if to say I hate you. It was my usual put-down without saying a word. I knew she despised me doing that.
“There. Done,” she said, and fixed the pink hair tie around my long brown ponytail, giving it one last swoop of the brush.
I started to get up. “Okay, then I’m gonna play handball with Mitchell instead.” I’d just sneak around the corner to play cards on Patty’s stoop outside her building.
“Better choice,” she said. “Just do me a favor Linda-girl, before you go.”
I picked up my jacket from the easy chair.
“What?”
“When you cross the threshold at the front door, come back three times without stepping on the cracks.”
“Mommy! No. Not that again.”
“Do it,” she said. “I don’t want you to have any bad luck out there on the street. Tomorrow’s your big audition with Richard Rogers. You need to be in tip-top condition.”
I pressed my lips together. I had planned to pretend to be sick that night so I could skip the unwanted callback audition the next day, the audition Mommy wished she was doing instead of me. I felt like her puppet. I didn’t want to be an actress, something she had urged me to do with ballet, tap-dancing and singing lessons each week since before I turned five. Lessons she went into debt to give me. Lessons I didn’t ever want.
“Remember that movie we saw yesterday,” she said, changing the subject. She knelt down on one knee to button up my wool jacket. “That hilarious man dressed up like a woman wearing a mink stole. Tony Curtis! He’s so funny.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I replied. “Kind of stupid.”
“Stupid? He’s an Academy Award winner. And he was my best friend. We danced, acted together in the Navy, and then did summer stock together in the Catskills.” Her eyes got misty. “I knew him as Bernie Schwartz. Now, the famous Tony Curtis. Of course, I had a stage name too – Gloria Parker. We both adopted stage names at the same time.” She smiled.
I shrugged. “Okay Mommy, can I go now?”
I had heard the Tony Curtis story at least ten times before. Ignoring my question, she giggled and fell back on the sofa, sinking into the cushions like a little girl sharing her boy crush, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders raised, her eyes up at the ceiling. She went off into a zone beyond our tiny living room. I almost laughed but caught myself and, instead, curled my upper lip in disgust.
She straightened and pointed her finger at me. “You keep doing that lip curl thing, young lady, and your face will get stuck like that forever.”
“Can I please go?” I asked.
She stood from the sofa. “Remember, three times back over that threshold. No stepping on the cracks. I’ll be watching you down the hallway.”
I turned to go and moved like a robot, my head fixed straight ahead, my body mechanical, arms stiff at my sides. I would only obey because I was captive to a delusional mother, and I had no choice.
“And find your brother out there,” she added as I neared the front door. “Both of you back in here by four. We’ll rehearse your ‘I Feel Pretty’ and Ronnie’s audition song one more time before Nana gets home for dinner.”
“Right,” I mumbled under my breath. “Can’t wait.”
I turned the knob to open the front door.
“I’m watching,” her shrill voice threatened.
I lifted my right foot, careful not to step on the grouted crack between our wood floor entry and the black-and-white checkered-tiled floor in the hallway just outside our apartment, the closest apartment to the main entrance of our five-story brick building. Then I lifted my left foot over the threshold and placed it next to my right foot, and then I turned back to face my mother who stood in the living room with her arms folded at her chest. I stepped back inside toward her, again careful not to tromp on the grout cracks despite the temptation.
“No cracks,” I said, my index finger pointing down at my feet. My mother nodded. I turned to cross back into the outer hallway a second time and looked back at her. The sun shot through the narrow entryway, its beam reaching to where my mother stood. Her face looked worn, wrinkled, her body thin, frail. She no longer looked anywhere near beautiful.
“Good,” she said and came down the hallway toward me, her black stack heels clicking on the wood floor. “Now do it again. A third time.”
Maybe I should call the social worker, I thought. I had the phone number for the red-haired woman who wore thick black eyeglasses and carried a black leather briefcase. Dina Weintraub from Social Services. She had given me the light blue business card which I hid under the mattress. She came by once a month to check on my single-parent mother, and sometimes she lingered, waiting for Nana to get home from work so she could spend a few minutes privately chatting with her in the kitchen.
One time I put my ear to the kitchen door to listen. The woman said in a hushed voice, “How is she? Showing signs of compulsive behavior or any delusions?”
I didn’t stick around to hear Nana’s answer back. All these years later, I still can’t decide what scared me most. I was afraid my mother would come up behind me. Or that Nana would swing open the kitchen door and catch me eavesdropping. Or maybe I just didn’t want to hear the answer to the question. So, I turned away.
