Author Archives: parmanifesto

Twentysomethings

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“Where are you?”

The voice was distant, blurred with sobbery, but I could tell it came from Tanya.

“Downtown,” I said. “What’s going on?”

Silence. For 2 minutes. Have you ever heard dead air on a radio station? It’s not that you hear nothing; you hear the absence of nothing. It’s a padded cell in a condemned mental institution in an evacuated city. So was this silence.

In response, my mind became a staff writer at a soap opera production meeting and within 2 minutes he had pitched some screwball ideas: Tanya is trapped in a burning building that is about to collapse and her leg is pinned to the ground by a steel girder; Tanya has been pushed in front of a Greyhound bus, or a Badger bus, or some kind of beastly bus; Tanya has been murdered and the murderer is listening to my helpless hellos.

I hung up. I called back. She answered: “Sorry, I lost you.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “What’s going on?”

“I’m driving to the emergency room,” she replied, sober of emotion.

“What did you do?”

“Something stupid.”

“What did you do.”

“I met someone on craigslist. It was stupid. There were so many red flags and I ignored all of them.”

“What did he do?”

“He slapped me really hard. Although, to be fair, I slapped him first. But that was because he threw me on the floor.”

“Did you call me while he was doing that?”

“No. After I left. Anyway, I’m almost to the ER,” she sighed, “and I – I just don’t want to be alone.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“No. You’re downtown, and I’m in Brookfield, and gas is so expensive.”

“I wasn’t inquiring about gas prices. I was inquiring if you want me to come.”

“Yes.”

By now I was short of breath. Not from suspense, or grief. From being on the treadmill for 20 minutes. But I would not stop until 30 minutes. Not for this. This was our routine. And I don’t mean the ER and I don’t mean the treadmill. I mean our credit card sexuality, with which we shop around, hoping for approval, dreading decline.

The ER receptionist betrayed her title and rejected me. Repeatedly. So I spent two hours in the lobby, where the floors matched the wallpaper which matched the chairs which matched the lamps and I worried if I stayed there too long I would match too. Law & Order was on the TV and some actor said, “God told me to do it.”

We got back to Tanya’s friend’s place where she’s staying while he’s out of town. He bought it so he could restore it. He’s doing all the work himself, a little at a time, so little you hardly notice.

Laying on her bed, we looked up the guy’s record. “Evictions, small claims, domestic abuse,” she laughed. “Why didn’t I look this up before I went to his house?”

It was 12:30 AM. I was laying my head behind the laptop screen. She closed it. “Are you okay to drive?” She asked. “I’m not that old,” I replied. “I am,” she said.

My Brilliant Career

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The sink had two compartments! To Roger Quat, this seemed extravagantly excessive – redundant – but then, he’d never washed dishes before. Soon he justified it, by filling one with dish liquid and hot water, the other, cold water. Wash and rinse and drying rack. There was Ford efficiency, maybe even Lean Thinking, to the method. What he forgot was his mother did it the same way.

This forgetfulness was not senility, for Roger was only 35. Neither was it the subconscious denial of influence so vital to the illusion of independence. It was that his mother never allowed him in the kitchen. His kid brother Norton, however, had always been allowed. But when you’re dying people will let you do a lot of things. When you’re a dying kid they’ll let you do anything.

Anyway, tonight his mother was at the cemetery board meeting, and in subservient rebellion, Roger had decided to do the dishes. Really, he could afford his own apartment, but not a “suitable” one, and his mother had “saved” him from “squalor” by insisting he stay with them. It had been an extended stay.

Both sink compartments were fulfilled in their roles, so he turned off the faucet, raised a scrubber and began:

“Some actors can stare into a camera as if challenging it to a duel,” he said. “Judy Davis is one of them.”

The forks smiled at this. Removing bits of spinach from their teeth, he continued.

“She has been called the patron saint of modern emotions by Michael Tolkin, and is regarded as one of the most exciting actresses in the world by Woody Allen. The woman played Judy Garland and Nancy Reagan. Who’s capable of that? And don’t say Meryl Streep, because she’s not. She’s not.”

The knives remained pointedly silent. After pausing out of respect for their opinion, Roger resumed.

“My Brilliant Career provided the actor with her breakthrough role, Sybylla, a girl who thinks she is a woman and a woman who everyone thinks is a girl. She wants to be somebody and she wants to belong to somebody. Davis embodies this state of becoming confusion with the vigor of youth and the wisdom of age, which is astonishing, considering she was 24 at the time of filming, and that she hated the character.”

On the drying rack, a bowl leaned in, and Roger lowered his voice.

