muse is the quarterly journal published by the lit
TRANSCRIPT
ISSUE03.10
WORDS+IMAGESM U S E I S T H E Q U A R T E R L Y J O U R N A L P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E L I T
MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT
ARTCRAFT BUILDING 2570 SUPERIOR AVENUE SUITE 203 CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114
WWW.THE-LIT.ORG
NONPROFIT ORG.US POSTAGE
PAIDPERMIT #4248
CLEVELAND, OH
9 771942 275009
07
ISSN 1942-275X
34th cleveland international film festivalmarch 18–28, 2010 tower city cinemas let’s go. clevelandfilm.org
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Founded in 1987 as Ohio Writer, MUSE is the quarterly journal published by The LIT, a nonprofit literary arts organization. No part of this journal may be reproduced without written consent of the publisher.
JUDITH [email protected]
TIM LACHINADesign [email protected]
RAY MCNIECEPoetry [email protected]
ROB JACKSONFiction [email protected]
ALENK A BANCOArt [email protected]
BONNIE JACOBSONDAVID MEGENHARDTContributing [email protected]
KELLY K . BIRDAdvertising Account [email protected]
THELITCLEVELAND’S LITERARY CENTER
ARTCRAFT BUILDING 2570 SUPERIOR AVENUE SUITE 203 CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114
216 694.0000 WWW.THE-LIT.ORG
MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT
SUBMISSIONS(Content evident) may be sent electronically to [email protected]. We prefer electronic submis-sions. MUSE publishes all genres of creative writing — including but not limited to poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, humor, lyrics, and drama. Preference is given Ohio-based authors.
V O L U M E 3 , I S S U E 1 M A R 2 0 1 0
IT’S ONLY MARCH, AND ALREADY 2010 HAS BEEN A PRETTY
SPECTACULAR YEAR FOR LITERATURE IN CLEVELAND.
In January, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, with the support of
Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, announced the
individual artists who were each awarded $20,000 in grant
support for the 2010 Creative Workforce Development Program.
Of the 20 artist recipients, 7 are writers: Congratulations to
former LIT board president Gail Bellamy, and to Sarah Willis,
Charlie Oberndorf, Kristin Ohlson, David Hansen, Sarah Gridley,
and Eric Coble. Each of these writers has demonstrated deftness
of craft, originality of voice, and plays a vital role in our literary
landscape.
In this issue of MUSE, my co-editors and I, along with our three
very generous judges, Karen Long, Kristin Ohlson, and Phil
Metres, are equally thrilled to present the winners of the second
annual Literary Competition. We worked long and hard to distill
only a first and second place winner in the areas of Fiction,
Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry from a pool of over 200 entries.
Choosing merely a handful was no small task. I am constantly
and happily reminded how rich the writing community is.
Congratulations to first place winners: Toni K. Thayer (fiction),
Heather Madden Bentoske (creative nonfiction), and Mark
Yasenchack (poetry). Coming in a very close second place are
Scott Lax (fiction), Amei Wallach (creative nonfiction), and
Thomas Dukes—who also swept the category of poetry last
year. May their pens and minds never run low.
Judith
7.5 in × 10 in
April 13, 2010 Poet Mary Oliver (born in Maple Heights, Ohio) is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including American Primitive (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award winner) and House of Light (winner of the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award). Her most recent poetry collection, Evidence, was released in April of 2009.
May 11, 2010 JhuMpa lahiri, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Namesake, an international bestseller. Lahiri’s second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and earned the author the prestigious 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book.
WRITERS CENTER STAGE SEASON SIX
2009- 2010 SERIES
THE WILLIAM N. SKIRBALL
WRITERS CENTERSTAGE PROGRAMIS EXCITED TOBRING YOU:
The WilliaM N. SKirBall WriTerS CeNTer STaGe prOGraM IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION AND CLEVELAND MAGAZINE.
BEST SEATS GO QUICKLY, RESERVE TODAY! To purchase Single Author Program tickets, call 216.241.6000 or visit writerscenterstage.org. All programs will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Ohio Theatre at PlayhouseSquare, 1511 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115. Each program will be followed by a book signing in the lobby.
SPONSORS: Cuyahoga County Public Library; Bostwick Design Partnership; Dominion Foundation; Eaton Corporation; Margaret Wong & Assoc. CO., LPA; Roetzel & Andress; The LIT: Cleveland’s Literary Center; Ulmer & Berne LLP
PARTNERS: Joseph-Beth Booksellers; PlayhouseSquare and The Ritz-Carlton, Cleveland
ALL IMAGES BY BILLY DELFS, WWW.BILLYDELFS.COM
COVER: COFFEE, TEA, SALT AND PEPPER, 2009 - 8X10
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hungry ghosts, failed utopias, and the recent
economic collapse. She has a day job in repro-
ductive rights and environmental education,
sometimes teaches, and rarely cleans. Toni is
also an occasional playwright and journalist;
her short play “Kali’s Beautiful Secret” was
presented in September 09 at Cleveland Pub-
lic Theater’s Pandemonium. She has an MA
in Literature from Cleveland State University
and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from
Goddard College. Her favorite novel persists
in being Middlemarch, which might seem at
odds with her love of all things fantastical.
She thanks David Hansen for his constancy
and unfailing support.
AMEI WALLACH is an art critic, filmmaker,
and commentator. She was for many years
on-air Arts Essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer
Newshour and chief art critic for New York
Newsday and Newsday. The current essay is
from a memoir-in-progress. Her articles have
appeared in The New York Times, New York
Times Magazine, Art in America, ArtNews, The
Nation, Elle, Vanity Fair and the Smithsonian.
Among the books she has written or contrib-
uted to are: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never
Threw Anything Away, Gees Bend: The Archi-
tecture of the Quilt, and Crossroads: Art and
Religion In American Life. She is president
emeritus of the International Art Critics Asso-
ciation and a frequent lecturer at museums
around the world. She co-directed, with the
late Marion Cajori, the internationally ac-
claimed 2008 documentary, Louise Bourgeois:
The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.
Sample reviews: “A remarkable achievement!
As intimate a portrait of a living artist as one
could ask for,” The Houston Chronicle, “Superb
documentary portrait,” The New York Times;
“a work of art in its own right,” Artforum. She
is currently making a feature-length film on
the Soviet-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
MARK YASENCHACK was born in Parma,
Ohio and is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace
College, where he majored in biology with a
concentration in creative writing. He under-
took the challenge to balance written art and
the visual. Originally he made large tiles with
images and stories painted on the surface.
Gradually the images won out as his experi-
ments with surface texture and color became
more involved. More recently, he began to
working with encaustic wax, encasing photo-
graphs in a semi-transparent layer, and fi-
nally, discovered a way to include words in his
work and a reason to dissect an old typewriter
(thank-you Patti Fields). For material, he
plundered a long-kept notebook of ideas and
began writing prose fragments and poems.
He is grateful to have found his way back to
writing, through an encaustic wax technique
where he stamps the letters with typebars re-
moved from a typewriter. In much the same
way pictures had replaced words, now words
are essential and the images cannot keep up.trib
con
utorsHEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE has an MA in
English from Cleveland State University, has
studied creative writing at Oberlin College,
and was in the poetry program at the Iowa
Writer’s Workshop. She’s been a copywriter
for over 16 years and is a writer with Doner
Advertising. She lives in Lakewood, Ohio
with an unruly menagerie of dogs, cats, and
60s furniture.
BILLY DELFS Was recently awarded the 2009 Press Club of Cleveland's Excellence in Journalism Award (2nd Place Portraiture). He continues to work for regional/national magazines, advertising agencies, and design firms. His main focus is portraiture, but he explores the medium through personal projects and travel.
THOMAS DUKES is professor of English at The
University of Akron. He is the author of an
award-winning collection of poems, Baptist
Confidential, and Sugar Blood Jesus: A Memoir
of Faith, Madness, and Cream Gravy. His
writing has appeared in a variety of journals
including Poetry, New Orleans Review, South
Carolina Review, The Plain Dealer, Jelly
Bucket, etc. He lives in an Akron/Cleveland
suburb with his partner, their six cats, and a
poodle, Princess Diana.
SCOTT LAX Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Scott
Lax is a fiction writer, nonfiction writer and
playwright. After graduating from Hiram
College, he spent 15 years as a salesman and
drummer. The Denver Post called his first
novel, The Year That Trembled, one of 1998’s
“milestones in fiction.” Lax then produced it
as an award-winning feature film and
adapted it as a produced stage-play. The re-
cipient of numerous awards from the Ohio
Professional Writers and Cleveland Press
Club, Lax is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
Nonfiction Scholar and Sewanee Writers’
Conference Fiction Fellow. He founded The
Chagrin Valley Writers’ Workshop, where he
teaches.
KAREN R. LONG has been book editor of The
Plain Dealer since 2005. She currently serves
on the board of the National Book Critics
Circle, which gives out an annual prize for
best book in fiction, biography, poetry, non-
fiction, criticism and autobiography.
PHILIP METRES is the author of numerous
books, including To See the Earth (poetry,
2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (a co-
edited anthology of peace poems, 2008),
Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the
American Homefront since 1941 (criticism,
2007), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties:
Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). His
poetry has appeared in numerous journals
and anthologies, including Best American
Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary
Arab American Poetry. He teaches literature
and creative writing at John Carroll Univer-
sity in Cleveland, Ohio.
KRISTIN OHLSON is author of the award-win-
ning memoir, Stalking the Divine, and co-au-
thor of New York Times bestselling Kabul
Beauty School. A freelance writer, her articles
and essays have been published in The New
York Times (newspaper and magazine),
Salon, Gourmet, Discover, Oprah, and many
others. One of her articles was featured in
Best American Travel Writing 2008.
TONI K. THAYER lives in Cleveland Heights,
where she is raising two wild and beautiful
children and working on a rangy novel about
SURFER, LAKE ERIE, 2009 - 11X17
06 OAR, MARK YASENCHAK
07 TURBINE, CLEVELAND, BILLY DELFS
08 BERNARD, NYC, BILLY DELFS
09 GUYS WITH THEIR HANDS IN THEIR POCKETS, THOMAS DUKE
10 I AM WHAT I PLAY, TONI K. THAYER
11 EMMY, BILLY DELFS
14 SALES CALL, SCOTT LAX
15 PARKED, DUMBO NYC, BILLY DELFS
21 NORTH AFRICA, HEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE
23 HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, BILLY DELFS
24 THE COUNTERFEIT KILLER: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER, AMEI WALLACH
25 SHASHA, WINTER, BILLY DELFS
27 BOOK ARCHAEOLOGY, ROB JACKSON
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contents
hungry ghosts, failed utopias, and the recent
economic collapse. She has a day job in repro-
ductive rights and environmental education,
sometimes teaches, and rarely cleans. Toni is
also an occasional playwright and journalist;
her short play “Kali’s Beautiful Secret” was
presented in September 09 at Cleveland Pub-
lic Theater’s Pandemonium. She has an MA
in Literature from Cleveland State University
and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from
Goddard College. Her favorite novel persists
in being Middlemarch, which might seem at
odds with her love of all things fantastical.