The “crossing the crack avoidance” routine at the front door was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to my mother’s bizarre behaviors. Each night, she’d demand that my brother and I go back and forth several times across the threshold of the bedroom before getting into bed. Sometimes it was ten times. Sometimes it was twenty.
There was one night when I heard her talking loudly on the phone. I tiptoed into the bedroom and picked up the other line to listen. There was nobody on the phone except her having a conversation with a dial tone, which turned into a loud beep. She ignored the annoying sound and just kept on talking without a pause. Her topic was something about the horrid New York City education system. She was shouting into the phone as if performing a dramatic scene.
Now returning home, I crossed the front door threshold three times as my mother had commanded. I stood alone on the other side of our apartment door, on the black-and-white checkered hallway floor, and I stared back at our shut front door for a few moments. I was ten years old but felt tired, angry, and sad.
I’ll talk to Nana when she gets home from work, I thought, after dinner when Mommy takes her bath.
Nana would listen, understand my frustration, my hopelessness. Maybe she would get Mommy to change her mind about dragging me to that callback audition tomorrow.
I just need a little comfort, I told myself, as I walked around the corner to find Patty. Embarrassed and ashamed, I couldn’t say anything to my best friend. It was my secret. My mother.
***Excerpt from memoir titled A BRONX GIRL (Growing up in the 1960’s in the Bronx) by Linda Springhorn Gunther available on Amazon:
Direct Link to Amazon:
AUTHOR BIO:
Linda S. Gunther is the author of six published romantic suspense novels including: Ten Steps From The Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost In The Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach, and Death Is A Great Disguiser. In 2023, Linda’s memoir titled A Bronx Girl was published and is available on Amazon. Over the past 18 months, more than 60 of Linda’s short stories, memoir pieces and essays have been published in a variety of literary journals across the world. Please visit Linda’s website for her WRITE-BYTES blog for developing writers at www.lindasgunther.com
***
ant learns to be small
***
the flower says goodbye in humility
but no one knows the language of flowers
even autumn remains indifferent
***
the wind
scratches the petals
the weather body
plunges into silence
***
I can't wait for winter
it's starting to snow and I'm in a stupor
I still can't forget you
***
bodies in graves
leaves underfoot
crunch
***
we sold our asses on the dark web every night
because nightingales no longer
accompany us with baby lullabies
money stolen from one's own
body is like coal from mines
need broke people in half
people broke the need in half
crowds of bawlers who forbade me to fuck in the ass
with homosexual boys and swallow their sperm
cannot imagine how many lovers' sperm
they lick from their wives' lips
love has broken us all
we all broke love
***
The dead do not choose who to come to in dreams
Shaggy blood cannot freeze on the rusty body of snow
Night of the concrete taste
Breaking silence
The bird sings a song
The song ruins the bird
***
cemetery puddle
I'm drowning in the grass like an embryo in a mother's belly
rain falls on the cemetery again
you are falling into the cemetery again
***
metal spikes of your kiss
the tattered leaves of my madness
I went crazy for the love of your winter
your snowy red palms make me sad
the distances between the letters of your name bring despair
the darkness in the night pupils is not capable of choice
love or die
suffer or be humus
unfinished concentration camps skulls are silent
the failed noses of love sniffle in the language of flowers
I'm looking for black rope for a bouquet of flowers
flowers strangled by the throat are not able to live without a cemetery
***
The sky ends with the grass dying
The dying sun turns to cold glass
Whose blood will flow from the wounds of the earth at the last moment?
Angels will come down at the most difficult moment
The walls are red like a throat will open up before them
Triangles of fear will explode and will warm cold fingers in vain
***
Wet hands like branches dangling in the cold wind
Aching hands like corpses dangling in the cold wind
Dead hands dangle in the cold wind
The raven screams at the pink moon and the moon turns red
Foliage lying on the ground asks for a drink
The walls of the night shrink to the size of a grave
Flowers grow
Flowers grow in the cemetery
***
The game of life is very strange
The game of life is very funny
People are real gods
Humans are gods of death
No one has risen again
Silence draws a hungry icon
Brahmagupta the zero you never had to carry
firefly
maybe there's
a chance
quietly turning pages the ending to a story, I already know
widower groundhog drowsy on the sun-warped deck
in a room alone waiting for his luck to change
a Paul Muni moment I STEAL her dark chocolate
history therein the ones who wouldn't behave
the tricky slow-pitch of old age
soft Veronicas at her open bedroom window
no longer sci-fi
scholars annotating obstruse texts
on a dying planet
using sodium-vapor lights for my big imaginary scene
I'm the monkey bars of nonlinearity,
shot in the back
with a hand-held camera
blowing sea water out of both nostrils
my Madras shorts
hemorrhaging
scent of crushed sage off the shoulders of a stranger
pioneering milk thistle enriching the soil she doesn't speak
I liked tracing
Currently thinking
about how
if I had to split my life in two
the before
and the after
it would start with watching
Avengers Endgame
in Daly City theater
on the week after opening weekend
For you,
it was just like any day
you gave me everything.