“We all hate what we were. And we were all Sybylla, realizing that those who love us have a plan for us. But we are in love with a dream of something else. That is where we’re wrong; we think we dream, and others plan. But we’re all dreaming. Just different dreams. And none of them go according to plan.”

Roger submerged a compliant wooden spoon in the hot water, rubbing it with the scrubber, slowing as he felt an incision, and another.

A face had been carved into it.

It was one of his childhood toys. Before the reader fabricates some romantic folklore of rural poverty, it must be understood that the Quat family was not poor, but cheap. For example, for one of the brothers’ birthdays, their gift was one basketball, given on a day exactly halfway between their birthdays. What an insult to their imagination. Basketball had rules and logic, despicable offenses both.

But nothing excites creativity like spite. Morton was the one who stole the first wooden spoon and etched a face on it, but Roger was the one who told him to steal more. Soon nearly all wooden household items were disappearing without a face and reappearing with faces, with perplexing regularity.

As Morton carved, Roger narrated. The wooden spoons professed love, got married, had measuring spoon children. There was underlying Marxist resentment of the silver spoons, constant threat of takeover from the meat hammer. It was their daytime TV; Roger was sure that they would be in syndication forever. He could not forgive the unknowable corporate entity that cancelled everything.

Suddenly Roger was aware of the silence, of the blue tooth headset on his ear. “Hello?” he said. “Cindy? Are you there?” Pause.

“Are you done?” She asked, finally.

“Done with what?”

“Your talk show.”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes,” he shook his head as if to loosen something.

“What is that in the background? It sounds like you’re smothering a rattlesnake in bubble wrap,” she speculated imaginatively.

“I’m doing dishes.”

“This whole time?

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were reading that.”

“What? No. I was just talking.” He said.

“Listen to me.” Pause. Cindy was his only real friend, so Roger was listening. “You have got to write all of these reviews down and publish them on a website or a blog or something – ” She insisted, then interrupted herself, “No. You should do those commentaries. You know, the ones in the DVD extras menu you always want to turn on while we watch the movie and I won’t let you.”

Cindy preferred films within the genre Roger called “Romantic Communism,” where everyone was attractive and safely quirky. Often they starred Jennifer Aniston or Jennifer Lopez or Jennifer Garner or some Jenniferpetessake. Only the commentary could keep him awake.

Roger saw a lot of those kinds of films while managing the local independent movie theater. How long ago was that? Two years? Three. At that time, whatever the Hollywood dump truck unloaded, he took it. The bigger the flop, the easier to mock. It was like a testimony in church; the more terrible the sin, the more triumphant the salvation. Roger and Aaron were saved, temporarily.

Aaron. Three years ago, he had just graduated high school, that place of caricatures, where everyone concentrates on their one amazing attribute. Loud people thought he was quiet; smart people thought he was dumb. Actually, he was just trying to get through life without touching anything. He lived with an unrelatably older sister, Jackie, in a condo bought with their parent’s life insurance policy after the accident that killed both of them when Aaron was 16 and Jackie was 22.

Such a living situation, intentionally but incidentally revealed by Aaron during his job interview at the theater, established credibility and invoked sympathy within Roger, who hired him. Aaron was never rude to customers, never questioned authority, always worked holidays. So Roger invited him to the late night roasts of the new reweakses. This was a reward; this was motivation for the other employees; this is what Roger told himself, as he told Aaron, who smiled, bit his lip, nodded.

Roger would turn off the speakers and they would supply the soundtrack. Car chase scenes became an undercover pizza man in pursuit of a runaway customer; heist scenes became interior decorators breaking in to do a make over. Kissing scenes became a Halitosis specialist providing a consultation to a suffering patient. Usually this digressed into a lecture from Roger on the decline of cinema since the silents (“It’s no longer a visual medium”), which enraptured Aaron.

They sat in the middle of the theater at first, but every time they moved a few rows back. And a few more. Until they were in the last row. Obviously it was easy to hear one another, but still they would both lean towards one another, just a little bit, just to be sure. In Aaron’s heart, a drum majorette raised her baton and the beating began; on his arm the hair rose like houseplants towards the light of the movie screen.

This went on for a while, until one night Jackie came to pick up Aaron. A dazed and confused employee at the front told her where to go. In the theater, coated in light, surrounded by little dust angels, she found them. “What are you doing?” She asked. What are we doing? Roger thought. Talking in silly voices. Watching a movie without sound. Holding hands.

The next day Jackie came in the theater while Aaron stayed in the car. “Just let me get him through college, OK?” She said, every word heavier than the last. Through two windows Roger and Aaron’s eyes met.

“Hello?” Cindy intoned. “Roger?”

“Yeah.” He blinked.

