The Super Bowl

That was the Sunday we'll never forget. I was at the bank, with my kids, depositing a check when I heard these popping noises coming from the door. Fearing the worst, I grabbed my little ones and we ducked under a nearby table, only to see the place where we were just standing buckshot to pieces. The robbers, whose faces were covered by masks, had shotguns and they were terrifyingly loud, demanding we look away, keep our heads down. The larger of them approached the cashier and handed him a large bag. "Fill it up!"

As he began to place the trembling money in the bag, we all heard the entryway ding and our eyes followed the sound. The doors slid open and there in the lobby was a large yellow mixing bowl. Slowly approaching it, one of the masked men began to laugh, tittering as he approached the vessel. He reached his gloved hand out to grab the rim, when suddenly the bowl flew onto his face and began to smother him, as if compelled by some magic force. He struggled to remove the bowl, his screams were muffled. Stumbling backwards into and over one of the desks, the robber's gun went off a couple of times, wounding two of his companions standing in the lobby, shattering their knees open in crimson puffs of smoke and pain. They screamed, dropped their weapons and grabbed their knees, falling to the floor in agony - the large man who was filling the bag ran over to see what had happened. As he approached the desk, the yellow bowl leaped at him from the ground. He narrowly dodged the bowl as it went flying past his head. He brought his gun up, took aim at the bowl and fired one shot. At that same moment the bowl turned towards him, deflecting the shot, ricocheting it directly back to the point of origin. With a spark, the large man's gun had been shot out of his hands. By then, the police sirens and lights had filled the lobby and the criminals were so dumbstruck they couldn't even move, they were wondering what the hell just happened...

When the police questioned us, I kept mentioning the bowl, "there was a bowl? where's the bowl? what happened to the bowl?" - they had no idea what I was talking about, and they said again and again that no yellow bowl was found anywhere in the bank.

It was just a yellow bowl, a regular bowl. A regular bowl, that did some pretty amazing things. No doubt about it - that bowl saved my families life. But I don't think that was just an ordinary bowl.

No.

That was a SuperBowl.

6 words.

six words

Through her tears she said goodbye.

The shovel pings against the coffin.

Dust covered the old wedding photos.

Hoarse from crying, she's resting now.

Mothers against science, unaware of risks.

One shot can help, why not?

One shot can’t hurt, why not?

One more drink before I go.

Vaccines answer the red question marks.

We could only save three children.

Piles of wood, unfastened from nails.

Sets of silverware hidden and tarnished.

Discounts and smiles greet the swindled.

The last push off the docks.

Behind her, the window sills ascended.

He kicked the chair out himself.

He’d written a note and everything.

What will his children do now?

He pulled it out, she gasped.

There were two bullets, two people.

Look away, you shouldn’t see this.

I’ll never stop seeing his face.

The neurotic ramblings of sad men.

Wool gathering and speculating about life.

Never firm enough to make decisions.

She interjects with uninformative life stories.

It felt so good without one.

The towel was cold and wet.

The stove had been left on.

The toaster malfunctioned, sparking the fire.

Underneath the bandage things were worse.

The smoke had left its grafitti.

In a field, on his knees.

Two in the head from behind.

When he’s sick he’s impossibly stubborn.

He didn’t want to share it.

When you can’t see the shore.

Falling eight floors should do it.

The sirens were two minutes late.

The subway car was completely empty.

They chose to blur the faces.

Sixty letters, marked “return to sender.”

The smell of the bodies traveled.

Sunken chests filled with coral reef.

A broken telescope, the ophthalmologists’ bill.

Young, reckless, the world wasn’t enough.

A skull filled with hot sand.

The shotgun blasted sign said “Welcome.”

The doctor's note made him weak.

How could he tell his mother?

The runner saw the legs first.

After seven hours, they gave up.

Crawling on his hands and feet.

The life insurance policy was wrong.

The lawyer’s pro-bono? Fuck U2.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? LandShark.

She was too short to ride.

The receipt said within thirty days.

The door had been ripped off.

Beneath the rubble, he was alive.

She shouldn’t have worn that outfit.

He pretended she wasn't saying no.

After dark, the neighborhood wasn’t friendly.

She burned all of their photos.

On the Internet, he wasn’t lonely.

They took turns with the girl.

He found the last Easter Egg.

The pastor smelled like pipe tobacco.