But for me,
it was the day I noticed the cracks in my basin
the thin, hidden lines that have continued to widen
and from my point of view
I started to see
how they aligned up with yours
in a completely different way.
I wondered if they would grow into tendrils
and now I know
they would.
I am now afraid
of when, I hope
our lines might intertwine
and I won't know
where I want to end
as you pull
and push
and I don't know if its you or me
So I wonder,
if the creator teaches the created
or the creator can never end.
Jeff, of Allentown, PA
Jeff stood at the case holding all of the bakery’s delights on display, cup of coffee in one hand and pumpernickel bagel in the other. He took a bite of the bagel, eyes closing like a whingy baby who’s finally dropped off to sleep. Then he opened them and began to chew slowly, rapturously.
“Ah, a Rockaway bagel,” he said. “You can’t beat them.”
The woman who’d served him only moments before and now was in the process of helping the next customer in line glanced over at him long enough to say, “Thank you.”
Very courteous, Jeff thought. And friendly. New Yorkers get a bad rap. They were friendly people. He’d never met friendlier people. Especially the ones here in Rockaway.
“I heard some goofball say on TV that Montreal has the best bagels. Montreal. Can you believe that? I’ve had Montreal bagels, young lady, and I can tell you they don’t hold a candle to these,” he said, raising the bagel, which was about the size of a catcher’s mitt.
The woman was boxing up an order of a dozen, mixed. She didn’t say anything in response to his Montreal comment but did nod in his direction. Yes, despite being busy, she took the time to nod. Jeff wished now that he’d given her the change from his bagel and coffee. She was the only person working the counter, and the line was getting longer. She deserved a tip.
“Now, I’m sure people will tell you that bagels are better in the city. Well, I’ve had bagels in the city, and I’m here to tell you they don’t hold a candle to Rockaway bagels.”
Each time Jeff said “the city,” he waved the bagel in what he was pretty sure was the direction of Manhattan. That’s what natives meant when they said “the city”: Manhattan. Jeff wasn’t a native, of course, but he didn’t want these people to think he was some yokel who thought “the city” referred to the whole damn five boroughs.
Jeff swept his gaze from the woman behind the counter along the line of customers that extended across the little shop to the door. No one acknowledged him with a word or nod or even a look back. Why should they? They were all there to grab a bagel or pastry on their way to work. Busy people. Industrious people. Look at the city they’d built.
Jeff took another bite of bagel.
“Mmm. By golly, that’s good. I haven’t had a Rockaway bagel in twenty years. I tell you I feel like I’ve come home. No, I’m not a native, but Rockaway and I go back a long way. I spent some of the best years of my life here.”
The man at the front of the line looked at him for one instant without expression and then turned to the woman behind the counter and asked if they had any bialys. No, said the woman. They were out of bialys.
*
“My kids used to call these trees ‘phony trees’,” Jeff said. “That was when they were little tykes, of course. Lisa and Joey. Twenty years ago or more.”
“Oh yes?” the man said. He was bent over sorting through envelopes in a big brown leather bag attached to a pull-cart like Jeff used to have back in the days when he played golf. After the divorce, when he moved into the little one-bedroom apartment, he didn’t have room for his clubs. No matter. By then he’d given up playing anyway.
Only at that moment did Jeff become aware of the man’s blue uniform and connect it with the bag and envelopes. The fellow was a mailman! Jeff worried about himself sometimes, walking through life in a daze.
“It was the way the bark would peel off the trees in raggedy sheets like paper, you see. I’d tell the kids the trees were made out of paper, so they called them phony trees.”
The mailman seemed about to reply but instead took a handful of envelopes and walked toward the front porch of the house they were standing before. Then up the steps.
“Oh,” Jeff said, an almost inaudible moan of pain.