“Well?” She prodded.

“I can’t do commentary.” Roger said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up and placed the spoon in the drying rack, where the drops of water would drip until it was dry.

M83

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The alien did not come in peace, but he did not come in war.

Not alien, really. More hybrid beast, bearing the physique of the creature in Where the Wild Things Are, extending an elephant trunk with a pig snout, and gazing out of eyes like roses made of Jell-O, fanned by the plumage of moth wing eyelashes.

He came to us, an audience of fans, children of all ages, who were not civil, but not violent; doting, yet demanding. The introductory music climbed into rapture as he reached the edge of the stage. He raised his arms and we raised ours, like poles, carrying power lines, alternating currents. Thus, considering his ambassadorship duties finished, he exited, and the band entered.

The band M83, named after Messier 83, a barred spiral galaxy, named for the spiral structures that extend from the center into the disk. The spiral arms are sites of ongoing star formation and are brighter than the surrounding disk because of the young, hot OB stars that inhabit them.

Not everyone can be a young, hot star. Not even in America. But that night, we, the stars, stellar remnants, gas, dust, dark matter… formed a system, bound and clustered. Next to me, a teenager, high on marijuana and hormones, flailed his limbs like a child’s push puppet toy, sweat glimmering all over his skin like dew. I watched him and listened to the music and wondered how long it could last.

House & Home

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This post and its comments were originally published on Transformation City Church’s blog.

 

“I had this dream of showing my kids where I grew up,” my sister said. I never thought of showing my kids where I grew up; I never thought of having kids. “Yeah,” I said, as if I had this thought.

“It was such a magical place to be a kid, with the woods and the fort and everything,” She said, then sighed. “But why would my kids care? I hope mom and dad get a good price for it.”

Megan called. Megan doesn’t like the phone because you can’t read facial expressions, whereas I like it for the same reason. So when Megan calls, it’s because she has to. I said bye to my sister and switched over. “Hello?”

“Hi,” she blurted above background noise that was becoming foreground. “Some kids just came over and asked to stay awhile. Would you mind coming down? Ben’s not home yet.”

My eyebrows pressed together like WWE stars and a wrinkle refereed between them. “Yes,” I said, manipulating my inflection into that of a cheerful giver, “I’ll be right down.”

Megan greeted me as I walked in. “They just rang the doorbell and said the police are at their house,” she whispered, “so I said come in. What else could I do?”

At the table, two sisters had opened the older one’s birthday present: a princess crown-making kit, complete with tiny sequins and beads and glitter and other girlie debris. “Wow,” I said, “that’s pretty cool.” The older one looked up at me. “You want to play?” She asked. “No thanks,” I said.

Their 10-year-old brother was in front of the TV, watching Phineas and Ferb and holding Megan’s baby. “Look at you,” I said, “you hold a baby better than I do.” He shrugged and responded, “I always hold my baby sister.” I smiled and shook my head.

At the end of the episode a casual messenger came to the door and said, “the police are gone, ma said come back now,” and left before I could ask for their credentials. I scanned the street. The police were gone and the crowd was going too. “OK guys,” I said, “you can go home now.”

The brother stared at me like he didn’t understand.

“Come on,” I said to the sisters, picking up the princess paraphernalia. “Do you want to keep the box?” I asked. “Yes,” the older one clutched it. On the front there was a picture of a beautiful castle. It looked as though it were built of sand and clouds and glass.

Recycling

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This post and its comments were originally published on Transformation City Church’s blog.

 

“Does Milwaukee recycle in winter?” I snapped at Kevin, who was about to throw a wrapper in the trash. He paused.

“Yeah?” He murmured, still holding the wrapper.

“Then why,” I tromped over to the window and jerked a finger downward at the driveway, “Have they not emptied our recycling bins? It’s been weeks. No, months. The bins are overflowing. They’re foaming at the mouth. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Um, I guess I didn’t notice,” he blushed, “But then, you always take out the recycling.” He lowered the wrapper into the trash, set it there, and stared at it.

“Not always,” I smiled.

But almost always. He hangs out with kids, I take out the recycling. If we reversed roles, I would probably end up putting the kids in the recycling bin and he would let the cardboard and cans accumulate around him until he couldn’t move anything except his tongue.

“I’m calling the city,” I declared, drawing my phone and spinning through contacts.

A representative at the Department of Public Works had several interesting theories for the lapse in recycling pickup, one of which was holidays. This was compellingly plausible until I remembered that the only holidays in the last two months were New Year’s, Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington’s Birthday, none of which were 8-week jubilee celebrations necessitating the shutdown of all local government.

