Campaign signs for various gubernatorial candidates stand spiked into the various lawns around town. Armenta enjoys this part of the drive the most, after getting off the interstate and onto the highway that turns into a small artery that wends itself through St Claire’s northern residential neighborhoods. The writers live here, she knows, the ramshackle artist colony apartments and co-op houses full of people who are in turn full of themselves, the loose fraternal institutions that had shut their doors on Otto when he’d applied to the MFA program here and been summarily rejected. Armenta tried to tell him then that it was for the best, that we bounce back from our defeats, turn our misfortunes into happy accidents, but of course he’d have none of it at the time, and she couldn’t really blame him, either. Still, she fancies herself correct, and is waiting for the day he’ll roll over one night in bed, in the little duplex they now share down by the river, and say: you know, you were right. It isn’t a smug thing, and it isn’t like she was waiting for validation. It’s just another little comfort she anticipates one night in the quiet of a shared bed before sleep.

Otto’s happy accident turned out to be a pregnancy in the English department of St Claire East High School. He sort of fell into the role after he sheepishly went to apply as a substitute teacher in his old alma mater, back in April, after the MFA program rejected him. Perhaps they took pity on him, or saw his alum status as some kind of asset, because they gave Otto Dunkel, SCE Class of 1993, the entire first semester at two-thirds salary. Now he comes home exhausted and hopeless at five o’clock every weekday, and Armenta just smiles to herself as he throws his bag on the couch and collapses. Everything happens for a reason, she tends to say, which is usually met with a groan from Otto that is somehow both despairing and affectionate.

Her job at Snap Photo in the mall is thankless and soul-draining, but it’s a job. And it’s technically in her field, which is photography, which was her major. What she really came to school for was dance; she was going to be a dancer. Photography was only a hobby. But it went from hobby to major the winter of her sophomore year, when she was drunk on the icy sidewalk outside the Jackhammer one night. She’d gone there for Wicked Wednesdays (domestic bottles for seventy-five cents) with some fairweather friends, sorority fashionistas she had a strange attachment to because they lived on her floor freshman year. She’d also left Otto at home that night, which may have been the bad omen she should have heeded. She can still remember the dreadful sound her knee made when it hit the pavement, the way she spiralled down, every detail of the fall thrown into sharp, slo-mo relief in her memory, even though she was drunk. Her promising rise through the ranks of the university’s dance program came to an abrupt halt in that one instant, when her ACL exploded and she screamed in a way she didn’t think herself capable. One long hospital stay and a semester’s vacation later, she brought her dad’s old SLR back to school and enrolled in as many art courses as she could.

When she is introduced to people, they always say they love her name. She would trade a million I love your names for something like Sarah or Jill. Calle Armenta was the name of the street in Tucson her parents lived on while in grad school. Supposedly, Armenta was conceived in that shitty rental house in the summer of 1973, though that’s really more information than Armenta would care to have. She wouldn’t call her parents hippies, but they were odd and artistic and sentimental enough to give her such a name. The oddity is only compounded by the fact that Armenta doesn’t look the slightest bit Hispanic; her parents are Dutch-English and her skin is white as milk. She’s got long golden hair, and a slim but muscular dancer’s body that she’s managed to maintain since the accident.

None of which is really here nor there as far as Otto’s concerned, since he would love her even if she were obese and missing three limbs. Put enough beers in him and Otto, normally reticent, will tell anyone about the night he fell in love with Armenta. It was his freshman year, her sophomore, and they’d already been dating about a month. They were in a bar downtown called Hannigan’s, since turned into a Chinese carryout, which always lends just the right wistful tone to Otto’s story. They both had fake IDs, and getting into bars back then was cake. Anyhoo, Otto will say, he was getting drunk and hanging onto Armenta like she was the most beautiful girl in the place, which she was, he’ll say, and the jukebox started playing “With Or Without You”, a song with which, Otto will emphasize, he had a more or less ambivalent relationship until that very moment. And they were sitting in a booth with two or perhaps three other people and Armenta was quiet while the other people were yammering on about something or other, and she was looking at nothing in particular. Otto was sitting at a 90° angle to her, the odd man out of the booth on a chair he’d pulled up, and when the song came on, he sat there and tuned out everything but the music and looked at Armenta’s face, and even though she was of course at eye level, it almost seemed as if he were looking up at her, and in that instant her face went slightly out of focus, like there was a diffusion lens on everything, and in that moment she looked asbolutely beautiful and he knew that there was a true capacity, a real and immediate chance that he’d fall in love with her, Ms Armenta Jensen. Like maybe he’d passed that point of no return in relationships when it can no longer just end cleanly; they are now in it to win it, and he was glad to give it the old college try. This is Otto at his most vociferous, and even though Armenta feigns good-natured annoyance whenever Otto pulls this story out, she is always a little touched, and a little choked up, because it is, for all of Otto’s drunken posturing, true and real beyond any of the other bullshit they may have gone through that year or in the time since.