These trees, he’d just realized with dismay, weren’t his trees, the ones he’d remembered. He didn’t know what kind these were—in fact, he’d never known the name of the phony trees, either—but these had slender trunks with unremarkable bark unlike the trees he, Lisa, and Joey would walk beneath on their way to PS 114, where they’d play stickball and basketball on the asphalt playground.
“No no, I had it wrong,” Jeff began explaining before the mailman reached the bottom steps of the house where he’d just made his delivery. “These aren’t the phony trees. Hurricane Sandy killed off most of those. All that saltwater. Ah, but here I am a visitor telling you about your own home.”
“I’m from Roxbury,” the mailman said.
Roxbury. Jeff knew that wasn’t far off, but he wasn’t sure how that fit in vis a vis the hurricane damage to Belle Harbor, the village in the Rockaways where he and his family had spent a week in the summer and a week over the holidays every year, year after year until it all ended.
“Roxbury’s nice, too,” Jeff said, following the mailman on down the sidewalk. “I love Rockaway—all the Rockaways. Wait. Is Roxbury considered part of the Rockaways? . . . No matter. I’m sure it’s nice, too. I spent the best years of my life here.”
The mailman stopped at the next house and began sorting through his bag.
“Damn Sandy anyway,” Jeff said, hands on his hips as he gazed around him. “A lot of change. A lot. Not all bad, though, I’m not saying that. It’s still a great place.”
The mailman suddenly looked up from his bag.
“Change? You talking about change? Have you seen 136th Street? Those enormous houses they built after Sandy? You won’t believe the place. Go take a look. That direction. 136th Street. No use coming this way. That’ll just take you away from it. That way.”
“Great idea. Thanks,” Jeff said.
He was well aware that the mailman was trying to get rid of him. Couldn’t blame to poor guy. Some tiresome old fart comes along and . . .
Jeff came to a halt. He’d just remembered something. He turned and called back to the mailman, “Hey, buddy! 136th Street. That’s where I was heading. Some guy in the deli on 129th Street told me I should check out the big houses on 136th Street. That’s where I was heading when I ran into you. Funny!”
The mailman went on delivering the mail.
*
Even though the mailman had pointed him in the direction of 136th Street, when Jeff got to Newport he became disoriented and wasn’t sure which way to turn. Then he heard the music coming from the direction of the sea.
He really wanted to see those big houses. Built to replace homes in the flood plain destroyed by Sandy, they looked bizarre, he’d heard somewhere, like a sudden outcropping of skyscrapers amongst cottages.
He’d had a dream once about a little village outside of Allentown that he used to drive through on the way to visit some old girlfriend. In his dream the little town had been remarkably transformed, still only a very few blocks long but those blocks towered over by enormous new chrome and glass buildings that gleamed in the sun. That dreamscape was still vivid in his mind although the girlfriend, alas, he could not remember one thing about.
Would the big houses on 136th Street beguile him like his dream?
But he did not go to the big houses. It was the music from the sea that summoned him.
He crossed Newport and continue toward the ocean.
People started coming out of their houses and joining him on his walk southward as if he were some quaint and clueless pied piper.
When he got to Rockaway Beach Boulevard, he didn’t cross and continue the final block to the beach because, he realized, the music wasn’t coming from the sea after all. It was coming from the east, coming ever nearer, coming down the boulevard right toward him.
A parade!
He remembered the date: March 17th. Of course, the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
They came on toward him, then past him, strutting and high-stepping and dancing and marching as to war. School bands and social-organization bands and motley crews who looked like the bars on 116th Street had kicked them out but handed them instruments on their way and commanded, Go make music, you drunken Irish bums.
Jeff cheered for the Rockaway Hibernian Society, striding out splendidly in their green and black tartan kilts and tall black palace-guards’ hats, bagpipes moaning and whining out that song you always hear with bagpipes, that song . . .
He turned to ask the old gent next to him what the song was you always hear with bagpipes, but before he could get the wording of the question straight in his mind, the Rockaway Hibernian Society band had marched on, their place taken by a school band, youngsters.
Jeff let out a roar of laughter.
“St. Camillus!” he said, elbowing the old gent and pointing. “St. Camillus!”
“Yes, I see,” the man said, edging a step away.
Jeff watched the band a moment, then laughed again.
He turned to the old gent to explain and, when he saw there were now a couple of yards separating them, closed the gap.
“My wife—my wife that was—went to St. Francis De Sales, you see. A long time ago, of course. She was in the St. Francis band, would go to band competitions and the like. They were good, St. Francis, but they never could beat St. Camillus. And here they are, here they still are, St. Camillus!”