Finally, I had to contribute: “I don’t mean this to be pretentious…” We always say we don’t mean before we say what we mean, so we can be mean without being seen as mean.

“I don’t mean this to be pretentious, but we do tend to recycle more than most people in our neighborhood,” I paused. “We recycle more than we throw away,” I laughed. Yes, I’m good-humored about my goodness. Really, I don’t even think of it as goodness, it’s just a little habit I have, being good.

“Oh yes,” the representative laughed. “You know what? I’ll put a note here to have them do a pick up a week before they were going to. Also,” she said, “once it’s warmer the schedule will be more regular.”

“Thank you,” I said, thinking. “Good bye.”

Once it’s warmer. Last spring and summer, the neighborhood kids had a favorite game, which confused me for a while. Standing about 15 feet from one another, they threw the ball back and forth, but didn’t catch it; they tried to hit some flat shiny objects on the walk. I couldn’t figure out what they were, so I got closer. They were crushed empty soda cans.

Cover

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The TV screen was thick with vultures – “news anchors,” “experts,” “friends” – circling her corpse, clawing for their carrion carryout. There will be no viewing at her funeral, I thought, there will be nothing left to see.

A co-worker sat in front of me, back to the TV. She was a fat anime character, eyes squinting smug stupid, magnified by glasses, and her sausage link fingers bloated white as she gripped a foot long sub and sunk her itching teeth into it. And so began her monologue, despite the sandwich’s preemptive strike.

“I’m not surprised,” she jabbed a thumb at the screen. “You saw the interviews, right? She kept saying she wasn’t doing drugs and then she’d get all crazy excited talking about how they used to roll up joints?” She grinned mayonnaise. “Come on. You’re not kidding anybody.”

“Yes,” I started. Like a bad actor, she paused with her eyes blank and mouth open, already ready for her next line, already ready to interrupt if I took too long. “But in the last few years she had made some changes and was -”

“Oh I’ve got nothing against her. She was really talented – ”

“Addiction is really hard,” I started again, “It’s a lifelong struggle, and you have to celebrate any amount of recovery – ”

But I was just a gunshot, and she was off and running again. The voice blabbered and the lips smacked and the teeth chomped and I smiled and nodded and looked across the room. There he was – the ’80s Robert Smith hair, the beautiful Egyptian nose, the jeans that held things I wanted to hold – I was mad about the boy, some boy, any boy, oh boy oh boy –

“She was always using. She never stopped using. She was only fooling herself…” Then she swallowed, and I snapped.

“One of my best friends is a recovering addict.”

Through two scopes I had a view to a kill. The target squirmed. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t mean, you know, that’s – yeah,” she nodded, stuffing her mouth with the rest of the sandwich, eyes darting at her cell phone. “Oh,” she said, “sorry, I’ve got to go to the bathroom before the end of break,” and her white ass wobbled away.

That night, at the gym, I was on the treadmill, keeping my pace, walking in place, not watching the flesh sculptures flexing, watching the TV. It was all about her. The talking heads talked and the bobble heads bobbled in agreement. The interview played and replayed. “Is it alcohol, is it marijuana, is it cocaine, is it pills?”…”It has been at times.”…”All?”…”At times.”…”If you had to name the devil for you, the biggest devil among them?”… “That would be me.”…”So, for the people out there who say, ‘we want to help,’ what do you want them to pray for?”… “Don’t pray about the drugs.”…”Why?”…”Pray for me. For my soul. That I’m stronger. No, man, I don’t care what anybody says or did or what they claimed I was. I know I’m a child of God. And I know he loves me.”

with without

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Only two weeks of doing without and he was doing fine.

Well. His mind was moving in a strange pattern. Not so much plaid as paisley. Curlicued, flowered, dizzied. All of the hallways led to the same room, a room with a pillar and its glistening tip at the center, like that episode of The Avengers. Maybe it was the fumes from the shower cleaner.

Well, and his hormones were holding him hostage. But you can’t meet their demands. If you do, they’ll increase their demands. You die fighting or you die running. Also there were some tingles. Some aching. Some tension. When someone touched him. When he moved the right way. When he woke up in the morning. When he was cleaning the shower naked.

That was to expected though, with all the rubbing and bucking and sweating. The yellowish stains on the shower were shaped like streams, rivers, ponds – who was he to try and clean up nature? Better to paint stain over stain over stain until any nostalgia for the white canvas was safely moot. No. That was not higher logic.

And what a dirty window. It looked like ghosts having an eraser fight. The instructions on the container didn’t say anything about not using it on windows, but that could be because he didn’t read the instructions on the container. The window was clear on top and blurry on bottom, which made sense; as much as a window in a shower can make sense. Somehow the cleaner made the clear part clearer and the blurry part blurrier.