She remembered the story five minutes ago, when she was on the interstate and, lo and behold, that very song came on the radio. She turned it up and kept driving, gliding along from the mall to the main St Claire exit at eighty miles an hour. (She remembers the spring that the song had first been popular. She remembers hearing it on the bathroom radio while her dad shaved, on the morning of the very last day of seventh grade in Tucson. She remembers waking up, and pausing in the middle of getting dressed to look out the window and breathe in the ineffible air of the last day of school, and she remembers the lemony wooden smell of the windowsill upon which she rested her chin.) She was on the interstate and a fantastic and somewhat unsettling optical illusion occurred when a semi trailer in front and to the right, in the next lane, passed under a huge green highway sign, and the resultant shadow dropped and slid down to the back of the trailer, so that it looked for an split second like the truck had sheared off the very sign itself, and was now causing a minor highway catastrohphe right there in front of her eyes, on an otherwise placid October afternoon just east of St Claire, as the sign fell to the highway below and motorists swerved to avoid its sudden clattering intrusion. But the sign stayed in place; it was only the shadows that moved, and she returned her fuzzy-eyed stare to the road just in front of the car, while everything in her line of sight and in her mind itself got diffuse, pleasantly blurry, perhaps as a result of that song on the radio.

Posted: September 12th, 2003 under Fiction.
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Russell’s in Javanalia, of all places, and it’s only eight-thirty in the morning but he couldn’t sleep due to all the construction right smack outside his apartment window—an unforeseen peril of living downtown—and it’s still dreadfully hot and he has no air conditioning, and so of course sleep was a fool’s errand, so he came down and crossed the street to this ridiculous place he loathes so much but it’s air-conditioned and he can sit and read without being bothered directly, at least. And he’s hating the fact that he’s a good fourteen months out of college and yet he’s still here in coffee shop purgatory, amidst the early-morning, too-cool-for-you-but-actually-frumpy-and-genuinely-unpleasant-and-overrated, approaching-middle-age, First-Wave-Ferminism-feminist, poetry-reading-attending, overpriced-cooperative-grocer-shopping, organic-coffee-drinking, local-business-supporting, Annie-Proulx-reading, staying-sober-on-the-weekend types. It’s well past the middle of August but the weather is hotter than it’s been all summer. He could have moved away. He doesn’t have to be here anymore. Instead he took a small apartment downtown and is going to keep working at the Patina and hating this place. He’s buttered his own grave, and so on.

Across the room, a girl with luxurious, wavy brown hair is sitting and reading something Russell can’t quite make out: a novel, something predictable, probably. She’s been into the Patina a few times, not really enough to be considered a regular. But he’s seen her at the bar during happy hour a few times, her book bag resting against her stool but still somehow conspicuous. He doesn’t want to admit to himself that he finds her attractive, because then his routine would kick in and he’d go through the predictable and inevitable motions he actually doesn’t have the energy for. But that’s when it hits him, in his early-morning cottony brain: he knows her, from a class, from a frightfully boring class his senior year, some Western something-or-other, philosophy or religion or philosophy of religion. She had shorter hair then and wore glasses all of the time, but it’s definitely her. Margaret something. Maybe Madison. He shudders at the thought of a woman named Madison. He can’t deal with this right now, this early in the morning. So he throws his newspaper on the table and leaves.

He goes outside and thinks for a split second, his hair still not fully recovered from his pillow, that it might be getting colder out. Something in the air, elusive: it’s late summer—definitely, distinctively not early summer, not even July-summer, but late summer. It’s the time in summer where the nights will, he hopes, get a little cooler, people get a little sadder, the window fans come out instead of the air conditioning, and Russell inevitably, for all his bluster, hearkens back to childhood days with the looming fear of the imminent back-to-school trauma, first-semester registration, driving back from out east, celebrating his birthday in a sad hotel room in Ohio somewhere, the DNC conventions, the rain. Mostly the rain. The emptiness of a college town in August right before everyone reconvenes. He really doesn’t want to be around for all this; he really, really doesn’t.