Breath

Breath. The subway smells like exhalation.
The high notes of perfume dance on top of a bassline of breath, brushed teeth, and coffee.
With their eyes still puffy from the eight-hour pillow slap of sleep,

an unforgiving blow sustained over a whole night,

the people of the N train are dazed.

Late in December..

Late in December, before Christmas break would separate us

we would coax our otherwise tender and anxious teenaged hearts out from their burrows, to hopefully capitalize on the emotions & goodwill of the season.
Mankind was advertised as being on it’s best behavior during this time and being young inductees into the self-coronated halls of heartbreak, we walked together.

She, much more beautiful and graceful than I...I
Maker of mixtapes, my heart stoking inside of my chest, an effulgent glow from a cauldron, within, the noble herbs and seasonings of romantic reasoning, the indirect heat gleaned from mother and sister stories, still campfire warm.
Nervously decided to buy the girl earrings at our school’s holiday fair.
MidWay quality jewelry, purchased this time with money
otherwise, acquired by a combination of money, marksmanship, and knocking down wooden milk jugs.

Leaf shaped flecks of tin, colored in harvest brown and yellow.

Late in December, in the basement of her parent’s home, she entertained fumbling advances.
Both of us standing still long enough, as to almost shout a willingness to concede,
my hand sneaking through straps of denim, on the small of her back, inside of her overalls
My heart, thrumming like a miniature sewing machine hurriedly printing the strange new fabric of reciprocated love,

yards of this cloth, smothering my intellect like a man being piled upon at a re-birthing ceremony,
desperately and with abandonment, crushed under the softest anvil.

By January, the opiate of goodwill had lost it’s potency
the balcony scenes of us pretending love had been revealed as just that.

Well rehearsed & almost naturally timed vignettes, bearing remarkable resemblances to the source material. All of them immersed into a fog, brought on by the barometric pressure of brown bag lunches, Algebra tests, orthodontists and the death rattles of childhood.

Short Story - "Indirect Directions"

To be read in an Austrian accent

“To be read in an Austrian accent”

Viceroy Johann Platz 

Here come the children with that infernal nun! Singing about deer! Strumming her guitar! I long for the day when I can look out of my window and not see them stupidly prancing about, bowing to invisible revelers at an imagined party, mindlessly laughing and capering and I could spit I’m so enraged! You are 16 going on 17? I wish that you all were leaving on a long trip, and never coming back. The Captain is doing himself a great disservice by not bringing this saturnalian nonsense his children and that Catholic fop are involving themselves in, to a swift and final close. Austria is not the land that blathers and languishes in the time wasting falsity and frivolities of entertainment. It is the land that seats an ancient wisdom, that wastes not the voice of man on song, but uses that divine instrument of tempered steel wisely, and in a like and militarian manner. From Salzburg to Innsbruck we are a dreadfully serious people. If Captain von Trapp, his idiot children, and that whorish cartoon of a nun are to be treated as ambassadors of Austria, then I make a motion that we lock the doors, and burn down the embassy.

Gretl von Trapp

I love waking up in the morning! Maria has been a blessing to us. For frühstück, instead of having boring old museli, Maria brings us trays decorated with flowers and overflowing with breads and jellies, fruits, yogurt...she is an angel! After frühstück, we practice our scales. Maria tells us that in order to make a good impression every time we sing, we have to practice a lot beforehand, and smile, smile, smile. It’s not hard to do that! Rolf and some of the older boys find it difficult to let go of their scowls, but always the music picks them up and they are smiling in no time, thanks to the ever cheerful Maria. She makes everyone so happy, including papa. Before Maria, papa would be so stern with us. Now he has little reason to be mad at us, and even he is smiling more. We are happy in our housework, diligent in our schoolwork, and we cannot help but thank God everyday for bringing us Maria.