She thanks David Hansen for his constancy
and unfailing support.
AMEI WALLACH is an art critic, filmmaker,
and commentator. She was for many years
on-air Arts Essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer
Newshour and chief art critic for New York
Newsday and Newsday. The current essay is
from a memoir-in-progress. Her articles have
appeared in The New York Times, New York
Times Magazine, Art in America, ArtNews, The
Nation, Elle, Vanity Fair and the Smithsonian.
Among the books she has written or contrib-
uted to are: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never
Threw Anything Away, Gees Bend: The Archi-
tecture of the Quilt, and Crossroads: Art and
Religion In American Life. She is president
emeritus of the International Art Critics Asso-
ciation and a frequent lecturer at museums
around the world. She co-directed, with the
late Marion Cajori, the internationally ac-
claimed 2008 documentary, Louise Bourgeois:
The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.
Sample reviews: “A remarkable achievement!
As intimate a portrait of a living artist as one
could ask for,” The Houston Chronicle, “Superb
documentary portrait,” The New York Times;
“a work of art in its own right,” Artforum. She
is currently making a feature-length film on
the Soviet-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
MARK YASENCHACK was born in Parma,
Ohio and is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace
College, where he majored in biology with a
concentration in creative writing. He under-
took the challenge to balance written art and
the visual. Originally he made large tiles with
images and stories painted on the surface.
Gradually the images won out as his experi-
ments with surface texture and color became
more involved. More recently, he began to
working with encaustic wax, encasing photo-
graphs in a semi-transparent layer, and fi-
nally, discovered a way to include words in his
work and a reason to dissect an old typewriter
(thank-you Patti Fields). For material, he
plundered a long-kept notebook of ideas and
began writing prose fragments and poems.
He is grateful to have found his way back to
writing, through an encaustic wax technique
where he stamps the letters with typebars re-
moved from a typewriter. In much the same
way pictures had replaced words, now words
are essential and the images cannot keep up.trib
con
utorsHEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE has an MA in
English from Cleveland State University, has
studied creative writing at Oberlin College,
and was in the poetry program at the Iowa
Writer’s Workshop. She’s been a copywriter
for over 16 years and is a writer with Doner
Advertising. She lives in Lakewood, Ohio
with an unruly menagerie of dogs, cats, and
60s furniture.
BILLY DELFS Was recently awarded the 2009 Press Club of Cleveland's Excellence in Journalism Award (2nd Place Portraiture). He continues to work for regional/national magazines, advertising agencies, and design firms. His main focus is portraiture, but he explores the medium through personal projects and travel.
THOMAS DUKES is professor of English at The
University of Akron. He is the author of an
award-winning collection of poems, Baptist
Confidential, and Sugar Blood Jesus: A Memoir
of Faith, Madness, and Cream Gravy. His
writing has appeared in a variety of journals
including Poetry, New Orleans Review, South
Carolina Review, The Plain Dealer, Jelly
Bucket, etc. He lives in an Akron/Cleveland
suburb with his partner, their six cats, and a
poodle, Princess Diana.
SCOTT LAX Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Scott
Lax is a fiction writer, nonfiction writer and
playwright. After graduating from Hiram
College, he spent 15 years as a salesman and
drummer. The Denver Post called his first
novel, The Year That Trembled, one of 1998’s
“milestones in fiction.” Lax then produced it
as an award-winning feature film and
adapted it as a produced stage-play. The re-
cipient of numerous awards from the Ohio
Professional Writers and Cleveland Press
Club, Lax is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
Nonfiction Scholar and Sewanee Writers’
Conference Fiction Fellow. He founded The
Chagrin Valley Writers’ Workshop, where he
teaches.
KAREN R. LONG has been book editor of The
Plain Dealer since 2005. She currently serves
on the board of the National Book Critics
Circle, which gives out an annual prize for
best book in fiction, biography, poetry, non-
fiction, criticism and autobiography.
PHILIP METRES is the author of numerous
books, including To See the Earth (poetry,
2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (a co-
edited anthology of peace poems, 2008),
Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the
American Homefront since 1941 (criticism,
2007), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties:
Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). His
poetry has appeared in numerous journals
and anthologies, including Best American
Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary
Arab American Poetry. He teaches literature
and creative writing at John Carroll Univer-
sity in Cleveland, Ohio.
KRISTIN OHLSON is author of the award-win-
ning memoir, Stalking the Divine, and co-au-
thor of New York Times bestselling Kabul
Beauty School. A freelance writer, her articles
and essays have been published in The New
York Times (newspaper and magazine),
Salon, Gourmet, Discover, Oprah, and many
others. One of her articles was featured in
Best American Travel Writing 2008.
TONI K. THAYER lives in Cleveland Heights,
where she is raising two wild and beautiful
children and working on a rangy novel about
SURFER, LAKE ERIE, 2009 - 11X17
06 OAR, MARK YASENCHAK
07 TURBINE, CLEVELAND, BILLY DELFS
08 BERNARD, NYC, BILLY DELFS
09 GUYS WITH THEIR HANDS IN THEIR POCKETS, THOMAS DUKE
10 I AM WHAT I PLAY, TONI K. THAYER
11 EMMY, BILLY DELFS
14 SALES CALL, SCOTT LAX
15 PARKED, DUMBO NYC, BILLY DELFS
21 NORTH AFRICA, HEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE
23 HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, BILLY DELFS
24 THE COUNTERFEIT KILLER: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER, AMEI WALLACH
25 SHASHA, WINTER, BILLY DELFS
27 BOOK ARCHAEOLOGY, ROB JACKSON
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OARThese surrounding days and hours, perhaps we shape them
.
If we do it is in the way an oar shapes the lake,
the way a w
ing shapes the sky. MA
RK YASEN
CHA
K
POETRY
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
“Oar” is a deceptively plain poem which grapples with one of the
eternal existential problems – the so-called “wreck of time.” What
can we make of our days and hours, and do they matter at all? The
poem’s imagistic answer is at once consolingly beautiful and brac-
ingly humbling. ~ PHIL METRES
TURBINE, CLEVELAND, 2007 - 11X14
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OARThese surrounding days and hours, perhaps we shape them
.
If we do it is in the way an oar shapes the lake,
the way a w
ing shapes the sky. MA
RK YASEN
CHA
K
POETRY
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
“Oar” is a deceptively plain poem which grapples with one of the
eternal existential problems – the so-called “wreck of time.” What
can we make of our days and hours, and do they matter at all? The
poem’s imagistic answer is at once consolingly beautiful and brac-
ingly humbling. ~ PHIL METRES
TURBINE, CLEVELAND, 2007 - 11X14
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Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets THOMAS DUKES
Mansfield, Ohio
Carl Lee and his buddies stand like trees listening to the pick-up engine idle as they idle on Sunday afternoon: no Steelers, or maybe the women ran them out of the triple-wides and the houses Paw-paw built himselfwith black lung.
As if he’d found love for the first time, L. W. leans his hard-case body over the motor. Hank and Lucaswait for the law and child support warrantscoming Monday, although the Honda plantlaid off Jesus Christ and everybody else. Carl Lee would tell the lawlaid off means you can’t get your own grits, let alone baby formula, but he knows no law listens to him.
The others Yeah and Good job, you cuss. L.W. nods with the country cool of a man who beat up an honors kid senior year and did time for it. The others shuffle in Meemaw’s raked dirt: maybe they’ll sniff out a six pack, smokes, and a trio of bored Wandas, or Merle will haul up with a notion.
But as they wait for the world to crank, Carl Lee slips away like a possum to listen for a dog barking, a train, some church organ left to hum, anything with a heart, singing.
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
POETRY
“Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets” deftly brings us into a
world that poetry has too rarely visited without condescension – the
world of workers and the out-of-work, of men who admire and puzzle
over the poetics of an engine, and worry over child support payments.
Carl Lee is poetry! ~ PHIL METRES
BERNARD, NYC 2004 - 8X10
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Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets THOMAS DUKES
Mansfield, Ohio
Carl Lee and his buddies stand like trees listening to the pick-up engine idle as they idle on Sunday afternoon: no Steelers, or maybe the women ran them out of the triple-wides and the houses Paw-paw built himselfwith black lung.
As if he’d found love for the first time, L. W. leans his hard-case body over the motor. Hank and Lucaswait for the law and child support warrantscoming Monday, although the Honda plantlaid off Jesus Christ and everybody else. Carl Lee would tell the lawlaid off means you can’t get your own grits, let alone baby formula, but he knows no law listens to him.
The others Yeah and Good job, you cuss. L.W. nods with the country cool of a man who beat up an honors kid senior year and did time for it. The others shuffle in Meemaw’s raked dirt: maybe they’ll sniff out a six pack, smokes, and a trio of bored Wandas, or Merle will haul up with a notion.
But as they wait for the world to crank, Carl Lee slips away like a possum to listen for a dog barking, a train, some church organ left to hum, anything with a heart, singing.
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
POETRY
“Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets” deftly brings us into a
world that poetry has too rarely visited without condescension – the
world of workers and the out-of-work, of men who admire and puzzle
over the poetics of an engine, and worry over child support payments.
Carl Lee is poetry! ~ PHIL METRES
BERNARD, NYC 2004 - 8X10
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He reached and wiped her chin.
“I only had sound,” she told him.
He clucked again and looked a little disappointed. “Well, that
makes the training exercises easier, I guess.”
An hour later, she was dressed and armed with a copy of the in-
struction manual. The nurse had gone over the basic storage and re-
call functions. It felt weird, like trying to type with six fingers on each
hand. This sensation didn't help the queasiness. On the way back to
her dormitory, she had to sit down on the moving sidewalk and put
her head between her knees. She noticed a pleasant, quiet flapping of
rubber over rollers that she had never heard from a standing height.
People giggled as they trooped past her.
The worst part was the hook-up jack behind her left ear. She
ended up allergic to something in the alloy and her flesh got oozy and
infected. She was in bed with flu symptoms for a week. She had to
cancel work for several nights.
It was worth it, though, once she was back in the sound cage. She
plugged herself into the deck and tried using the implant surrepti-
tiously at first, slipping in the odd sound sequence as a segue or filler.
The cat purring. The slow tick of a heating duct cooling. Chess pieces
clacking on the boards in the dormitory common. It worked—only
she knew where music stopped and the sounds of the world began.
Like Duchamp’s toilet, it was music because she said it was. She called
it brain spin. The beat sats ate it up.