Posted: September 2nd, 2003 under Fiction.
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Even though it was August and even though the days were getting shorter, the sun didn’t fully set until after ten, here on the western shore, practically making love to the CDT that beelined down the middle—maybe not the exact middle, but who knows where exactly—of the huge lake. So around nine-thirty Russell and Armenta could still see perfectly well, though everything was fully duskful—what filmmakers would call the Magic Hour, Russell remarked more than once—as they made their way down the hill toward the dunes on a rather lackadaisical survey of the cottage’s condition after nine months of being vacated. Armenta’s mother had told her early in the summer that no one in the family had plans to use it this summer, but she’d been in some kind of denial about its actual dormancy, hoping until the last possible minute that maybe some interloper or a random relative had made himself at home without her knowledge.

But no. The boat was still up in the in the shed, the storm windows were in, and there was a fine film of dust over everything. In the two hours since they’d arrived—making a quick trip of what was really a very scenic drive up the coast on 31, stopping only once, just outside of Interlochen, for gas and junk food—they’d removed the most offending signs of disuse, like cobwebs and the aforementioned dust and mysterious fungal-looking forms in moist places, from most crannies and horizontal surfaces, and thrown screens in a few crucial windows, and then with their feet had sort of cleared of leaves and twigs the path to the shore. This was a half-assed homecoming to a half-assed home, Armenta knew, perfectly appropriate for the sort of half-assed vacation she’d taken on the spur of the moment, with a travel companion who—if anyone knew where he was and where she was and the startling proximity of themselves to each other, and they would know soon enough—well, they were in for quite a ride either way, she knew.

They were sitting on the dock now, and it was nearly ten, and they were allowing themselves the sort of intimate adjunctival angles of repose that were forbidden back at home for obvious reasons. Russell was talking about a story he’d read recently in a magazine about a man whose unfortunate gastrointestinal condition was both his eventual undoing and also the catalyst for all his creative endeavors, ever. Whether the story was fiction or non-fiction or occupied that goddamned apocryphal ghetto of urban legend, Armenta wasn’t clear on, whether Russell had actually specified what it was, or whether he even knew, or even what magazine the story was from—Armenta hadn’t caught that. She was half-listening while at the same time picking apart the events of the last few days, what she’d actually done versus what everyone had said, and trying to assess everything as analytically and objectively as possible, which is something she’d never been good at, even when she was a third-party observer, and it was a difficult thing to asess analytically in the first place.

What she knew, however, was that she had behaved reasonably. Of this she was sure. She was a good person, goddamn it. She had loved well and continued to love well, she had done good things for people and maintained and nurtured healthy relationships and friendships with only the minimal complaints that were par for the course, of course, and anything “crazy” or “evil” she’d done lately had only been perceived as such by others who were crazy or evil themselves. She knew the old dictum: the truly crazy, the truly evil, never think themselves crazy or evil. They are acting in the right. But Armenta wasn’t crazy or evil, even though she didn’t think herself crazy or evil.

She was nestled into the ancient nook created by men’s seated forms since the dawn of time, and Russell was doing the thing with the hair again, remarking on how amazingly long and straight and smooth her hair was. He was smart enough not to add that this was in part because of the critical distinction between her hair’s texture and that of Maggie’s, but they both—Russell and Armenta—added the unspoken but obvious thought in their heads, and with this ingenous but unconscious maneuver they both reaffirmed and supressed that which was taboo. The sun was now below the sharp edge of the great lake, but there was a still a silver cast to the water and the dunes were strangely incandescent. Behind them, Armenta could hear the keening of what she knew to be egrets in the thin birch woods above the dunes.

Posted: August 5th, 2003 under Fiction.
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Maggie was walking home from Russell’s, tired and sober and sad, muttering to herself about nervous breakdowns and creative license. She saw two figures stumble out of a cab up the hill. The cab drove off as one of the figures fell right down into the grass. As she got closer, Maggie realized the person who had fallen wasn’t moving; the other one, a short girl, came up to Maggie and got right in her face, but wasn’t really being hostile, just confrontational, saying hey, hey. She went over to the other figure and saw that he was lying in the grass, his head almost in the street. Maggie asked if the boy was okay. His companion, the girl, bent over and tried to move him, pull him by his legs. She couldn’t do much. It was then that Maggie realized the boy on the ground was actually a girl with short hair. And her shirt was being lifted up by her friend, her breasts fondled by the other girl.

Oh, I get it.

They didn’t seem to notice Maggie was there, but she felt compelled to help because the girl on the ground wasn’t really moving. Her name was Sarah. Maggie helped Sarah’s friend get her into the house, a basement apartment. Sarah asked Maggie if she had a cigarette; having quit almost two months ago to the day, Maggie said unfortunately she didn’t. Sarah’s friend said hey, come smoke pot with us. As if they were old friends. Maggie wanted to introduce herself but she couldn’t quite find a window for it. She figured the priority was to get Sarah inside where she would stop falling down with her head in the street.