He laughed as if it were a delightful thing but also a bit scandalous, St. Camillus, still at it after all these years.
The old gent turned his back to him.
Jeff tapped him on the shoulder.
The man turned back halfway toward him.
“My wife—my wife that was—she didn’t march in this parade with St. Francis, this little parade. Not that I’m knocking this little parade, understand. I like this one. But I’m talking about the big one, the one in the city. That’s the one she marched in. Played the fife. About froze a couple of times, she said, my wife said. My wife that was.”
The man turned fully toward him and studied him a moment.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
“Your wife that was, you said. You’ve said it several times now.”
“Oh. Ha, no. I mean she used to be my wife. Divorced now. You thought she was dead? Ha, no. She’s alive as we speak, living right here in Rockaway. Neponsit, actually.”
“I see.”
The man turned his attention back to the parade.
Another school came marching down the boulevard. Jeff couldn’t tell by the initials on the bass drum where they were from. He recognized the song they were playing, though.
He began to giggle.
“Ha. ‘MacNamara’s Band’,” he said to the man, who apparently took no notice. “Grand old song. There’s a really funny version of it, pretty raunchy version, if you get my drift. Want to hear it?”
“Not interested,” the man said without turning.
“It’s really funny. The first line goes—”
The man turned and said, “Not interested. And isn’t it a little early in the day, buddy?”
“Early in the day?”
“To be drinking. You’re drunk. No, don’t bother. Now look, I’m going to move on down this way. Do me an enormous favor and don’t follow me.”
Jeff watched him move off to the west. He chuckled as he said to himself, He calls this drunk?
*
“I know you’re a serious man. We’re all serious men here. But that’s not what this is about. All I’m asking you is if you’ve got The Ramones on the jukebox.”
The bartender stopped wiping the bar top and laughed.
“Not that kind of serious,” he said. “The music Sirius thing. S-I-U-R . . . whatever. We get our music through a Sirius hookup. We haven’t had a jukebox since I’ve been working here, pal.”
Jeff finally got it, and then he laughed, too, briefly. But he was disappointed about The Ramones.
“Time was you couldn’t walk into a bar anywhere in the Rockaways without hearing The Ramones on the jukebox singing ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
“Right you are. That and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’.”
It wasn’t the bartender who said this but an old gent sitting at the end of the bar. Wait. Was he the same old gent Jeff had talked to at the parade earlier that day? No. This fellow wasn’t that old. Probably no older than Jeff. Maybe younger. Forty years old, maybe, but looked twenty years older the way a man will sitting in a cheap bar by himself.
Jeff looked in the mirror but couldn’t see himself because of the big Harp decal plastered across it.
He looked down at his beer. Was he drinking Harp? Took a taste. Well, that didn’t do him any good. He didn’t drink enough beer to tell an ale from a lager from a pilsner. Whiskey, though. He could tell you a Scotch from an Irish or a Canadian or a bourbon or a rye, tell you one Scotch from another Scotch, one bourbon from another, right on down the line.
“Yuengling,” the bartender said, and Jeff thought it likely that he’d asked what it was that he was drinking.
“A Pennsylvania beer!” Jeff said. “That’s me, Pennsylvania. Allentown born and bred.”
“Oh? I would have taken you for a local, the way you’ve been doing a Rockaway travelogue here for the last hour.”
Jeff reared back on the barstool and gave the bartender a closer look. Was he being critical? Jeff decided that he wasn’t. Nice fellow, he looked like.
So, Jeff had been in here for an hour talking about Rockaway. News to him. This time of day—or night—his memory tended to take him back no farther than his latest drink.
“Just taking a sentimental journey,” he said.
He took a sip of the Yuengling and was just about to ask the bartender if they had “Sentimental Journey” on the jukebox when the fellow at the end of the bar began to sing.
“There was a wild colonial boy,” he sang but got no farther. Apparently he couldn’t remember the colonial boy’s name.
“Andy Byrne,” Jeff called down to him before remembering that Andy was his brother-in-law—or had been before the divorce.
“Andy Byrne was a great pal of mine back in the day,” Jeff explained to the bartender to cover his embarrassment for calling out the name. “I wonder if they still live here—the Byrnes.”
“Couldn’t tell you,” the bartender said, glaring down at the end of the bar where the old guy was getting into an increasingly heated argument about the identity of the colonial boy with someone at the table behind him.
“Keep it civil down there,” the bartender called to them, then turned back to Jeff.
