The Kids

Toby slouched his way upstairs and knocked on his 10 year old brother Felix’ door like he usually did when he got home. He pushed it open and found five 10 year old boys smashing wrestling toys together.

“What up freaks?” Toby said. He pointed at the TV. “What’s this?”

“Wrestlemania,” Alex, a husky voiced kid said.

Johnny, a blond kid with glasses straightened his neck and tried to get in Toby’s face.

“Who you callin’ a freak?” he said.

“You,” Toby said. “Freak.”

Johnny tackled him around the waist. Toby scrunched his arms and knees to his midsection in defense.

“No no no no, get off,” he said.

Johnny jumped up on the bed, which had been stripped of all blankets and pillows to make it a more suitable wrestling ring.

“That’s what I thought,” Johnny said, twisting his neck like a bird.

“Felix, look,” Alex pointed to the TV.

A wrestler with long, multi-colored hair stood on top of a ladder above another lying prone on a wooden table. He came down upon him with a flip and a crack and the kids screamed with delight.

“I hate to break it to you guys,” Toby said, “But this stuff is fake.”

Toby was surprised to see Felix crook his face defensively.

“It’s not fake.” the boys all said.

“I’m not saying I don’t like it, but you’ve got to appreciate it for what it is,”
Toby said.

“So when that guy just jumped off the ladder, that was fake?” Johnny said, “Was there cables strapped to him? Cause I didn’t see no cables.”

“Do you actually think this is a legitimate athletic contest?” Toby said.

“You’re a legitimate athletic contest,” Felix said. The kids all laughed.

“Good one,” Toby mocked. He couldn’t believe his brother was taking sides against him. “Remember when Triple H hit the Undertaker in the face with a sledgehammer?”

“Yeah.”

“That was awesome,” a big kid named Tim said.

“Okay,” Toby said. “Do you think that was a real sledgehammer?”

“Hell yeah,” Johnny said.

“He was bleeding everywhere,” Felix said.

“Okay, well, what do you think would happen if went over to your house and hit your Dad in the face with a sledgehammer?” Toby said to Johnny.

“He’d kick your ass,” Johnny said.

“Maybe. But either way they’d definitely put me in jail. Triple H didn’t go to jail. He was on TV the next night bragging about it.”

“He wouldn’t go to jail. It’s wrestling,” Johnny said.

“Yeah,” Felix said.

“I’m not saying that wrestling sucks because it’s fake. I really like wrestling, but it isn’t real.”

Johnny turned away. “Your brothers an idiot, Felix,” he said.

The other kids all agreed. Toby was stung. He always figured he would be the cool older brother who would awe all of Felix’s friends with his hilarious sense of humor and his ability to bring a different beautiful woman home every weekend, but now they were teaming up on him and would not listen to reason.

A wrestler on TV smacked another with a black folding chair and it bent to the shape of his head.

“What about that, Toby? Was that fake?” Johnny said.

“It’s a real chair but--”

“He’s bleeding!” Alex said.

“It’s probably a blood capsule,” Toby found that he was yelling.

“Don’t get mad just cause you’re wrong.”

“It’s either a blood capsule or he sliced his forehead with a razor blade.”

“He hit him with a chair, Toby. What’s so hard to understand?” Johnny said. He was calm, having proven his point.

“Yeah, what’s so hard to understand,” Felix smiled and laughed with his friends.

“Whatever,” Toby said.

“Not whatever, “Johnny tried to stare Ethan down. “Say it’s real.”

“It’s not real.”

“Say it, punk.”

Toby grabbed the remote control. “You want to see something real?” he said. He changed the channel to an mixed martial arts cage match. One fighter was kneeing the other in the face relentlessly. “This is real.”

“Change it back,” the kids all screamed. They jumped for the remote as Toby held it over his head.

“All right, all right,” Toby said and threw the remote on the bed. Jack, Johnny’s brother, scrambled at it and changed the channel back to wrestling.

Toby went into his own room. He grabbed a book off the shelf and began to sift through the pages. He could hear the kids through the wall jumping off the bed and smacking each other with pillows and fighting heatedly over trivialities and reconciling and patting each other on the back and gossiping like kids do.

A conversation I overheard between a large boy and his teacher

Mrs. Applebaum: Tom, do you have any special plans for the Summer?

Tom: Yes Mrs. Applebaum. Frank and Mike and I are going to take some time and try to build a catapault.

Tom is 11 years old and his body is outgrowing his mind at great speeds.

Eyeshadow

She puts on her eyeshadow.

"I'm too pretty for suicide," she says,
"but I don't know how to live in this world.
When I walk in a room, my friends sneak out."

Her mouth and eyes are wide open
as she applies the shadow to her eyes.
Does anyone look at anything
in a mirror but themselves?

"The one thing I won't do is apologize."

She goes out and dances alone
and when the boys approach her
she twirls away.

Most nights she doesn't say goodbye
she just disappears,
walks 20 blocks home, barging
past 20 blocks of people,
the cold rain smearing her eyeshadow.

"Fuck'em. I don't want to be
a pessimist. I can't change
who I am."

She puts on her eyeshadow.
She slit her wrists once.

"Somebody stole my whole life.
I'm not sure who it was.
It might've been me."

She puts on her eyeshadow.
She never listens.
My words bounce off, sweep around her.

"Sometimes I know I'm the worst person I know.
Other times I think I might be god."

All of her real friends
are dead. That's the only
way it can be.
They sing her lullabyes.

She puts on her eyeshadow.
Some people worship her.

I don't know what I'm doing here.