At a private party in the trendiest beat room, Indra made a whole
night of brain spins. She’d been collecting, starting with the sounds of
the recovery room. A mix called “The Upgrade Suite” combined the
humming lights and the distant ukulele, punctuated with the cluck-
ing tongue of the nurse, and in the background an eerie refrain that
only Indra knew was sound of her “emesis.” It was a huge hit with the
crowd, and a dance music feed picked up a recording of it for regular
transmission. Suddenly, Indra was making royalties.
Other sounds that appealed to her in the first phase were slippers
on carpet, her own teeth chewing, doors and dishes and running
water, and last-century songs recorded on antique vinyl. She plugged
ndra would have told you she
was a visual artist, but no one
else saw what she saw. To her,
music had its own terrain—
color and distance, density and
duration. She could close her
eyes and isolate each element of
the landscape. She could stop
the flow of rhythm, hold it
steady in her mind and walk
through it. She could mix tracks
in her mind’s eye before she ever
got near a deck. Modern Bali-
nese tech-hop had the perfect
negative space, like a hollow
under a hill, in which to fit a
Bach violin phrase. She could
just see it.
In her teens, she’d discovered that the dance floor had an ener-
getic landscape of its own. Being a wallflower gave her the chance to
observe the overlay of the dancers' vibe on the musical terrain. A good
track mixer could match the two a majority of the time—that was
their job. In her experience, most weren't all that good. She dropped
out of her recycling-tech program to start mixing tracks profession-
ally when she was 18. It was like daydreaming for pay—synapses blaz-
ing with the intricate pictures of one imagined world syncing with the
other. Vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral.
Even London had started to seem like a backwater once so many
people were spacebound. She took the first off-world opportunity that
came her way, but being a track mixer on the far side of the moon isn't
as glamorous as it might sound.
Indra was good—in her first year
or two she was something of a
sensation among hardcore beat-
sats, the trendy demilune of
techies, miners, engineers, and
their servicers who orbited the
beat room dance floors. But now
that she supported herself, she
realized the credit was abysmal. She still lived in a standard-assign-
ment dormitory. Free sound files were a nice perk, but she scraped to
get all the new tracks she needed.
So Indra was first in line when she saw the adverts for the new
memory chip implants. She knew instantly what she could do with one
at the deck. She would be able to sample anything she ever heard for
the dance floor. She could solve her sound budget problems and trans-
form track mixing into sound sculpture. She was a genuine visionary.
The procedure was much more unpleasant than she anticipated.
Indra had been too excited to take the time to read the fine print, the
part about how the mem chips weren't really chips at all but polymer
nanofilament data storage woven into the sensory centers of the dien-
cephalon. She had told them she only needed sound, so it wasn't as in-
volved as a full set (which were marketed to admin assists as data
organization lifesavers). But they still had to drill into her skull and
laser knife her cerebellum.
She woke up in the recovery room in a panic. The pinky orange
walls looked like the inside of a body cavity. The lights hummed. Her
head hurt. Her mouth was painfully dry. She couldn’t remember what
was going on. She sat up quickly and immediately retched, puking
down the front of her crinkly paper surgical gown. A crepe-soled nurse
stepped so quietly out of nowhere and surprised her with his clucking.
“Careful or you won't be able to forget the taste,” he said wryly.
“Huh?”
“The implants. The flavor. Don’t send it to long term storage,” he said.
Indra stared at him. He was wearing a sound pod on him some-
where. She could hear the faint plinking of a ukulele now, on top of
the humming lights. Pseudo-Hawaiian was way too popular these
days, but this combination was interesting, like emerald geodes lit-
tered on the stubbly yellow remains of a cornfield.
After moment, she asked,
“What are you talking
about?” Then suppressed an-
other retch.
He smiled a little conde-
scendingly. “You just had the
mem chip put in. I was trying
to warn you not to bank the
aftertaste of your, um, emesis.”
I Am What I PlayTONI K. THAYER
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
“I Am What I Play” is a striking, original story. Indra, the title character,
mixes dance music somewhere in the future. She describes this work
as “vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral,” a description that is
two-thirds accurate for the story itself. This unexpected and well-
imagined tale is vibrant and vivid, but not ephemeral. By the end, its
power detonates like a depth charge, as the consequences of Indra’s
gifts at her work take an unanticipated turn. Like the best science fic-
tion, “I am What I Play” speaks to us as moral creatures. ~ KAREN LONG
EMMY, 2003 - 5.5 X 6 7/8
0310
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0310
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He reached and wiped her chin.
“I only had sound,” she told him.
He clucked again and looked a little disappointed. “Well, that
makes the training exercises easier, I guess.”
An hour later, she was dressed and armed with a copy of the in-
struction manual. The nurse had gone over the basic storage and re-
call functions. It felt weird, like trying to type with six fingers on each
hand. This sensation didn't help the queasiness. On the way back to
her dormitory, she had to sit down on the moving sidewalk and put
her head between her knees. She noticed a pleasant, quiet flapping of
rubber over rollers that she had never heard from a standing height.
People giggled as they trooped past her.
The worst part was the hook-up jack behind her left ear. She
ended up allergic to something in the alloy and her flesh got oozy and
infected. She was in bed with flu symptoms for a week. She had to
cancel work for several nights.
It was worth it, though, once she was back in the sound cage. She
plugged herself into the deck and tried using the implant surrepti-
tiously at first, slipping in the odd sound sequence as a segue or filler.
The cat purring. The slow tick of a heating duct cooling. Chess pieces
clacking on the boards in the dormitory common. It worked—only
she knew where music stopped and the sounds of the world began.
Like Duchamp’s toilet, it was music because she said it was. She called
it brain spin. The beat sats ate it up.
At a private party in the trendiest beat room, Indra made a whole
night of brain spins. She’d been collecting, starting with the sounds of
the recovery room. A mix called “The Upgrade Suite” combined the
humming lights and the distant ukulele, punctuated with the cluck-
ing tongue of the nurse, and in the background an eerie refrain that
only Indra knew was sound of her “emesis.” It was a huge hit with the
crowd, and a dance music feed picked up a recording of it for regular
transmission. Suddenly, Indra was making royalties.
Other sounds that appealed to her in the first phase were slippers
on carpet, her own teeth chewing, doors and dishes and running
water, and last-century songs recorded on antique vinyl. She plugged
ndra would have told you she
was a visual artist, but no one
else saw what she saw. To her,
music had its own terrain—
color and distance, density and
duration. She could close her
eyes and isolate each element of
the landscape. She could stop
the flow of rhythm, hold it
steady in her mind and walk
through it. She could mix tracks
in her mind’s eye before she ever
got near a deck. Modern Bali-
nese tech-hop had the perfect
negative space, like a hollow
under a hill, in which to fit a
Bach violin phrase. She could
just see it.
In her teens, she’d discovered that the dance floor had an ener-
getic landscape of its own. Being a wallflower gave her the chance to
observe the overlay of the dancers' vibe on the musical terrain. A good
track mixer could match the two a majority of the time—that was
their job. In her experience, most weren't all that good. She dropped
out of her recycling-tech program to start mixing tracks profession-
ally when she was 18. It was like daydreaming for pay—synapses blaz-
ing with the intricate pictures of one imagined world syncing with the
other. Vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral.
Even London had started to seem like a backwater once so many
people were spacebound. She took the first off-world opportunity that
came her way, but being a track mixer on the far side of the moon isn't
as glamorous as it might sound.
Indra was good—in her first year
or two she was something of a
sensation among hardcore beat-
sats, the trendy demilune of
techies, miners, engineers, and
their servicers who orbited the
beat room dance floors. But now
that she supported herself, she
realized the credit was abysmal. She still lived in a standard-assign-
ment dormitory. Free sound files were a nice perk, but she scraped to
get all the new tracks she needed.
So Indra was first in line when she saw the adverts for the new
memory chip implants. She knew instantly what she could do with one
at the deck. She would be able to sample anything she ever heard for
the dance floor. She could solve her sound budget problems and trans-
form track mixing into sound sculpture. She was a genuine visionary.
The procedure was much more unpleasant than she anticipated.
Indra had been too excited to take the time to read the fine print, the
part about how the mem chips weren't really chips at all but polymer
nanofilament data storage woven into the sensory centers of the dien-
cephalon. She had told them she only needed sound, so it wasn't as in-
volved as a full set (which were marketed to admin assists as data
organization lifesavers). But they still had to drill into her skull and
laser knife her cerebellum.
She woke up in the recovery room in a panic. The pinky orange
walls looked like the inside of a body cavity. The lights hummed. Her
head hurt. Her mouth was painfully dry. She couldn’t remember what
was going on. She sat up quickly and immediately retched, puking
down the front of her crinkly paper surgical gown. A crepe-soled nurse
stepped so quietly out of nowhere and surprised her with his clucking.
“Careful or you won't be able to forget the taste,” he said wryly.
“Huh?”
“The implants. The flavor. Don’t send it to long term storage,” he said.
Indra stared at him. He was wearing a sound pod on him some-
where. She could hear the faint plinking of a ukulele now, on top of
the humming lights. Pseudo-Hawaiian was way too popular these
days, but this combination was interesting, like emerald geodes lit-
tered on the stubbly yellow remains of a cornfield.
After moment, she asked,
“What are you talking
about?” Then suppressed an-
other retch.
He smiled a little conde-
scendingly. “You just had the
mem chip put in. I was trying
to warn you not to bank the
aftertaste of your, um, emesis.”
I Am What I PlayTONI K. THAYER
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
“I Am What I Play” is a striking, original story. Indra, the title character,
mixes dance music somewhere in the future. She describes this work
as “vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral,” a description that is
two-thirds accurate for the story itself. This unexpected and well-
imagined tale is vibrant and vivid, but not ephemeral. By the end, its
power detonates like a depth charge, as the consequences of Indra’s
gifts at her work take an unanticipated turn. Like the best science fic-
tion, “I am What I Play” speaks to us as moral creatures. ~ KAREN LONG
EMMY, 2003 - 5.5 X 6 7/8
0310
M
U
S
E
12
M
0310
M
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13
M
at Main Library
Sara Wolfe, celloworks by J.S. Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich,and George CrumbSaturday, March 20
George Foley, pianist and singerJazz standards from the 20s-50sSaturday, April 17
Cleveland Public Library presents an afternoon of music. Both programs begin promptly at 2 p.m. and will be held on the 3rd floor of the Main Library building.
For more information call 216.623.2848 Free and open to all ages.
MUSIC
325 Superior Avenue | Cleveland, Ohio 44114 | www.cpl.org
in, called up the sound mems, mixed them together with snatches of
song on the palette behind her eyes and let them spill out like neon,
like mercury, through the wire into the machine out the speakers and
across the dance floor.
As Indra adjusted to her new groove, she sought out more and
more sounds. Her days became a wandering quest for unusual and
unexpected noise. She started going places she wasn’t supposed to be.
Into the greenhouse at night for birdcalls. Behind restricted access
doors for new machines and the occasional overheard clandestine sex.