“No, I couldn’t tell you about any locals. I’m from Arverne myself.”
“Ah, Arverne. I’ve had good times in Arverne, too,” Jeff said. A lie. He’d driven through Arverne, always careful to keep his doors locked.
“Oh? The only good times I have in Arverne is every time I drive out if it. How come you know so much about the area? I thought you were from Pennsylvania.”
“I am. Allentown born and bred. But I married a girl from Belle Harbor. Beth Byrne. My Belle Harbor Belle, I called her.
“Called her. So she’s . . . not with us any longer.”
“No, divorced is all. All my fault, it won’t surprise you to hear. She lives right here in Rockaway. Neponsit, actually. Not five blocks from where she was born.”
“I see. So you’re back on business, I guess,” the bartender said, not waiting for a reply but moving off to fill an order from the waitress.
He came back a minute later and wiped at the bar, a dreamy smile on his face.
“I’m trying to remember how that song goes. ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
“No idea,” Jeff said.
*
It was thirty blocks from the bar on 116th Street to Neponsit. The blocks were shorter walking west to east than if he were walking the numbered streets from north to south, Jamaica Bay to the beach. Still, he was exhausted by the time he got to Neponsit.
He stood across the street from the big brick house, leaning against a tree—not one of the phony ones but one of the new ones. He was having trouble catching his breath, panting, his legs rubbery, his shoulders, arms, and hands trembling. Thirty blocks.
Why had he come?
It hadn’t been a conscious goal, to see Beth, the wife that was. But why else drive all this way, what point to this sentimental journey? If there was any point at all.
Now that he was here, he was frightened at the possibility of seeing her and being crushed, annihilated by the enormity of all that he’d lost. And what if she saw him, saw what he’d become? A wheezing, stumbling remnant. Bloated bag of whiskey-soaked memories.
The first floor of the house was dark, but two windows on the second floor were lit. Across the lowered blind over one window a shadow passed.
Beth!
Maybe. Impossible to tell. Could as easily be him, the man, the son of a bitch. He was likely to be a son of a bitch, wasn’t he, Beth with her poor taste in men?
He couldn’t bear it. He released his hold on the tree and watched his shadow, thrown by porchlights, stumble south down 145th Street toward the beach.
*
He stood on the sand, eavesdropping as the waves murmured to one another.
He had been to the beach many, many times with Beth and the kids, but they’d never come at night.
It had been an overcast day, and there was no moon, no stars. Still, it was beautiful enough to kill a man.
He had not come for that, though—to walk into the sea. No, he had come to create this new memory for himself alone. He’d take it back to Allentown and wait for what was inevitably coming for him, a thing he probably wouldn’t even recognize when it came, so in thrall would he be to the stars and moon that did not shine this night on Rockaway Beach, the waves that spoke to one another, but not to him.
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.
THE GANDHI BIG SOUL’ STICKS
What a rogue, what a hypocrite
How obscene this old male creator
And proven faggot
Cum Laude in South Africa
Who sleeps naked with a young girl on either side
Which he calls “my two beloved sticks.”
How lucky is that scoundrel!
Manu, wife of his great nephew
And Abha, great niece
Hugging him very close
“Because they have to correct my sleeping posture”
As he tells us
And because, alone, he feels cold
Incredulous and deluded
Girls dreaming that they were sleeping with a Donkey
Swinging their innocent dreams on his cock
While he braying snoring
Like a cardinal in his temple
Belly up, erect
Leading a long procession
Of ejaculated orgasms, sleeping
Complaining with joy
Ejaculating with full force
While the babies respond in chorus:
-Oh, how cute and how strong!
Oh, what a miracle!
How much milk is lost!
Oh, what colostrum!
When he woke up and saw
The Feast of the Lonely Ass
On the naked bodies of the innocent babies
Not so innocent because they had already been deflowered
By use, by fashion and without any teacher
He saw at the tip of his cocoon
A divine and ideal sign for universal history
From human understanding:
Through his sperm coming out and counting
From the tip of its cocoon
Because he looked like a vegan fortune teller!
He foresaw the coming defeat of the British Raj
Without any violence or blood shed
Just, and thanks
To the violence of four-handed handjobs
Showing the young girls
Great appreciation for the Braying of this “holy” Donkey
Although it made them laugh to see this old relic
Naked and in balls with a stupid face
Indian Hinduist and good person
Because trying to do Justice and Peace
It is typical of the sane and upright man
Although the arse Hole had been twisted
In other times.
-Daniel de Culla