Ticket Stubs

He knew his childhood was over when he took the ticket stubs out of his wallet and buried them in a drawer underneath love letters and birthday and baseball cards and all the other artifacts of youth. The stubs represented a little under a decade of movie going experience, from Toy Story 2 to Superbad. He'd even transferred them with all his other important pieces of identification from the orange velcro wallet he bought at the Grand Canyon when he was ten to the leather one he got his junior year of high school. Now he needed room for condoms, so the stubs had to go...

Whenever he was bored at work or waiting at the bus stop with nothing to read he would take them out and look through them. He had shuffled them all out of chronological order, but they were conveniently dated and priced and titled and would bring him back instantly to the night (or sometimes afternoon) he saw the movie. He couldn't believe how cheap the movies used to be, or how expensive they'd become. There were tickets that he only bought so he could sneak into other films, R rated films that he and his 12 year old friends had to be protected from. There were movies he saw with girls whose bobby pins were lost under the table next to his bed, musicals and fairy tales. Movies he saw with friends he'd lost touch with, movies about war and loneliness and guys trying to get laid. In high school he and some of those friends had a contest to find out who could be first to see a movie in each of the 24 theaters at the local multiplex. He'd bought tickets to some really awful movies but Charlie Larson still beat him. There were stubs for independent films, for retrospectives, for blockbusters and flops. Stubs from the dollar movies, the drive-in, the multiplex, the drafthouse, the art house and the grand old vaudeville house downtown.

The ticket is a beautiful thing, a symbol of a journey, of transportation emotional and physical. You buy a ticket for a concert, a game, a train ride. You go up to the guy in the glass booth with the microphone and he talks to you through a little speaker. Even though he's two feet away he sounds like he's Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or maybe, more appropriately, Darth Vader. You slip him the money and he slips you the ticket. You take it 100 feet or so and the usher tears it and puts half in a little box. You keep half and they keep half. You share. They tell you were to go and you walk past all the posters, considering them, checking them for the faces or names of actors or directors or writers you trust, who have proved themselves to you, who have given you some feeling that you wanted. They all live in the same place. Los Angeles: The Angels. There is something angelic about the people up there, the way they drift over your head in that dusty beam of light and pour all over the screen, giant and incandescent. People like Brando and Bogart and Hepburn (both of them). Stars. That's really what they are. We all want to laugh and cry and be scared and thrilled and believe in triumph and accept suffering and they teach us how to do this.

After he found a seat he always was careful to put the stub in his wallet. He didn't know why anyone would throw them away. Once you threw them away, the memory would start to vanish. To him the stubs were a catalog of mythic and emotional experience. One reminded him of the time he sat next to two old people who made out all the way from coming attractions to end credits. Another the time an usher caught him and his friends in The Hills Have Eyes when they'd bought tickets to A Prairie Home Companion.

They give the stubs back for a reason.

But it wasn't practical for him to keep them anymore so he put them in his dresser drawer and when he left home for college he dumped the drawer into a box and put it in his parent's attic with the rest of the archive of his youth. He might come back when he bought a house of his own or when his parents died and find the stubs next to the golden souvenir box he got at his senior prom. He might open the box and find his date's corsage, rotten but still fragrant. He might sift through the ticket stubs and remember the movies and the girls and the friends of his adolescence and feel the nostalgia blow through his soul like an autumn breeze.

My baby is blowing away like gold dust

The doctors told her she had the bones of an 80 year old woman. Her beauty might crumble to the ground like a house all chewed up by termites.

She used to eat leaves and nuts and bamboo shoots and chew gum for the calories but now they had to force the food in her veins. She didn't know how to eat a cheeseburger cause she'd whipped her stomach to stop it from begging. She took laxatives to hurry the food through before her body had a chance to steal any of the nutrients. She was my girl. None of us knew how to stop her. She was dead set on beauty and her bones were disintegrating.

I could always tell they were soft. A lot of people think gold is hard, but when you touch the real thing you can bend it like clay. I'd grab her wrist and it would bow slightly. Sometimes we'd be making it and I thought I might just snap her all to pieces. It was almost macabre. The skin, the muscle clung to her bones like a wet t-shirt. All the tissue was being blown right off her frame.

It seems imaginary. It seems like vanity, and maybe it starts there, but it becomes something else. You feel sorry for kids in Africa with no food, but it's harder to sympathize with some pretty rich bitch whose only problem is that she won't eat a hoagie. All her friends were obsessed with their weight, counting the numbers, watching the scale like stockbrokers watching the ticker. Maybe most women are. Maybe I'd just never been around women before. It was kind of amazing, the way they'd support and deceive each other, reporting that one of them had gotten high and ate a whole pint of ice cream. I didn't understand it, but my girl had a real problem. It was not a choice to her.

Now, would I have loved her if she weighed 300 lbs.? Probably not. 120? Sure. Skinny girls can look pretty fucking good, but I've been with skinny girls, real thoroughbreds, and they look a lot better than they feel. It is slightly awesome to touch a firm, beautifully toned ass, but when you can pick up a girl and throw her on the bed, I don't know, it's too easy. I want a girl I've got to fight a little. I don't want to touch a girl whose spine pokes through her back like a fucking stegosaurus.

People are attracted to strength, to rarity. It's easy to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise and that's why nobody wants to fuck those people. It's harder for a girl to be thin, and it's damn near impossible for a girl to be thin and have the fat blubber up in her tits and ass. That's why those chicks are desirable. It's Darwin. It's science. Lydia was becoming too rare. When animals get too rare, they go extinct.

Six word story

Transplant recipient marries widow, kills self

Breath

Love is a claw
shoveling our hearts into
the incinerator.
Our souls rise up
the chimney stacks,
bodies, ash lay
behind on the floor.

The Goddess is a hologram.
There is no authority. Our
emotional machinery was grown
on an assembly line.
We have been programmed
to be hungry.

This pump and valve runs
on beautiful illusion.

Enjoy what you can
while you can
without destroying yourself
or anybody else.