She mingled strangers’ sex sounds with the noises of filtration plants:
cum cries and draining tanks of human waste. Her sense of humor
was getting darker the more she searched, the more she heard. In the
beat rooms, the crowds danced and danced.
One morning, out trawling for sound, she heard four kids argu-
ing near the rec complex. Nothing special, until one punched another
with a wet thud. Three boys beat the fourth with hands and boots and
space hockey rackets until he mewled like an underfed kitten. Indra
had no idea why they did it. She preferred not to. She took the sounds
and sculpted them into something new. She called the mix “Force
Field.” The dancers went crazy for the primal energy. Indra tried to
find other sounds of violence, but ended up just smashing in her black
metal wastebasket with a pipe.
Then one evening, she went to lurk in the corner of a transport
hub, eyes closed, listening to all the sounds of the station, trying to
pick out each part individually so she could brain spin it however she
pleased. She particularly liked the echoes. A brief cry and a muffled
whimper from down an empty hallway attracted her attention. She
opened her eyes and turned. A man was attacking a woman. Instinc-
tively, Indra turned her face away, then thought to cry out, to some-
how interfere, but she only stood.
The man was saying, “This is mine. This is mine. This is mine.
This is mine,” as he pinned the woman to the floor. Indra had regis-
tered the sight of the woman's fountain of golden braids before turn-
ing away. Now she talked herself into imagining his fingers picking up
a rope of hair with each utterance.
The rape was a dark symphony: a belt clanking against the floor,
shoes scrabbling for purchase, fabric rasping fabric, flesh slapping
flesh, various guttural sounds of pain and fear and satisfaction. It was
fascinating, electrifying, too powerful to let go of.
That night at the deck, she mixed the sounds of the attack into an
hour-long percussive, retro-synthfunk blend that mesmerized the
dancers. The manager complained because the beat room didn’t sell
enough bevs, but Indra went home feeling like a superhero. She woke
up the next morning wanting to kill herself, thinking she had raped
the woman again to make music. The shame lasted only as long as it
took for the recording of last night’s mix, just called “Mine,” to be-
come the most popular on the music feeds. She had to admit, her per-
formance was like nothing anyone had ever done.
For two nights Indra used her new prestige to justify calling off
work. Ignoring the occasional nauseous regret, she stayed up all night
searching for the colony’s darkest corners—dogfights and sex rentals.
When she returned to the sound cage, her mixes were nothing but a
collage pulled from her mem chip, with no music to get in the way.
Sometimes she mixed according to a plan; sometimes she improvised
in response to the energy of the dancers, the shakers, the writhers.
What they were doing down there was bizarre.
After she picked a fight with a drug dealer just to hear a body
pummeled from the inside, Indra realized she missed music and her
innocent toying with its structural clarity. But she missed it like she
missed the neighborhood she had grown up in. The longing felt senti-
mental. She indulged it privately, but didn’t let herself take it seriously.
This new thing was too big. She was making something entirely her
own. She was booked two months out, for crazy amounts of credit.
Then, suddenly, she was sick of it. She woke up one morning with
no desire to search for new sound. Maybe the chip was malfunction-
ing. The night before she had watched a woman on the dance floor
yanking at her golden braids, yanking and yanking in ecstasy or an-
guish while Indra shot sounds from that first rape out into the room.
“This is mine” pulsed through the air at 100 different frequencies. In-
dra’s whole body tensed. It couldn’t be the same woman. It couldn’t
be. The brain spin hiccupped and missed a beat, and the dancers
jerked unwittingly to get back in the groove. The woman with the
braids stood dazed for a second. Who else could it be? Indra didn't
have the strength that morning to do anything but lie in bed and stare
at a shadowy stain on her wall. The only sounds she was collecting
were the whir of the exhaust fan and the rustle of sheets. That wasn’t
worth much, a paltry deposit into the memory bank.
That night she didn’t even want to be at the deck. She spun to-
gether some old favorite sounds, but she was bored of them. Looking
out from the sound cage, she let herself be lulled by the motion on the
floor. She listened to the people themselves, their breathing, their mo-
tion, their propulsive energy. There were no longer two landscapes to
meld together, but one continuous loop—from the crowd to her,
through her mind and the jack and the deck, and back out to the
crowd. A huge room full of people was animated by the regurgitated
sound of their own bodies, and they loved it. Indra didn't have to mix
anything. She was a conduit, a nothing, a star.
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0310
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0310
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e were sitting at the
bar at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska. Snow fell in heavy
wet sheets and the motel had filled up for the night. Cars were
skidding all over the highway and even the truckers pulled off
and rented rooms. The bartender told us that every hotel in
town was booked.
I’d reserved my room a few weeks earlier. I made the once a
year trip to Lincoln since graduating from college and going to
work for a manufacturers’ representative firm. This was the
time in America when salespeople sold lots of things to compa-
nies that made products. Lincoln was a good place to sell fasten-
ers. The buyers I called on liked to talk football, which was fine
with me. They were all Cornhuskers football fanatics, but I
managed to fake it, being a Cleveland Browns fan myself,
because football is football.
The guy sitting next to me at the bar lit one cigarette after
another. He turned to me and said, “What’s your trade?”
“Manufacturers’ rep,” I said. Usually when someone asked
me what I did, the questioner often didn’t know what that was.
“Do you make things?” he
might then ask. “No; I sell one
company’s products to other
companies,” I’d reply. Some-
times my answer would be met
with silence or another ques-
tion. But this guy nodded his
head up and down. He consid-
ered it for a while.
“I make rubber car mats. My problem is that I need to run
my plant. If I’m not there they tend to horse around and I get
behind on my orders. I could use a young fellow like you to sell
for me, a self-starter, a commissioned guy. What kind of
percentages do you boys make?”
I assumed the “they” he lamented were his current workers
that were probably from generations of working men and
women.
“Your generation,” – he smiled – “present company excluded,
is filled with spoiled brats that don’t have a sound work ethic.”
I figured his workers got stoned a lot, but didn’t want to say
something that might ruin his night. Instead I asked him his
name. Harry was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Business was
decent, he said, but profit margins were so low that it was hard
to justify a full-time salesman. I told him that our company
didn’t sell finished products, but “components and packaging
for O.E.Ms.”
Harry shook his head up and down again and said, “Uh
huh. And we’re a finished product. I get it. No problem, my
young friend.”
He took a long drink of whiskey. “I’ll just stay on the road
until I figure it out. I really do need to fire Rich. I promoted the
son of a bitch from salesman to sales manager to help his – what
do you call it? Self esteem. He’s my only salesman and now he
shows up drunk at sales calls. Can’t have that. We all like our
libations” – he held up his golden glass – “but not between eight
AM and five PM. Am I right?”
I nodded yes. I was encour-
aged that he knew that O.E.M.
stood for original equipment
manufacturer, and that I was
with one of my tribe; my tribe,
I suppose, being lonely men
out on the road trying to sell
something they didn’t really
Sales CallSCOTT LAX
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
At its best, “Sales Call” works like an update on “Death of a Salesman”
as it explores a wintry Nebraska encounter between two salesmen, the
narrator and “Harry,” who peddles rubber car floor mats. As the
evening wears on, Harry is astute in sizing up the young narrator, and
a kind of decency is attained. “Sales Call” holds the reader’s interest
throughout. ~ KAREN LONG
PARKED, DUMBO NYC, 2004 - 8X13
0310
M
U
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14
M
0310
M
U
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15
M
e were sitting at the
bar at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska. Snow fell in heavy
wet sheets and the motel had filled up for the night. Cars were
skidding all over the highway and even the truckers pulled off
and rented rooms. The bartender told us that every hotel in
town was booked.
I’d reserved my room a few weeks earlier. I made the once a
year trip to Lincoln since graduating from college and going to
work for a manufacturers’ representative firm. This was the
time in America when salespeople sold lots of things to compa-
nies that made products. Lincoln was a good place to sell fasten-
ers. The buyers I called on liked to talk football, which was fine
with me. They were all Cornhuskers football fanatics, but I
managed to fake it, being a Cleveland Browns fan myself,
because football is football.
The guy sitting next to me at the bar lit one cigarette after
another. He turned to me and said, “What’s your trade?”
“Manufacturers’ rep,” I said. Usually when someone asked
me what I did, the questioner often didn’t know what that was.
“Do you make things?” he
might then ask. “No; I sell one
company’s products to other
companies,” I’d reply. Some-
times my answer would be met
with silence or another ques-
tion. But this guy nodded his
head up and down. He consid-
ered it for a while.
“I make rubber car mats. My problem is that I need to run
my plant. If I’m not there they tend to horse around and I get
behind on my orders. I could use a young fellow like you to sell
for me, a self-starter, a commissioned guy. What kind of
percentages do you boys make?”
I assumed the “they” he lamented were his current workers
that were probably from generations of working men and
women.
“Your generation,” – he smiled – “present company excluded,
is filled with spoiled brats that don’t have a sound work ethic.”
I figured his workers got stoned a lot, but didn’t want to say
something that might ruin his night. Instead I asked him his
name. Harry was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Business was
decent, he said, but profit margins were so low that it was hard
to justify a full-time salesman. I told him that our company
didn’t sell finished products, but “components and packaging
for O.E.Ms.”
Harry shook his head up and down again and said, “Uh
huh. And we’re a finished product. I get it. No problem, my
young friend.”
He took a long drink of whiskey. “I’ll just stay on the road
until I figure it out. I really do need to fire Rich. I promoted the
son of a bitch from salesman to sales manager to help his – what
do you call it? Self esteem. He’s my only salesman and now he
shows up drunk at sales calls. Can’t have that. We all like our
libations” – he held up his golden glass – “but not between eight
AM and five PM. Am I right?”
I nodded yes. I was encour-
aged that he knew that O.E.M.
stood for original equipment
manufacturer, and that I was
with one of my tribe; my tribe,
I suppose, being lonely men
out on the road trying to sell
something they didn’t really
Sales CallSCOTT LAX
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
At its best, “Sales Call” works like an update on “Death of a Salesman”
as it explores a wintry Nebraska encounter between two salesmen, the
narrator and “Harry,” who peddles rubber car floor mats. As the
evening wears on, Harry is astute in sizing up the young narrator, and
a kind of decency is attained. “Sales Call” holds the reader’s interest
throughout. ~ KAREN LONG
PARKED, DUMBO NYC, 2004 - 8X13
0310
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U
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M
0310
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M
care about and ending up snowed in at a Holiday Inn in
Nebraska in the middle of winter.
Harry insisted on buying us another round.
“Good man,” he said, as I drank. “You’re not one of those
Chardonnay drinkers. I don’t trust them fellows. That there’s a
little light in the loafers for my taste, if you know what I mean.”
I told him I did. While I’d heard the term and knew he was
talking about homosexuals, I had no idea if they drank Char-
donnay. I didn’t feel like questioning Harry about it.
He smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, I bummed
one from him. “You want to stay off them cancer sticks,” he said
as I lit up with his Zippo.
I told him I was a social smoker.
“Well, don’t get started. Stick to the hooch.”
Harry looked like he’d never seen the inside of a gym or put
on a jogging suit and he had a lot of dandruff around his shoul-
ders. Both of us were wearing suits. My suitcase was sitting on
my bed, where I’d tossed it before I came down to the bar. Harry
wore a gray pinstripe that looked like he’d had it on for a week. I
wore a new tan corduroy suit. I figured I needed a warm suit for
Nebraska, and I’d been right. There’s no cold like prairie cold,
when the wind is a knife blade sharpened by a medieval crafts-
man. No matter what you’re wearing, you’re an olive with no pit
when you go outside and that knife cuts through you.
“Look here,” Harry said, ordering another Jameson’s. “You
want to grab dinner in the dining room? They serve a hell of a
sirloin. Nothing better than Nebraska beef. Neither one of us is
going anywhere tonight.”
he bar was busy. Truck-
ers were drinking shots
and beers and getting
hammered fast. The
cocktail waitresses
looked horrified at what
the prairie storm had
blown in. One had red
hair stacked high on her
head and green eye
shadow. She kept saying
to the truckers and
salesmen, “Easy, there,
fellahs, or I’ll call your
wives.” She laughed
after she said it, but I
could tell she wasn’t
happy about working
through a blizzard. It was only eight o’clock and she had a long
night ahead of her with a bunch of drunken salesmen and
truckers.
After a couple of Jameson’s, the idea of trying to tune my
hotel room television in to one of the two stations that Lincoln
had wasn’t attractive. I’d left my book, a Tom Clancy paper-
back, on the airplane, which annoyed me because I was two-
thirds of the way through it. I had been looking forward to
maybe taking a bath and reading the book, then watching some
Johnny Carson and turning in. I had an eight o’clock the next
morning with a company that made industrial shelving. They
bought a lot of expensive screws that were made in Elk Grove
Village near Chicago, where the company I worked for got our
fasteners. Getting that account would be a real coup for me
around the Friday morning sales meeting table.
Over dinner Harry showed me his left hand, which I hadn’t
noticed at the bar. He was missing the tips of his little and ring
fingers.
“Let me tell you about cold,” he said, holding them up like a
trophy. “I lost these babies when my car conked out on my way
home from work one night. No gloves. Six miles of walking
through a blizzard. Can you believe that? Frostbite.”
“Man,” I said. I didn’t want to stare at his tip-less fingers.
“Where you from?”
“Cleveland,” I said.
“Then you know cold. But not northern Wisconsin cold.
I’m talking twenty below and wind. I was lucky. Up where I live
you see guys with missing feet, hands… those boys are usually
the drunks that roll out of taverns thinking they’re warm. They
wake up in snowdrifts – if they wake up – and they’re blue.
They’re lucky if they keep their limbs. If not….”
He held up his hand again. “Like I say, I’ve always been
lucky. At least I’m alive.”
The bar and restaurant was filled with smoke. There were
arguments and apologies and laughing and shouting around us.
Hanging out with Harry made me feel a little better about my
life. At twenty-eight years old, I’d been divorced for a year. I still
got carded at bars but I felt old. I thought Harry might have
worse stories than I did.
“Not married?” he said, glancing at my naked ring finger.
“Good-looking young fellow like you? You’ve got a good
job. Sales is a solid occupation. People will always need to buy
goods and you have to have salesmen to sell them goods. I’d
think the ladies are knocking down your door. Am I right?
“I had some bad luck a while back,” I replied. “I made a bad
choice. It’s over and done. I guess you could say I’m gun-shy.”
“Ah, well. I guess you young folks are different from my
generation,” he said. “We hang in there through thick and thin.
But things change. Hell, the wife and I do the disco every now
and then.”
Harry was about six inches shorter than I, and the way he
slouched in his chair made him seem even shorter. He'd
combed what remained of his hair from one ear to just over the
other ear.
ur steaks
arrived and
Harry was
right; they
were out-
standing. I ate
slowly, and
drank my
third whiskey
even slower. I
realized I
couldn’t hang
in with Harry,
who had a hollow leg. I hoped he wasn’t one of those drinkers
that suddenly turned crazy or violent. But he just kept drinking
and talking, mostly about the rubber car mat business and how
he started it in his twenties, and how the Japanese were destroy-
ing the American car market. He told me about his wife and
kids and how they were “the best family a fellow could have.”
“What do you drive?” he finally asked, not unpleasantly.
“An Olds Omega.”
“American.” he said. “Then you have one of my car mats.”
He looked proud. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had carpet
car mats.
“I’m sure I do,” I said. “It’s a very good mat. Never falls apart.”
Harry looked at me like I’d somehow made his life better, if
only for the night.
“See? This is why I do what I do. Every now and then you
meet someone who drives American, and knows quality. A rub-
ber mat gets dirty, you wash it off. Am I right?”
I felt ashamed that I’d lied to Harry. But he seemed so
happy. Dear Jesus, I thought. Rubber mats. This is my life.
“So you’re a peddler,” he said. He smiled and wrapped his
hand with the missing fingertips around his glass. He’d finally
slowed down on the Jameson’s. “Is this where you saw yourself
ten years ago?”
I began to answer without knowing what I was going to say.
But my voice had suddenly gone hoarse. It happened to me on
sales calls; now it was happening to me with Harry, who made
rubber mats for American cars.
“I…”
“Are you alright?”
I pointed to my throat. It was closing, constricting, and I was
having a hard time breathing or swallowing. I began to panic.
“Drink some water,” he said. “Do you want me to get a doc-
tor?” Harry seemed suddenly sober and concerned. “You chok-
ing? Maybe someone knows the Einstein maneuver.”
I tried to smile and nod and let him know I was okay. But it
was a bad choke up – the worst I’d ever had. I couldn’t swallow,
couldn’t breathe very well, and couldn’t talk to save my life. I
thought I might die at twenty-eight years old in a Holiday Inn in
Nebraska, sitting with a guy with two bum fingers and who
made car mats for shitty American cars like my Olds.
After a few minutes and making sure to breathe through
my diaphragm and drink more water, I could finally speak. The
Jameson’s had kicked in, late, but hard.
“I hate it,” Harry,” I said. “I have no idea why I do what I do.”
Our waitress – she wasn’t the one with the piled up hair and
green eye shadow – came over. “Looks like you boys were hun-
gry. Can I get you some dessert, another drink? I don’t think
anyone’s going anywhere tonight. The highway patrol closed
down the highway. We’re socked in for the night, at least.”
Harry ended up paying the bill. I protested, but he kept
apologizing for me choking.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I get hoarse sometimes and
have a hard time breathing. And talking.”
We left the restaurant. The bar was going into overdrive.
Some of the truckers were arguing about something with a cou-
ple of traveling salesmen. Harry and I stood in the lobby.
“Look here,” Harry said. “I didn’t want to say anything in
the restaurant, but I want you to consider something.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You’re too young to give up. That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?
Given up? You had a bad marriage. But you’re what, twenty-five
years old?”
“Twenty-eight,” I said.
“Good lord,” Harry said. “Twenty-eight years old. Now lis-
ten to me. You need to do what you need to do. You can’t talk
about your job and you can’t make sales calls, because this isn’t
who you are.”
I stood there and looked at the tile floor of the Holiday Inn.
Then I looked at Harry.
“What should I do?”
“You should go home and quit, and then do something you
want to do. What do you like to do?”
“I was a guitarist in a band,” I said.
“Did you like it?”
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care about and ending up snowed in at a Holiday Inn in
Nebraska in the middle of winter.
Harry insisted on buying us another round.
“Good man,” he said, as I drank. “You’re not one of those
Chardonnay drinkers. I don’t trust them fellows. That there’s a
little light in the loafers for my taste, if you know what I mean.”
I told him I did. While I’d heard the term and knew he was
talking about homosexuals, I had no idea if they drank Char-
donnay. I didn’t feel like questioning Harry about it.
He smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, I bummed
one from him. “You want to stay off them cancer sticks,” he said
as I lit up with his Zippo.
I told him I was a social smoker.
“Well, don’t get started. Stick to the hooch.”
Harry looked like he’d never seen the inside of a gym or put
on a jogging suit and he had a lot of dandruff around his shoul-
ders. Both of us were wearing suits. My suitcase was sitting on
my bed, where I’d tossed it before I came down to the bar. Harry
wore a gray pinstripe that looked like he’d had it on for a week. I
wore a new tan corduroy suit. I figured I needed a warm suit for
Nebraska, and I’d been right. There’s no cold like prairie cold,
when the wind is a knife blade sharpened by a medieval crafts-
man. No matter what you’re wearing, you’re an olive with no pit
when you go outside and that knife cuts through you.
“Look here,” Harry said, ordering another Jameson’s. “You
want to grab dinner in the dining room? They serve a hell of a
sirloin. Nothing better than Nebraska beef. Neither one of us is
going anywhere tonight.”
he bar was busy. Truck-
ers were drinking shots
and beers and getting
hammered fast. The
cocktail waitresses
looked horrified at what
the prairie storm had
blown in. One had red
hair stacked high on her
head and green eye
shadow. She kept saying
to the truckers and
salesmen, “Easy, there,
fellahs, or I’ll call your
wives.” She laughed
after she said it, but I
could tell she wasn’t
happy about working
through a blizzard. It was only eight o’clock and she had a long
night ahead of her with a bunch of drunken salesmen and
truckers.
After a couple of Jameson’s, the idea of trying to tune my
hotel room television in to one of the two stations that Lincoln
had wasn’t attractive. I’d left my book, a Tom Clancy paper-
back, on the airplane, which annoyed me because I was two-
thirds of the way through it. I had been looking forward to
maybe taking a bath and reading the book, then watching some
Johnny Carson and turning in. I had an eight o’clock the next
morning with a company that made industrial shelving. They
bought a lot of expensive screws that were made in Elk Grove
Village near Chicago, where the company I worked for got our
fasteners. Getting that account would be a real coup for me
around the Friday morning sales meeting table.
Over dinner Harry showed me his left hand, which I hadn’t
noticed at the bar. He was missing the tips of his little and ring
fingers.
“Let me tell you about cold,” he said, holding them up like a
trophy. “I lost these babies when my car conked out on my way
home from work one night. No gloves. Six miles of walking
through a blizzard. Can you believe that? Frostbite.”
“Man,” I said. I didn’t want to stare at his tip-less fingers.
“Where you from?”
“Cleveland,” I said.
“Then you know cold. But not northern Wisconsin cold.
I’m talking twenty below and wind. I was lucky. Up where I live
you see guys with missing feet, hands… those boys are usually
the drunks that roll out of taverns thinking they’re warm. They
wake up in snowdrifts – if they wake up – and they’re blue.
They’re lucky if they keep their limbs. If not….”