The apartment was decked out in almost stereotypical decor: tapestries, pottery, incense, posters. Lots of posters. But also more classically girly stuff, like photocollages and stuffed animals. And a cat, a beautiful black cat with blonde highlights. Maggie didn’t catch the cat’s name. The place adhered to a dictum she’d observed in most annoyingly stereotypical hippie pads: it may have been reeking of incense and tye-dye, but it was cozy as hell.

Sarah was being extremely uncooperative. When she wasn’t acting almost comatose, she was freaking out and running around, falling down, hitting her head on things. Her friend, whose name Maggie still didn’t know, started dragging her into the bedroom, through the kitchen. Sarah’s shirt and bra were now up around her head. As she was being dragged through the kitchen, her head hit the leg of a flimsy plastic shelf and everything on it came crashing down around her. Maggie was able to catch the microwave before it landed on Sarah, but everything else fell to the floor. Shards of glass were everywhere.

Sarah passed out in the bedroom for a few minutes, so Maggie helped her (girl)friend clean up the mess in the kitchen. Maggie was wondering if this was some kind of sign, if perhaps she had been chosen to act as a good samaritan, to stumble upon these hapless drunken girls at just the right moment, so she could help them, make sure they didn’t throw up on themselves and die. Maybe this was intended to lift her out of the doldrums she’d been having of late.

Or maybe it was just bad luck, and now she was going to lose many hours of sleep because she suddenly had a case of alcohol poisoning on her hands. Kids really still do this, don’t they? Maggie was starting to feel her age, and she wasn’t even out of college yet. She learned that the other girl’s name was Lindsay. Lindsay was drunk too, but lucid and in full possession of her faculties. Or at least, as full as she probably ever got. She still seemed a little spacey, like she occasionally forgot Maggie was there, a stranger in her house looking around helplessly while she wrestled with her drunk girlfriend.

Sarah woke up, freaked out, ran back up the stairs and outside, fell down on the driveway. Maggie and Lindsay tried to drag her back inside, she wriggled free and fell down the stairs headfirst. This happened two or three times. She was on the floor, looking up at Maggie and scowling, schizo and drunk. She asked Lindsay what Belgium was doing here, nodding at Maggie scornfully. Belgium? Apparently she had decided Maggie’s name was Belgium. Whatever.

She got up and ran away again, and this time made it out the door. Maggie and Lindsay chased her outside but she was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, some Delta Gammas were arriving home to their palace next door. Lindsay momentarily seemed to forget about her girlfriend’s predicament and said hey, let’s make fun of them!, meaning the DGs. She ran along the fence separating the yards, yelling, Hey, retards!

When she got tired of that, Lindsay set about looking for Sarah again, who was suddenly nowhere to be found. Maggie helped her scour the yard, the parking lot with the sorority girls’ Volkswagons, the neighbor’s yards. Maggie at this point was seriously considering calling the ambulance or the police; she’d never seen a drunk person behave this way. She suddenly felt very naïve, very sheltered for being so worried. Had she not lived as free, as dangerously as these two twenty-year-olds? Was she a good samaritan or an old crone, a puritan?

Maggie had barely begun contemplating the philosophical ramifications of this strange incident at the same time she was considering its immediate circumstances. Lindsay borrowed Maggie’s phone and eventually got ahold of Sarah; she was wandering around somewhere down the block. And so Maggie set off with Lindsay in the direction that Sarah was describing, though she couldn’t identify streets. Lindsay kept her on the phone, a primitive GPS of sorts. She looped her arm through Maggie’s as the two girls walked back west along Franklin. They finally found Sarah staggering around on Cornelia, just around the corner. She was crying and freaked out because she couldn’t figure who Maggie was or where she’d come from. Maggie didn’t blame her, really.

She ran off again, Sarah did, and Maggie was going to chase her, except she (Maggie) was feeling suddenly tired and selfish. And Lindsay didn’t seem terribly alarmed. She was very calm, as if this was a nightly occurance. Maybe it was. Maggie asked her if she wanted her to stick around. She said she probably didn’t need to; she could do what she wanted. Maggie told her she was going home and that she hoped everything turned out okay, etc etc. Lindsay hugged Maggie for a long time at this point, longer than hugging ettiquette would deem customary under the circumstances, but then, she was a hippie lesbian hugging a stranger at two-thirty in the morning while her girlfriend ran amok through the yards of sorority houses. So who knows.