On the fiery death of Viceroy Johann Platz

The Viceroy Johann Platz lived next door to the von Trapp estate for the whole of his miserable 67 years. He was an Austrian of such seriousness that he once shot a man for telling him a knock-knock joke. It has been said, that as soon as the man began to answer the question, “Who’s there?” the Viceroy Platz had already pulled the trigger of a drawn pistol pointed at the man’s head, forcibly removing the contents therein, of which, the Viceroy referred to as a “burdensome waste upon the neck muscles of a moron.” The Viceroy’s life would take a sullen and dark turn when, shortly before WW2, the nun Maria and her guitar arrived next door at the von Trapp’s. She made the Captain and his children very happy, developed their talents for singing, and led them to international acclaim and sold-out performances throughout Europe. Meanwhile, the Viceroy Platz hated the whole thing. So consumed with hatred was he, that it ultimately led to his own undoing. As it has been officially documented by the authorities, the manner in which the Viceroy met his end can be pieced together from the following account...On the night of his death, the Viceroy had made plans to burn down the von Trapp mansion entire, with all inhabitants. As he danced around the whole house, dousing the walls with an incendiary mix of petrol and oil, he managed to get a small quantity of the fluid on his coat and pants. Finished dispensing all of the mixture to the house and sure of it going all up with one match, the Viceroy Platz felt like he had to mark the specialness of the occasion. He stepped into his library, grabbed his pipe and a pinch of tobacco, and stepped back outside. He clinched the pipe in his teeth, and went to triumphantly strike the match. A horrific blaze consumed the Viceroy Platz at this moment, sending him running pell mell to the edge of a cliff, off of which he threw himself, tragically ending his own life. The memorial services will be held this afternoon; a simple and somber program, with music provided, oddly enough, by the von Trapp Family Singers.

Finger Exercise #3 - The Boy Who Never Left His Bed

The Boy Who Never Left His Bed

The steep view from the 19th floor break-room window was a visual buffet for the curious and voyeuristic. Workers with blank faces and monitor glazed stares, diverse motivational posters, lights on, lights off, soft lights, cubicle interior decorators creatively snazzing up their economical trappings. Two floors below and on the opposite side of the air shaft, seen in several windows, is a collection of hospital beds, some neatly preserved and unattended except for one in the corner. In this bed, lying on it's back, with a head obscured by the vantage point and with arms outside of a blanket, is what looks to be the sleeping form of a teenager. A hospital bracelet on the right wrist, sheets tucked-in outlining a slim torso which slopes into a valley of legs, only to be upraised again by feet at the bottom snugly fastened by the sheet. Day after day the man on the 19th floor would approach the window and gravely look down at the boy in the corner. Was this an infirmary where no one else ever got sick or ever used the other beds? He was sure he had never seen anyone else in any of the other beds. He knew there was a private high school in the building - was this a school nurses office, where each day this poor boy comes to school and gets into a bed and stays there all day? Was this a quarantined hospice which was only dealing with sick and infectious children, a place where they could safely relax and nap their way into heaven? What was wrong with this child? The most intriguing aspect of this situation was that the child was always lying in the same position, never moving. During his coffee-break the man looked down, the boy was still face up, lunch, face up, the fading light of an early winter night, face up...never moving, the hospital bracelet and hand always laying motionless at his side. The situation had to be dire.

Seeing the motionless boy day after day started to affect the man’s heart, weighing heavy on it like an heirloom cameo locket in a velvet bag, shoved away in a bottom drawer. He began to be nicer to people, he was sweeter to his wife and co-workers, he had a relish for his unremarkable commute and started to smile and offer his seat. Thinking about the boy in the bed who would not move, could not move, turned a light on in the man’s heart. He knew what it was like to sit at the bedside of an ailing child, watching something commit to movements alien to it’s design, or worse sit in a languid state adopting the pallor of illness. Children are supposed to run, laugh, scamper, look you straight into the eye, absorb lessons on how to behave and misbehave, the little ones are hungry for guidance, earnest with love, and their youthful innocence affords them whiteboard anger that can always be easily wiped away. He remembered this and his heart was rent by the touching spectacle of the child who knew nothing else than the frosted mini wheat texture of the ceiling tiles over his sickbed. The teenager was comatose, close to death, trapped in a New York City high-rise, and the most offensive and puzzling element of the whole heartbreaking situation was not one person ever came to check on this boy. The man never saw a nurse approach the bedside, no family members bringing stuffed animals or flowers, no vitals were ever checked, no magazines were given out, no hint of the blue-glare of a TV in the corner. What kind of care was this child being given? Possibly the only care you can give to someone who is this close to the threshold of mortality. The man stared at the teenager, day after day his thoughts crowded by the silent entreaties from the suffering boy in the bed, urging him to live his life to the fullest and be thankful for everyday he spent above ground.

Weeks later, during a fire training in which they learned how to escape the building, the man’s thoughts flew to the boy in the bed. In the event of an emergency, who would help the sick boy? How could they move him? Would it be worth it? It was then that the building manager referenced the building’s many occupants, various business offices and companies, one of which was a nursing school on the 17th floor. The poor infected near death teenager who had inspired the man to become a better person was a mannequin.