He held up his hand again. “Like I say, I’ve always been
lucky. At least I’m alive.”
The bar and restaurant was filled with smoke. There were
arguments and apologies and laughing and shouting around us.
Hanging out with Harry made me feel a little better about my
life. At twenty-eight years old, I’d been divorced for a year. I still
got carded at bars but I felt old. I thought Harry might have
worse stories than I did.
“Not married?” he said, glancing at my naked ring finger.
“Good-looking young fellow like you? You’ve got a good
job. Sales is a solid occupation. People will always need to buy
goods and you have to have salesmen to sell them goods. I’d
think the ladies are knocking down your door. Am I right?
“I had some bad luck a while back,” I replied. “I made a bad
choice. It’s over and done. I guess you could say I’m gun-shy.”
“Ah, well. I guess you young folks are different from my
generation,” he said. “We hang in there through thick and thin.
But things change. Hell, the wife and I do the disco every now
and then.”
Harry was about six inches shorter than I, and the way he
slouched in his chair made him seem even shorter. He'd
combed what remained of his hair from one ear to just over the
other ear.
ur steaks
arrived and
Harry was
right; they
were out-
standing. I ate
slowly, and
drank my
third whiskey
even slower. I
realized I
couldn’t hang
in with Harry,
who had a hollow leg. I hoped he wasn’t one of those drinkers
that suddenly turned crazy or violent. But he just kept drinking
and talking, mostly about the rubber car mat business and how
he started it in his twenties, and how the Japanese were destroy-
ing the American car market. He told me about his wife and
kids and how they were “the best family a fellow could have.”
“What do you drive?” he finally asked, not unpleasantly.
“An Olds Omega.”
“American.” he said. “Then you have one of my car mats.”
He looked proud. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had carpet
car mats.
“I’m sure I do,” I said. “It’s a very good mat. Never falls apart.”
Harry looked at me like I’d somehow made his life better, if
only for the night.
“See? This is why I do what I do. Every now and then you
meet someone who drives American, and knows quality. A rub-
ber mat gets dirty, you wash it off. Am I right?”
I felt ashamed that I’d lied to Harry. But he seemed so
happy. Dear Jesus, I thought. Rubber mats. This is my life.
“So you’re a peddler,” he said. He smiled and wrapped his
hand with the missing fingertips around his glass. He’d finally
slowed down on the Jameson’s. “Is this where you saw yourself
ten years ago?”
I began to answer without knowing what I was going to say.
But my voice had suddenly gone hoarse. It happened to me on
sales calls; now it was happening to me with Harry, who made
rubber mats for American cars.
“I…”
“Are you alright?”
I pointed to my throat. It was closing, constricting, and I was
having a hard time breathing or swallowing. I began to panic.
“Drink some water,” he said. “Do you want me to get a doc-
tor?” Harry seemed suddenly sober and concerned. “You chok-
ing? Maybe someone knows the Einstein maneuver.”
I tried to smile and nod and let him know I was okay. But it
was a bad choke up – the worst I’d ever had. I couldn’t swallow,
couldn’t breathe very well, and couldn’t talk to save my life. I
thought I might die at twenty-eight years old in a Holiday Inn in
Nebraska, sitting with a guy with two bum fingers and who
made car mats for shitty American cars like my Olds.
After a few minutes and making sure to breathe through
my diaphragm and drink more water, I could finally speak. The
Jameson’s had kicked in, late, but hard.
“I hate it,” Harry,” I said. “I have no idea why I do what I do.”
Our waitress – she wasn’t the one with the piled up hair and
green eye shadow – came over. “Looks like you boys were hun-
gry. Can I get you some dessert, another drink? I don’t think
anyone’s going anywhere tonight. The highway patrol closed
down the highway. We’re socked in for the night, at least.”
Harry ended up paying the bill. I protested, but he kept
apologizing for me choking.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I get hoarse sometimes and
have a hard time breathing. And talking.”
We left the restaurant. The bar was going into overdrive.
Some of the truckers were arguing about something with a cou-
ple of traveling salesmen. Harry and I stood in the lobby.
“Look here,” Harry said. “I didn’t want to say anything in
the restaurant, but I want you to consider something.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You’re too young to give up. That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?
Given up? You had a bad marriage. But you’re what, twenty-five
years old?”
“Twenty-eight,” I said.
“Good lord,” Harry said. “Twenty-eight years old. Now lis-
ten to me. You need to do what you need to do. You can’t talk
about your job and you can’t make sales calls, because this isn’t
who you are.”
I stood there and looked at the tile floor of the Holiday Inn.
Then I looked at Harry.
“What should I do?”
“You should go home and quit, and then do something you
want to do. What do you like to do?”
“I was a guitarist in a band,” I said.
“Did you like it?”
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“Sure. I loved it. But you can’t make a decent living at that.”
Harry looked at me. “When you lose your voice, it’s be-
cause you’ve lost your heart for what you’re doing.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve never lost my voice. I love what I do.” Harry
smiled.
I’d told Harry over dinner that I’d left my Clancy novel in
the plane. “Done it myself many times,” he’d replied. I assumed
he’d forgotten it as small talk.
Harry said, “I’ve got a Newsweek I picked up at the airport.
You want it?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But what are you going to read?”
“I’m whipped,” he said. “I’m hitting the hay. Early day
tomorrow.”
We walked to Harry’s room, which was close to the lobby. I
glanced in at his room. It was a mess and stunk of cigarettes and
dirty socks. Outside the snow was coming down so hard it
looked like a white curtain had been drawn across the window.
He isn’t going anywhere tomorrow, I thought.
“Here you go,” he said. He gave me the magazine. John
Lennon, who’d been shot two weeks earlier, was on the cover.
“One of your guys. I think you’ll enjoy this more than me.
Shame about him, though.”
We shook hands and said goodnight. I didn’t think to ask
him his last name.
ack in my
room, I drew a
bath. While I
lay in the tub I
kept using my
big toe to add
hot water. I
could hear the
TV in the
other room.
Listening to
the local Lin-
coln, Nebraska
news, like lis-
tening to the
news in any
other city than
Cleveland,
seemed exotic.
I still felt the effects of the whiskey. I read through the News-
week and fell asleep a few times in the tub.
After my bath, I dried off and got in my pajamas, which I
always brought with me on overnight sales calls. I walked over
and opened the curtains, which were made of vinyl. It was
snowing hard outside. You could see the highway from my
room, and there wasn’t a single car or truck light. The only
lights were snowplows, with spinning yellow lights. I sat down
on the one of the chairs at the little round table by the window
and watched them on the highway, passing each other in both
directions.
The next morning I got up at six, saw that the roads and
airports were still closed and digging out of the snowstorm,
even though it was bright outside. I called the company I had an
appointment with, and left a message on their answering ma-
chine. I cancelled my sales call and went back to sleep.
At about ten-thirty I went down to the restaurant and fig-
ured I’d see Harry. I wanted to give his Newsweek back to him.
But he wasn’t there. I asked one of the waiters if he’d seen him. I
gave his description. “You mean Harry? He was out of here first
thing this morning. Nothing stops that guy. He’s a true
salesman.”
I checked out and caught a cab back to the Lincoln airport.
When I got back to Cleveland, I gave notice. My boss told me
he’d had great hopes for me. “You’re a natural at the sales
game,” he said. “Sorry to lose you.”
Harry and I never crossed paths again. I ended up in a dif-
ferent world than him, thanks to him. What I remember most
about Harry is the look on his face when I was choking. You
don’t forget someone who actually gets as concerned about you
as Harry was that night.
I figure Harry would be in his eighties by now, but I doubt
if he made it this long. With all his smoking and drinking and
extra weight – life in general – I’m not sure I want to know what
happened to him. I prefer to think of him as a guy who loves his
job, a guy I met at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I
was young; a manufacturer of rubber mats for American cars,
which, I’ve always believed, is an honorable profession.
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o we went to
Tangier, went to
Tangier, down lots
and lots of differ-
ent roads to get
there, and then we
had to take a ferry.
People stood in
lines. I wore a
scarf Anna Mag-
ninied around my
head. I wanted it
to be the forties,
be the sixties, be
something else.
Can I make it hap-
pen when some-
thing else is
happening, and the boat went over the strait, over and over this divided
and coming together of water, and Gibraltor was behind us, and it was a
clear dusk that exhausted itself quickly, and we didn’t know anyone except
each other. It was now Thursday night, and there was a chill but it was
welcome. The Mediterranean and the Atlantic were Herculean around us,
and nobody seemed to care, they were getting drinks, and stamping pass-
ports, and sitting on parcels and the guy from San Francisco said he was
never going home, he was on a travel that started 14 months ago but he
looked too clean not to go home, and then suddenly I was too aware of my
red sweater, and it smelled of my
core, and I wanted to shrink, every-
one could smell the stink of me then
and I was foreign in the same clothes
I’d been wearing for two weeks, and
the steward spoke French over the
microphone and Arabic right after
and we drank coffee con leches be-
cause we were coming from Spain,
and no one got sick because we’re good on boats, our feet know where they
are. And the men, and the men played a game with coins, and wanted to
buy my cigarettes, no one wanted my scarf, and three Canadian women
turned their backs, and before the back-turning one was my size and we
recognized that the other was tall, and a red Australian couple drank from
a flask and talked about driving down to Fez and oh it was something,
they’d retired to do this, as long as no one put drugs in their car for the
ferry ride back, that’s what they say, and people were running!
The boat lazed into the harbor, bumping against the water, and
then everything was happening at once, and disembarkation took a long
time time time as suitcases were checked, and families with a thousand
paper bags and tired looking food pushed past, they obviously knew the
drill, and the Canadian women turned left, and the Australian couple ig-
nored everyone, even the little boys trying to carry their bags, and what’s a
few dirhams, it’s a living, at seven, eight, nine and noon, but they were
firm, no one would glom on to them, and the guy from SF was cheerful,
but he kept his pack to himself, and we chuffed to keep up with the crowd,
and everyone moved at once, and the line swelled into these two green-
brown glass tubes, and then we were spit out into the port authority. And
men in white in white men in white were everywhere running and they
said come with us we’re from government come with us, only for a couple
dirhams, and you are the American couple, and Hamad will take you to
the El Minzah, and come with us come with us. And we took a petit
taxi and the taxi driver’s wife studied her long frosted fingernails
and looked pissed-off—why should she be in a taxi when every-
one was out, it was Thursday night, and it was past 30 for both
of us and we both knew it and neither of us wanted to be in a
taxi and going the long way to
a hotel and the numbers kept
clocking.
