Max didn’t even have to ring the doorbell. I came out as the van pulled up. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so eager for the visit but it didn’t occur to me hang back, to be cool, not yet at least. It was late summer, just before the start of eighth grade. I was… Continue Reading
In the voice of this charismatic stranger, basketball is a mystical game you can control before the ball is even in your hands. There’s a way of feeling out the court, of knowing where to stand. He generously shares his knowledge with me, as though, like the sun and the stars, it belongs to everyone.… Continue Reading
…bookishness and cultivation, so treasured by those who possess them, are no guarantee of human value…. Nobody is a more worth-while person for having read Yeats. – Anthony Lane I scratch notes for a piece to describe a social divide I experienced as a child in a factory town in Rhode Island. I… Continue Reading
Everyone has their own tolerance and focus with how to stay connected during the last two years, or as we say Post Pandemic (are we ever, truly?) With masks and vaccines or not, and travel dribbling away, parties and gatherings somehow obsolete, many of us, myself included spent more time, not less, on social media,… Continue Reading
Fight #1 My first fight was with this guy on our block who didn’t have any friends his own age. He was always hanging around the younger kids, teaching us to smoke, swear and vandalize. He liked to talk about sex, too. One time he asked me what the nastiest thing I ever saw was.… Continue Reading
LOVE Friday in the Student Union basement bar meant ‘70’s night: soul, rock, disco, funk, reggae. ‘They should do one each week, or two. It’s too much of a mix.’ Billy leant on one of the sofas that lined the dark, graffitied walls. Between his middle fingers he held the rim of his empty plastic… Continue Reading
ONE NIGHT ONLY The only time I ever saw James Brown perform live was through the Lone Star Café plate glass windows on 13th Street in light snow at midnight. It was the week before Christmas, 1981. I was single, in my late twenties, and had made the mistake of asking out the woman who… Continue Reading
I’m sorry about the things I said when I thought the world was ending The morning after the end was supposed to happen, I woke up in the bunker I made for us. On the surface cameras there was still nothing. Just the woods and the wind and everything going along as it always had.… Continue Reading
This morning, after the Sheriff and two state investigators left his office carrying sealed boxes, the man did not return home—instead, he drove to a neighboring town and bought three things: Dancing shoes. A hamburger. A shotgun. The dancing shoes he delivered to his daughter whom he would never see again. The hamburger he ate… Continue Reading
I saw a cat give birth today at my buddy Anthony’s apartment in Logan Square. Her name is Nezumi. Anthony named her. I found her and gave her to him. It was the dead of winter and me and my girlfriend, Rosa, were walking home from the semi-truck mechanic shop our bands practice in, down… Continue Reading