Finger Exercise - #4 - No More Sugar

NO MORE SUGAR

The early morning sunlight flashed a golden amber as it caught the descending ribbons of maple syrup. The sauce fell in drizzling ropes, first onto a perfectly square pat of creamy butter, and then, unable to contain it’s morass of molasse, it slowly dripped off the sides of the immaculately browned and fluffy stack of pillow-soft pancakes. And with one final squeeze, city councilman Glenn Headwidth had knowingly, and shamefully, dispensed the last drop of sugar in the whole city of Lakeburg onto his breakfast.

There was no more sugar in Lakeburg. What had originally appeared to be a small hiccup in the computers had turned into a riot inducing hellscape; where sugar was like meth, and every citizen of Lakeburg, a methhead. Teenagers, whose storied apathy had been the clarion call to couches for decades, now sprung into militant and frightfully organized action. Single mothers, who had relied on confectionary induced comas to free their afternoons, became baggy-eyed warriors, fighting to replace the saccharine laced sanctity of peaceful, although chemically altered, sleeping children. Systems of bribery and cajolement, utilized by parents and nannies relying on an endless supply of sugar to work as tender, crumbled and what took over was nothing short of anarchic entropy with a slight inclination for the formation of mobs, usually of the lynching variety. Bands of concerned and cracked-out neighbors gathered together, roaming the streets, armed with weed whackers and garden shovels, hunting for any trace elements of the sweetness that once flowed like fountain drinks.

Daytime news anchors began trolling the conflagrated neighborhoods, looking for truly newsworthy distress. In some cases, the tv personalities were using stray packets of Splenda to illicit information they hoped would make for historic news coverage. Several people, convinced of the futility of a continued life without the considerations of a cassonade, immolated themselves in front of the Little Debbie distribution center on Front St. A heap of burning corpses smoldered upon the driveway, blocking access to the center. The continued production of all those cakes and cookies would be in jeopardy without workers, but manpower wasn’t the missing ingredient; what was needed was sugar, something that no one had in Lakeburg. At least, no one was outwardly advertising that they had sugar.

As city councilman Glenn Headwidth ate the final bite of his breakfast with satisfaction, he heard a thunderous pounding at his door. As he approached, he heard the unmistakable and agitated sounds of an angered crowd. Open handed and forceful, the people slammed the councilman’s door, concerned with the local governmental response to this problem. Or the lack thereof. Wondering if answering the door was the right decision, Glenn hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. If he didn’t answer the door, they might think he was not inside. They might move on. He waited as the crowd’s anger slowly rose in intensity. There were shouts outside,

“I can smell it! It smells like pancakes god damnit!”

As the crowd realized that syrup was a key aspect to pancake enjoyment, and syrup was mostly sugar, the noise and anger surged mightily. He backed away from the door and stared at his entryway, open mouthed and stupid. His hands searched his robe absentmindedly; half like he was looking for his car keys, and half proprioceptively reminding himself that yes, he was inside of his body and yes, this was real life. Glenn put his hand on his face and was terrified to find little chunks of syrup and tasty crumbs of pancake stuck to his stupid mouth. He quickly wiped off the incriminating crust and started to form a plan inside of his head. Remembering that his cool rationale, even-handed ability to control crowds, and well-versed persona had seen him through 4 non-contested re-elections, Councilman Headwidth bravely resolved to open the door.


As his hand gripped the doorknob, 613 buckshot splintered their way through his door and viciously embedded themselves throughout his face and torso, effectively ending both his life and his questions about what kind of reception he would receive from the angry mob. With the door jamb blown away, the mob entered Councilman Headwidth’s house, to find the robed official in a bloodsoaked heap of terrycloth, gun smoke and sinew.

Walking slowly towards the body, as if not to wake it up, an elderly member of the mob leaned over and in frustration, addressed the man with the shotgun.

“Well for God sake’s Travis, you shot the alderman!” He drawled, poking at the heap.

“And just how in the hell was I supposed to know he would be directly on the other side of the door? He musta heard us coming." Travis quipped back, shouldering his gun.

He stood, perhaps not as proud as a big game hunter, but as a man who had used his firearm for it’s ultimate purpose, and that, was something. He continued,

“He shouldn't even be here! He should be doing whatever it is that he usually does! His ass should be in Town Hall, or checking drill sites for permits, or...hell I don’t know. He should definitely not be sneaking around his own damned house!"