And wouldn’t we rather be
dancing and flinging the long
bones of our arms into the air
and wearing clothes as airy as
sheets and feeling a freedom
somewhere, certainly the air is
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ood for that here, and the wife just continued to look bothered and we were going oh and suddenly the Grand Socco and sheer
numbers of people. And we knew no one, and we were very aware
of the ground when we stood on it because it had swirling pat-
terns carved into it and it would be the envy of any patio-monger
back home, and everything smelled blue and the smoke of meat
rose into the air and there were lots and lots of people walking
slowly around and men and men smoking outside cafes and the
French Consulate was dark, and the Casbah started unwinding
its ropes and snakes and many many goods at the top of the street
which had one French name and another in Arabic, so we didn’t
know where we were, and it was pleasant, and our hotel ended
there, and there were only men at the desk, and I wondered would
the guy from SF keep going, and how were the three Canadian
women faring, and did the Australian couple get away, and would
they come back without drugs because it seemed to be a concern,
and my husband inquired about rates and the freshness of the
fish, so the waiter brought it out intact on a plate, and its belly
looked full of itself, and finally in the morning I saw a woman
and she made up our beds shyly bending away from me because
Americanism might be catching, and who wants it.
HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, 2008 - 8.5 11
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ood for that here, and the wife just continued to look bothered and we were going oh and suddenly the Grand Socco and sheer
numbers of people. And we knew no one, and we were very aware
of the ground when we stood on it because it had swirling pat-
terns carved into it and it would be the envy of any patio-monger
back home, and everything smelled blue and the smoke of meat
rose into the air and there were lots and lots of people walking
slowly around and men and men smoking outside cafes and the
French Consulate was dark, and the Casbah started unwinding
its ropes and snakes and many many goods at the top of the street
which had one French name and another in Arabic, so we didn’t
know where we were, and it was pleasant, and our hotel ended
there, and there were only men at the desk, and I wondered would
the guy from SF keep going, and how were the three Canadian
women faring, and did the Australian couple get away, and would
they come back without drugs because it seemed to be a concern,
and my husband inquired about rates and the freshness of the
fish, so the waiter brought it out intact on a plate, and its belly
looked full of itself, and finally in the morning I saw a woman
and she made up our beds shyly bending away from me because
Americanism might be catching, and who wants it.
HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, 2008 - 8.5 11
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rom across the street Gert sees
sky. He sees gulls under-lit in
pink. Caterwauling geese
shred grey clouds that fray
into gold. Under the autumn
sky is the concert hall, stone
friezes and red brick. And in
front of the white columns,
chaos.
Everything is moving at
once: fists, umbrellas, stones,
clubs. Such a tangle of green
aprons, white collars, grey
vests, street conductors caps,
veterans' visors, even kerchiefs
and cloche hats. Even women.
Someone is shrieking, someone is shouting, a cacophony of
hatred, a howl such as Gert has only heard from a dog before,
from that loathsome dachshund Franz, when there were dogs
around and food enough to keep them. A howl as from every
dog that ever lived in Duisburg.
A new sound arrests the rest. Gunfire. A man in homburg
and white breast pocket handkerchief puts his hand to his eye,
teeters to the right, and Gert and everyone else thrusts forward.
The monstrous body of a hundred heads and two hundred
knees surges and subsides. Gert elbows a place for himself, be-
tween Loden green and scratchy tweed.
The howl has splintered
and multiplied. Gert is buf-
feted by noise, his ears bruised
with it. It is terrifying, this
noise, as if his head must burst
of it, but there is something
else, too. Some terrible exalta-
tion, to be so enraged—and
Gert is often enraged—to be deranged with rage, and no one,
nothing between him and it. Only this fury all around to herd
him forward.
Up stone steps the many-headed monster stampedes. Per-
haps Gert’s foot steps on flesh. Someone is down there, but the
monster cannot stop. Gert is pressed against a frock coat, let us
say it is black and shiny from too much brushing, and there,
where his nose touches, it is split at the seam. The back that
wears the coat is broad and Gert has to weave and crane, no easy
matter when you are jostled on every side, to catch a glimpse of
the other backs in front of him.
Abruptly the monster shifts and, there by the shattered
door, he sees torn cuffs, a raised arm, an elbow in grey worsted
flailing, and so many hands, so many clubs and stones and
umbrellas, so much blood, spraying the torn cuffs, the black
umbrellas, the hands and the heads they are pummeling and the
heads other hands are trying to cover. Blood drenches helmets
which fly through the air, roll on the floor. The helmets are
encrusted with bronze, they are embossed with eagles, they rise
at the crown to pointed pikes that once, perhaps, in Siegfried's
world of tournaments and dragon quests, might have had more
than honorary effectiveness.
These pickelhaukers are useless, however to the men beside
whom they come to rest, men in epaulettes, who lie bloody and
still, or twitch a little, or cover their heads and scream and
scream. And now Gert, too, is stomping and pummeling,
thrashing and kicking the men in epaulettes, feeling something
more gruesome than solid
flesh, something soft, and
pulpy and liquid.
“You mean you hit them?”
I ask my father.
“Oh yes,” he says. “Oh yes.”
“You mean you helped kill
them?”
The Counterfeit Killer:A Memoir of My Father
AMEI WALLACH
“At that time I was a wild boy.”
It is 1980. My father and I are standing in the very spot in
downtown Duisburg where he is saying that he became a part of
that mob and helped it commit murder. Only he doesn't call it
murder. Patriotic duty would be more like it. Hans Gert Max
Klaus Wallach has brought his daughter at last on a journey to
his boyhood streets in the port city where Ruhr River coal meets
Rhine River industry. His Germany. We are standing on fake
cobblestones where once there were real ones. The columned
gymnasium of his memory has been replaced with utilitarian
concrete.
Never mind, the sight has been enough to animate him into
a recreation of what is happening in his mind’s eye.
I take my time doing the arithmetic; something concrete
and comprehendible.
“That was 1923. You were 14.”
“It was one of the most terrible experiences in my life. “ he says.
“Did you see them die?”
“I did right.” His hand is raised, making his point, as it
always does.
“The people were so outraged, women and everything. A
popular uprising is the worst you can say. But,” It is like he was
explaining to a halfwit. “It is as Schiller says, ‘Germany cannot
be safe so long as her neighbor does not leave her in peace.’”
I am accustomed to my father's stories and how he tells
them, insistently, with eyes alert for reactions, with repetitions
for reassurance, with chortles to ensure an appreciation, he is
not in the least certain of. But I have never looked at him like
this, not just with disbelief and horror, but with the furtive thrill
of discovery, too. I cannot imagine the father I know bragging
about such a thing.
Funny, I am so aware of his eyes, his eyes gleaming, his eyes
checking, his eyes looking for what? Something I don’t want to
give. But I don't know what color they are. And the color mat-
ters. I think they are brown, like mine. But my mother says they
are blue. “Blonde and blue-eyed,” she says. German, she means.
CREATIVENON
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
A father's secret rises to the surface like a boil and bursts; a daughter
realizes that it changes everything she thought she knew about him.
The writer expertly draws the reader in to share her horror and her pain,
and to wonder anew at the mysteries of family history. ~ KRISTIN OHLSON
SHASHA, WINTER, 2003 - 7X9
0310
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0310
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M
rom across the street Gert sees
sky. He sees gulls under-lit in
pink. Caterwauling geese
shred grey clouds that fray
into gold. Under the autumn
sky is the concert hall, stone
friezes and red brick. And in
front of the white columns,
chaos.
Everything is moving at
once: fists, umbrellas, stones,
clubs. Such a tangle of green
aprons, white collars, grey
vests, street conductors caps,
veterans' visors, even kerchiefs
and cloche hats. Even women.
Someone is shrieking, someone is shouting, a cacophony of
hatred, a howl such as Gert has only heard from a dog before,
from that loathsome dachshund Franz, when there were dogs
around and food enough to keep them. A howl as from every
dog that ever lived in Duisburg.
A new sound arrests the rest. Gunfire. A man in homburg
and white breast pocket handkerchief puts his hand to his eye,
teeters to the right, and Gert and everyone else thrusts forward.
The monstrous body of a hundred heads and two hundred
knees surges and subsides. Gert elbows a place for himself, be-
tween Loden green and scratchy tweed.
The howl has splintered
and multiplied. Gert is buf-
feted by noise, his ears bruised
with it. It is terrifying, this
noise, as if his head must burst
of it, but there is something
else, too. Some terrible exalta-
tion, to be so enraged—and
Gert is often enraged—to be deranged with rage, and no one,
nothing between him and it. Only this fury all around to herd
him forward.
Up stone steps the many-headed monster stampedes. Per-
haps Gert’s foot steps on flesh. Someone is down there, but the
monster cannot stop. Gert is pressed against a frock coat, let us
say it is black and shiny from too much brushing, and there,
where his nose touches, it is split at the seam. The back that
wears the coat is broad and Gert has to weave and crane, no easy
matter when you are jostled on every side, to catch a glimpse of
the other backs in front of him.
Abruptly the monster shifts and, there by the shattered
door, he sees torn cuffs, a raised arm, an elbow in grey worsted
flailing, and so many hands, so many clubs and stones and
umbrellas, so much blood, spraying the torn cuffs, the black
umbrellas, the hands and the heads they are pummeling and the
heads other hands are trying to cover. Blood drenches helmets
which fly through the air, roll on the floor. The helmets are
encrusted with bronze, they are embossed with eagles, they rise
at the crown to pointed pikes that once, perhaps, in Siegfried's
world of tournaments and dragon quests, might have had more
than honorary effectiveness.
These pickelhaukers are useless, however to the men beside
whom they come to rest, men in epaulettes, who lie bloody and
still, or twitch a little, or cover their heads and scream and
scream. And now Gert, too, is stomping and pummeling,
thrashing and kicking the men in epaulettes, feeling something
more gruesome than solid
flesh, something soft, and
pulpy and liquid.
“You mean you hit them?”
I ask my father.
“Oh yes,” he says. “Oh yes.”
“You mean you helped kill
them?”
The Counterfeit Killer:A Memoir of My Father
AMEI WALLACH
“At that time I was a wild boy.”
It is 1980. My father and I are standing in the very spot in
downtown Duisburg where he is saying that he became a part of
that mob and helped it commit murder. Only he doesn't call it
murder. Patriotic duty would be more like it. Hans Gert Max
Klaus Wallach has brought his daughter at last on a journey to
his boyhood streets in the port city where Ruhr River coal meets
Rhine River industry. His Germany. We are standing on fake
cobblestones where once there were real ones. The columned
gymnasium of his memory has been replaced with utilitarian
concrete.
Never mind, the sight has been enough to animate him into
a recreation of what is happening in his mind’s eye.
I take my time doing the arithmetic; something concrete
and comprehendible.
“That was 1923. You were 14.”
“It was one of the most terrible experiences in my life. “ he says.
“Did you see them die?”
“I did right.” His hand is raised, making his point, as it
always does.
“The people were so outraged, women and everything. A
popular uprising is the worst you can say. But,” It is like he was
explaining to a halfwit. “It is as Schiller says, ‘Germany cannot
be safe so long as her neighbor does not leave her in peace.’”