Two weeks or not, he was not doing fine with doing without.

But when he finished, he could see the rooftop of his neighbor’s house. There was a flaky frost all over it, but it didn’t seem to have just appeared, like it normally does; it seemed to have fallen from the sky.

Anything Good

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This post and its comments were originally published on Transformation City Church’s blog.

 

Right after Ben and Megan had been robbed for the third time, we all sequestered in the kitchen, like hostages. We watched as two police officers poked through their personal belongings – the violation following the violation.

“My guess is it’s somebody you know,” one officer said, freeing a notepad from the oppression of his belly-tight belt.

“We know that,” Megan said, making them feel stupid while making it seem like she was making nice.

“Well, we can dust everything they might have touched, but that probably won’t prove anything,” he said, then smiled, “It’s not like on CSI.”

How do we hire them? I thought, glancing out the window. Recently, our neighbors had the eco-friendly idea of hanging tinsel on their outside bushes; within minutes the wind had strewn it over the street and our yard. Soon the squirrels would be pooping silver. Still, it sparkled pretty, provided you knew it was tinsel, and not sharpened razor blades, which, in this neighborhood, was a more reasonable conclusion.

The other officer walked by a desk and stopped. “They didn’t take the computer,” he puzzled, peering into the dark monitor, as though it were a Magic 8 ball that would give him an answer. Just then the screensaver started, a slideshow of community house pictures: us smiling, neighborhood kids smiling, staff smiling, volunteers smiling; everyone smiling as though they had discovered a really good secret.

“Thanks for being here,” Megan said to Kevin and I. We shrugged and shuffled our feet, unsure of where else we should be but here.

Ben braced Megan from the back, his arms resting against her ribs, hands cradling their unborn baby. Last Christmas they played Mary and Joseph. This Christmas they are not playing. Their baby will be born in the ‘hood, in our stable of bachelors, in the awe of little wise kids. And her name shall be called Cadence Grace.

When one of the disciples, Philip, told his friend, Nathanael, that Jesus was from Nazareth, Nathanael exclaimed, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Philip smiled and responded, “Come and see.”

991

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This post and its comments were originally published on Transformation City Church’s blog.

 

There were 3 kinds of chips, 4 kinds of dip, 5 kinds of vegetables and some kind of nut mixture. Which was kind of ridiculous, considering the meal was yet to come.

People hovered around the table like hummingbirds, dipping into this and that. “That’s hummus,” I enlightened a cousin who was contemplating it, “It’s got olives – you’ll like it, you’re Italian. Well, I mean, it’s Middle-eastern, but whatever.” After delivering that bonbon of a bon mot (funny outside, foolish inside), I strolled to the beverage table.

There were 3 kinds of wine, 3 kinds of beer and 4 kinds of soda. Which was kind of ridiculous, considering wine was the only one worth drinking.

“Hey, Ben,” another cousin began, after a swig of beer, “where are you living now? Your dad mentioned something a few months ago about you living – ”

“In the ghetto,” I sang.

“Right,” he chuckled, “how is that?”

“Well, the other day some kids beat my car with a bat,” I smiled, raising my glass to the kids.

“Really?” He murmured.

“Really,” I repeated. “They probably think they’re the 99% and we’re the 1%.” I gulped some wine and looked into the half-full glass. “They’re probably right.”

The Civil Wars

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We are waiting for the music.

Before it was even written we were waiting, without knowing, like deer frozen in the woods, ears twitching.

The music, bewitched and betrothed and bitter. The music, a snake slithering around a cross, sickness and healing. The music, a Flannery O’Connor story as told by Over The Rhine. The music, divinely inspired, divinely possessed.

We are waiting for the music and the waiting, the waiting is like Russian dolls wrapped separately that we rip and open and open and rip.

In a moment, in the shapely and shifting sea of darkness, a stagehand appears, his flashlight a mobile lighthouse, leading two figures toward the front of the stage. The closer they come, the louder we scream and clap, playing a crazy game of hot and cold – yes, hot, hotter, we’re on fire, we’re melting –

The lighthouse is switched off and daylight floods the stage, exposing them, self-conscious and smiling, somehow larger and smaller and closer than I expected: individually, they are Joy Williams, a nymfairy with butterfly hands, and John Paul White, an early 1800s philosopher in need of a drink. Collectively, they are The Civil Wars, dressed in their Sunday best and blackest, with the gothic whimsy of a Tim Burton film and the passionate reverence of a Southern Baptist Funeral. Through the raucous waves of our adoration, they keep their balance, keep their smiles.

And the music begins.