Lindsay said “peace,” performing an elaborate peace salute that all hippies probably learn upon their induction. Maggie said goodnight and scurried in the opposite direction towards home, feeling old and tired, but momentarily jarred out of her usual roles and routines. She had felt necessary and custodial again, for the first time in a while. Even if the scenario had been absurd and a little aggravating … still.

Still.

Posted: July 16th, 2003 under Fiction.
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Russell was running later one night, around eleven. This was his favorite time to go running, especially in the summer when running at any given point before sundown was like an open invitation to trouble of all sorts for a person of Russell’s constitution. He had the night off from the Patina and was tentatively planning to join Maggie on her deck later for a refreshing beer or two.

He crossed the river and came back on a different bridge, coming up through downtown and its bustling drunkenness. He ran up Franklin, which hugged the side of the faux-cobblestone agora and its hipster enclave of coffeehosues, juice bars, and head shops, bordered on the opposite side by the incongruous seven-story black glass tower that housed Perfidian Bank and Trust, Inc; it was easily the tallest building in St Claire’s otherwise architecturally humble college-town topography.

He was just crossing Clarion onto its residential side, across from Javanalia and, further to the north, his employer, the Patina Tavern—mentally congratulating himself on a declicious witticism he’d dispatched earlier in the day, when Otto had described a woman at his job as toothsome, and Russell asked if that meant she gave bad blowjobs—when a car of high schoolers hooked around the corner and cut across his path just in front of him, and a teenage boy with an ungainly storklike face shot Russell square in the old visage with a squirt gun.

The joke was on them, though, because just before the run, Russell had enjoyed a 30 mg Diazepam cocktail with the standard pseudoephedrine chaser.

Posted: July 10th, 2003 under Fiction.
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Apparently there was a man, a poet, who had a moderately successful career and had published a couple books. He lived a satisfied life and didn’t have much to complain about, except that he hadn’t had a regular bowel movement since he was twenty-seven years old. He had two published anthologies of poetry to his name and spent several hours a day on the toilet, either constipated or wracked by heaving bouts of fiendish diarrhea. He took to writing most of his poetry on the toilet, mostly out of necessity, since he could never sit at his desk for very long before the need arose. With his laptop, he could sit on his toilet for hours, uninterrupted. His commode became his primary workstation.

As the years went on, the situation got worse, but he continued to meet success as a writer. He branched out into prose works, had some short stories published, and contributed an occasional piece to a literary quarterly. All the while, his bowels continued to give him a dickens of a time, but he never went to a doctor to have it checked out because he had no health insurance and didn’t want to spend the revenues generated by his artistic success on doctors’ fees. He found a strange solace in his bathroom at home, which had taken on a bit of a legendary aura as the site of so much creative inspiration. He was now in his mid-thirties and spent perhaps eighty percent of his day on the throne. He installed a makeshift desk and pillow in front of the toilet so he could rest his head and sleep through the night without the nuisance of waking several times a night and getting out of bed for the shits.

By this point the man never wrote except when he was on the toilet. He did get out every so often. He’d go to a café not far from his home, close enough that he could make the drive without ruining a perfectly good pair of trousers. His marriage to the toilet and to the various creative and gastrointestinal acts which took place there prohibited him from having much of a social life, and he was dreadfully lonely. He’d never fallen in love. But he wrote wonderfully poignant and much-praised love poems, and here’s how: he’d go to this café and sit down at a table briefly, just long enough to look around and note the young pretty single women who frequented the place. He’d become inspired by them, and they were his muses. He’d invent stories about them and, in his head, craft passionate verse in their names. As he sat, he’d consume perhaps two or even three strong latte beverages, which as we all know behave as a wonderful natural laxative. He’d then proceed to the establishment’s restroom, which had an occupancy of one and thus afforded him a great deal of privacy, and he’d take his laptop out from his shoulder bag and generate beautiful poetry while evacuating.

This went on for some years, apparently, until the man’s insides were virtually destroyed by his disorder. The increasing severity of his erratic bowel movements had wreaked havoc on his GI tract, until he had no choice but to check himself into a hospital. His colon was damaged beyond repair, and he had perhaps a few weeks to live. He was forty-four. He spent all the money he had left on the hospital expenses necessary to maintain his life functions for what remaining little time he had. The doctors and nurses outfitted him with a sophisticated device which sufficently simulated his bowel functions. He was able to continue eating some semi-solid foods while a machine shat for him.

A few days before he died, he wrote that he was glad he was going when he was, because he felt he was running out of ideas for poetry anyway, and couldn’t be sufficiently inspired while a machine was doing his shitting—it just wasn’t the same as sitting on a real toilet.

Then he died.

Posted: November 6th, 2002 under Fiction.
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