I am accustomed to my father's stories and how he tells
them, insistently, with eyes alert for reactions, with repetitions
for reassurance, with chortles to ensure an appreciation, he is
not in the least certain of. But I have never looked at him like
this, not just with disbelief and horror, but with the furtive thrill
of discovery, too. I cannot imagine the father I know bragging
about such a thing.
Funny, I am so aware of his eyes, his eyes gleaming, his eyes
checking, his eyes looking for what? Something I don’t want to
give. But I don't know what color they are. And the color mat-
ters. I think they are brown, like mine. But my mother says they
are blue. “Blonde and blue-eyed,” she says. German, she means.
CREATIVENON
FICTION
T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R
A father's secret rises to the surface like a boil and bursts; a daughter
realizes that it changes everything she thought she knew about him.
The writer expertly draws the reader in to share her horror and her pain,
and to wonder anew at the mysteries of family history. ~ KRISTIN OHLSON
SHASHA, WINTER, 2003 - 7X9
0310
M
U
S
E
26
M
0310
M
U
S
E
27
M
Book Archaeology ROB JACKSON
There are many “best of the decade” lists out now, so we thought we should add one of our own.
Usually the story-telling takes place at dinner, Sunday dinner,
perhaps, after the service in the white clapboard church on the
Green in our New England village.
They were never stories about why they had to leave, only
about what they left behind, on their wedding day, June 23, 1938.
They were married under a picture of Hitler. It was a damp day
that blurred the yellow and red ranunculus outside the City of
Hamburg Bureau of Records. The bride, Gerda Wilhelmina Le-
wenz, was pregnant. The groom had been told he was dying of
tuberculosis. After the champagne and prosits, the venison
steak and wild strawberries, he was so weak that my mother had
to carry his suitcase. They were traveling south, out of Germany
to a sanatorium in the Alps, and they did not know if they would
ever come back.
he train whistled as
it approached the
Swiss border, and
they leaned out the
window to glimpse
the last of the swas-
tikas, of women
hoeing kitchen gar-
dens, of the Rhine.
They showed their
German passports
for the last time. In a
few months the J
stamp for Jew would
be mandatory.
My father did not
want to be Jewish,
not in Germany, and
not in America,
where, “on the 19th
day of June in the
year of our Lord 1944, in the First Methodist Church Richmond
Hill, N.Y.,” Gert Max Klaus Wallach and I were “Baptized in the
Name of The Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The
words on the certificate are spelled out in church gothic letter-
ing, and below, in a more homely font: “He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved. Mark 16:16.” It would not have saved
him in the Germany he left. And I think now it did not save him
in America, at least from himself.
The babel of my parent’s German past was the background
din of our growing up, my two brothers and I, like static on the
radio. Except that you could never turn it off, or get away from
it. And we tried. Maybe he didn’t tell these stories because we
didn’t want to listen. Maybe, I am thinking on this Duisburg
street, he had something to hide.
Who is this man, gesturing, pumping the air? This story,
for instance, is one that I have never heard before. My mother
has not heard it. Or my two brothers. This is the first time, on
September 3, 1980, the day after his 71rst birthday, that he tells
me how 57 years before, he helped club the men to death who
wanted to separate Duisburg, his hometown, from Germany,
his fatherland.
All up and down the Rhineland in that Fall of 1923, in Duis-
burg, in Dusseldorf, townspeople were erupting in rage at the
Separatists who had taken over their town halls, whose alle-
giance was not to Germany, on the right side of the Rhine, but to
France. And France, across the Rhine, was Germany's enemy of
the World War so recently ended.
Duisburg, where my father has not lived for more than half
a century now, is efficient and industrious. It is a port city at the
confluence of Rhine industry and Ruhr coal. Dumpy, business-
like boats ply dirty water between steeply sloping stone dikes.
the dour autumn light does nothing to relieve the ugliness that
has afflicted my father's hometown like a disease. So far, he’s
found nearly nothing the way he left it except the smokestacks,
and the business men’s lunches and the air of dogged utility.
Houses, streets, neighborhoods were all bombed in the war—
not the First World War, which he is remembering, but the
second, which he watched from an ocean away, in the green hills
of New England.
I understand why just being here has been enough to break
his long silence about the death of the Separatists. I don’t get at
all why he tells it so brazenly now. With pride, not as if there is
something to hide the way he has always failed to mention the
fact that he is Jewish. He is ashamed, I know, of being Jewish.
But he is not ashamed of murder.
We are in search of his boyhood, buried somewhere here,
under the drab utility of urban renewal. Downtown is one notch
up from a strip mall. For lunch, we settle for MacDonald’s.
We are at cross-purposes on this journey, though it is not
until long after my father has died that I understand this. We
may both want to blot out the signs of this new Germany, that
keeps interrupting our duel disguised as a pas de deux. But we
are here because I want to learn what it was like to be a Jew in
Hitler’s Germany. He is here, because he wants me to know what
it was like to be German.
To write about this will be to betray him. That much I know.
There are several reasons for making favorite lists of the year, decade, or for that matter – like so many a decade ago – a century, but a few come to mind. It serves as a recommendation to readers who may be interested in what they have missed in the first decade of the century. Second, lists can spark a good debate at a party, coffee shop, chat room, and so on. Finally, one is making a prediction about the future. What books from this decade will still be read in ten, twenty, fifty, or even 100 years? It was difficult to pick only 5 but the editors have given it a go.
JUDITH MANSOUREDITOR
The Reluctant Fundamen-talist, Mohsin Hamid
The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri
Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi
Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Ex-periments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
DAVE MEGENHARDT MANAGING EDITOR
2666, Roberto Bolaño
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald & Anthea Bell
The Amazing Adventures Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
ROB JACKSON FICTION EDITOR
2666, Roberto Bolaño
Season of Ash, Jorge Volpi
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Everyman, Philip Roth
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
RAY MCNIECE POETRY EDITOR
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race & Inheri-tance, Barack Obama
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, Chris Rose
0310
M
U
S
E
26
M
0310
M
U
S
E
27
M
Book Archaeology ROB JACKSON
There are many “best of the decade” lists out now, so we thought we should add one of our own.
Usually the story-telling takes place at dinner, Sunday dinner,
perhaps, after the service in the white clapboard church on the
Green in our New England village.
They were never stories about why they had to leave, only
about what they left behind, on their wedding day, June 23, 1938.
They were married under a picture of Hitler. It was a damp day
that blurred the yellow and red ranunculus outside the City of
Hamburg Bureau of Records. The bride, Gerda Wilhelmina Le-
wenz, was pregnant. The groom had been told he was dying of
tuberculosis. After the champagne and prosits, the venison
steak and wild strawberries, he was so weak that my mother had
to carry his suitcase. They were traveling south, out of Germany
to a sanatorium in the Alps, and they did not know if they would
ever come back.
he train whistled as
it approached the
Swiss border, and
they leaned out the
window to glimpse
the last of the swas-
tikas, of women
hoeing kitchen gar-
dens, of the Rhine.
They showed their
German passports
for the last time. In a
few months the J
stamp for Jew would
be mandatory.
My father did not
want to be Jewish,
not in Germany, and
not in America,
where, “on the 19th
day of June in the
year of our Lord 1944, in the First Methodist Church Richmond
Hill, N.Y.,” Gert Max Klaus Wallach and I were “Baptized in the
Name of The Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The
words on the certificate are spelled out in church gothic letter-
ing, and below, in a more homely font: “He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved. Mark 16:16.” It would not have saved
him in the Germany he left. And I think now it did not save him
in America, at least from himself.
The babel of my parent’s German past was the background
din of our growing up, my two brothers and I, like static on the
radio. Except that you could never turn it off, or get away from
it. And we tried. Maybe he didn’t tell these stories because we
didn’t want to listen. Maybe, I am thinking on this Duisburg
street, he had something to hide.
Who is this man, gesturing, pumping the air? This story,
for instance, is one that I have never heard before. My mother
has not heard it. Or my two brothers. This is the first time, on
September 3, 1980, the day after his 71rst birthday, that he tells
me how 57 years before, he helped club the men to death who
wanted to separate Duisburg, his hometown, from Germany,
his fatherland.
All up and down the Rhineland in that Fall of 1923, in Duis-
burg, in Dusseldorf, townspeople were erupting in rage at the
Separatists who had taken over their town halls, whose alle-
giance was not to Germany, on the right side of the Rhine, but to
France. And France, across the Rhine, was Germany's enemy of
the World War so recently ended.
Duisburg, where my father has not lived for more than half
a century now, is efficient and industrious. It is a port city at the
confluence of Rhine industry and Ruhr coal. Dumpy, business-
like boats ply dirty water between steeply sloping stone dikes.
the dour autumn light does nothing to relieve the ugliness that
has afflicted my father's hometown like a disease. So far, he’s
found nearly nothing the way he left it except the smokestacks,
and the business men’s lunches and the air of dogged utility.
Houses, streets, neighborhoods were all bombed in the war—
not the First World War, which he is remembering, but the
second, which he watched from an ocean away, in the green hills
of New England.
I understand why just being here has been enough to break
his long silence about the death of the Separatists. I don’t get at
all why he tells it so brazenly now. With pride, not as if there is
something to hide the way he has always failed to mention the
fact that he is Jewish. He is ashamed, I know, of being Jewish.
But he is not ashamed of murder.
We are in search of his boyhood, buried somewhere here,
under the drab utility of urban renewal. Downtown is one notch
up from a strip mall. For lunch, we settle for MacDonald’s.
We are at cross-purposes on this journey, though it is not
until long after my father has died that I understand this. We
may both want to blot out the signs of this new Germany, that
keeps interrupting our duel disguised as a pas de deux. But we
are here because I want to learn what it was like to be a Jew in
Hitler’s Germany. He is here, because he wants me to know what
it was like to be German.
To write about this will be to betray him. That much I know.
There are several reasons for making favorite lists of the year, decade, or for that matter – like so many a decade ago – a century, but a few come to mind. It serves as a recommendation to readers who may be interested in what they have missed in the first decade of the century. Second, lists can spark a good debate at a party, coffee shop, chat room, and so on. Finally, one is making a prediction about the future. What books from this decade will still be read in ten, twenty, fifty, or even 100 years? It was difficult to pick only 5 but the editors have given it a go.
JUDITH MANSOUREDITOR
The Reluctant Fundamen-talist, Mohsin Hamid
The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri
Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi
Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Ex-periments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
DAVE MEGENHARDT MANAGING EDITOR
2666, Roberto Bolaño
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald & Anthea Bell
The Amazing Adventures Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
ROB JACKSON FICTION EDITOR
2666, Roberto Bolaño
Season of Ash, Jorge Volpi
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Everyman, Philip Roth
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
RAY MCNIECE POETRY EDITOR
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens
Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race & Inheri-tance, Barack Obama
1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, Chris Rose