An investigative branch of the mob had detached and began rummaging through the recently deceased’s kitchen cupboards. There were the sounds of frantic searching followed by loud curses. One of the investigators had found something. The kitchen door swung open and in the hand of a waifish old lady, who was diabetic and had no active need for sugar like the rest and was just along for the ride, was the empty squeeze bottle of Aunt Jemima.

“Councilman Headwidth was holding!” She yelled, clutching the empty bottle with punctuation.

“He deserved what he got.” Travis said with finality. “In a bigger sense.”
 
Travis’s self-affirmation and absolvement from shooting an unarmed man for eating pancakes seemed almost right. But a lot of things “seemed” on that day.

Finger Exercise #2 - "Key Foods"

 

By the time I had arrived, the scene had progressed from mild frustration, to regular frustration. The aisles in NY grocery stores only yield so many passing lanes and due to the produce man’s cart of assorted lettuces, the way had become blocked and the only hope of going towards the refrigerated dairy was a large circumnavigation of the onion display. The time for which, none of us had. With the AC on blast, I get in line behind two people. One, an overweight near sighted mother of two horrible children, and a young bespectacled hipster art student.

The mother gets up each morning when her horrible children ask for their horrible sugary cereals. She has a 45 minute commute to her job, consisting of two trains and several stairs, which are becoming harder each day. She has a cup of Folgers in the morning, an iced Dunkin Donuts black with 4 sugars during the commute, a 5 Hour Energy at 2:30, and sometimes a diet Coca-Cola with dinner. Throughout the day there is a static tiredness, an all encompassing and omnipresent weariness. She thinks of herself as a dog person because she wears “sporty” outfits, but the frizziness of her hair, the pedestrian wear in her sneakers and sweat pants, and the far off look in her eye leads me to believe she is a cat lady with no cats. In school she was proud to be an efficient reader, but her interest in fine literature was dispelled because appearing too interested in class was grounds for humiliation at the hands of her young and stupid friends at Richmondtown Prep on Staten Island. She has passed on her passable study habits to her children who are draped at either side of the cart, wearing lobotomized stares in front of the salad dressing, a deep stupidity in their eyes, apathetic and slow as molasses.

The art student wakes up around the 10:30 - 2:30 window and has borrowed this strategy from cable repair men. Most things happening in his life in large bay windows of time. To get to his catering job he would prefer to ride his bike, but having only one gear can be a strain on his little chicken stick legs, so he prefers to take the N to 42nd and transfer to the 1 train to 18th St. He’s been trying to watch his caffeine intake, but if the night before was especially raucous he has little choice but to keep a steady waterfall of coffee, bought at a myriad of establishments, rushing into his mustachioed face. Unlike his grad student friends, he will drink Starbucks and has on occasion enjoyed an iced grande carmael macchiato, because the caramel sauce settles in the bottom corners of his cup and turns into a soft, taffy like sugar snack that jazzes his mouth. He is a cat person, but does not know it yet. His schooling has been top notch and his family came from wealth, so they created a padded playroom for his life. He was always encouraged to work on big problems and not worry about keeping up with standards, as things could be moved to accommodate him, and not the other way around. He learned creativity not from scarcity or resourcefulness, but by the endless streams of support and encouragement from private schools and the terrarium of privilege which now he feels is his job to thwart and refute, rebuke and rebel. He is wearing a stupid hat.

Press Play and then read the story

Theatre of the Mind

The day after the funeral, the child was awake before everyone, and had begun to establish contact with his recently deceased grandmother. Outside, the birds acknowledged the grey dawn. In front of him lay the gutted remains of a 40 channel mobile CB radio, a soldering iron, green, red, and black wires, a clamp-on ammeter, coiled up coax, and an off-white saucer sprinkled with crumbs and 2 remaining sugar cookies. The child was sitting on his knees in a gardeners position, earnestly turning the RF gain in conjunction with the squelch control. In static colored visions, he heard himself travel outside of his parent's home, up into the sky and further into the ionosphere where electricity traveled unencumbered and reached all the way around the Earth. He whizzed by planets and brushed by comets and gravely nodded to event horizons surrounding sightless black holes, which he knew emptied themselves out into white holes in alternate universes. His grandmother had always loved his imagination, and now he was using it to reach out to her, to make contact with her, to establish a link and a connection, to ensure that there really was a destination at the end of our travels through life. In the end however, he only heard static.