Dodo, Chapter Ten, The Swallowing Depths

“No, idiot, I whip the rock right at his coffin – it makes the biggest thump in the world – everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there – I can see myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel,” explained Helmut, seated on the icy cold pavement of Sixth Street, busy unlacing his sneakers.
     “I thought you were going to say he woke up and beat the shit out of you.”
     “Here – hold these.”
     “What are you doing? It’s freezing.”
     We were standing in the middle of a bridge, where Sixth Street crossed the unforgiving murk of the slow-moving Allegheny River, one of three tributaries that formed the triangular cut of land upon which Pittsburgh had been built. It was early November. We’d just scored a bottle of Night Train at the most reliable of all the late-night package stores that would still serve Helmut. I never quite knew just what he had done to have himself blacklisted from so many of the sad bottle temples, the dimly-lit businesses that attracted men who either stared at their shoes or the backs of their own eyes, but I knew it was something bad, probably something violent. I was yet to understand the true shape of Helmut’s increasingly regular transgressions.
     The wind cutting across the bridge was fiercely cold. My winter coat, a full-length canopy of bulletproof tweed, a hand me down from Uncle Alder, was all that kept me from catching pneumonia. Even so, the freezing air found its way inside my upturned collar, running its icy fingers under my thin T-shirt.
     “What are you doing?” I repeated, holding his shoes obediently, his socks bunched inside them. I watched him sit up on the yellow metal siding of the bridge. It was about four feet high, tall enough to stop you from just walking off, but hardly high enough to stop you from climbing over, something you’d only do if you planned on jumping. The Spartan span’s architecture offered nothing but empty space beyond the ill-considered wall, all the way down to the depressing slough of dirty water. “Tell me what you’re doing, Helmut!” I insisted angrily, seeing him swing his leg over the other side of the wall, his body quickly following. Soon only his hands were visible, clinging to the rounded edge. They seemed to linger there for an eternity. I stood there, not breathing, terror squeezing at my heart, trying to understand why my brother’s unfolding suicide seemed so strangely inevitable.

It took me back to our first house in America. It was a drab, split-level, brick row house in Binghamton, New York, one of twenty-odd such homes that ran alongside a creek, a dirty ribbon of polluted water that was as unpredictable as father’s moods. At a moment’s notice, under heavy rain, the soft, slow current would become a raging torrent, the creek rising up over its banks and onto the road before the houses, flooding each and every basement, sparing no one.
     The second winter we’d been there, the creek began to swell from melting snow, pumping its frigid, churning contents under the ill-fitting door of our basement, which faced the street, at the foot of a short set of descending concrete steps, a good two feet below the road. The muddy water quickly covered the basement floor, rising about the washer and dryer, the plastic baskets of musty clothes waiting to be laundered, the toilet and cavity drain where we showered. Within minutes it had reached more than half the way up the wooden stairs that lead to the kitchen, swallowing father’s boxes of National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and Consumer Reports, three American publications he’d so unexplainably taken to.
     We never could quite figure out what he found so compelling about them. For years I’d believed it their intricate maps and diagrams, his math-oriented mind having found in them a language that was universal. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that mother casually explained one afternoon that he’d had been using the magazines to learn to read English, something he swore he’d never bring himself to do, no matter how necessary it was, in order to make a go of it in the new world.
     His insistence on it was always a secret joke between Helmut and I, adding to our clandestine code, the language we’d fashioned together over the years, the only manner in which we felt safe discussing father, even when he wasn’t around. “Grandmother,” we’d whisper to each other, if someone in the early days inquired how his English was coming along, meaning “dad’s mum”.
     So it was hard to understand, at the time, why he almost drowned trying to save those out-of-date magazines.
     I clearly remember being upstairs, in the small corner room Helmut and I shared, with its slanted ceiling formed by the roof of the attic-free house. My mattress lay wedged in the sharp angle, buttressed to where the ceiling met the floorboards. Directly over my pillow I’d taped a large poster of The Incredible Hulk, bright green on yellow. I was studying the intricate, brick-like lettering of the cartoon logo when I heard mother screaming. She was at the front door, making sure the water hadn’t reached the porch. Father was hollering from the basement stairs, informing her that the “river was in the house again!”
     Battling each other for position on the steep staircase leading downstairs to the front room, Helmut and I catapulted from our mattresses, dragging sheets and blankets with us. When we reached the kitchen, mother was rushing back and forth from the basement door to far end of the kitchen, heaving stacks of dripping magazines into the sink. We reached the stairs just in time to see father, in his undershirt and drawers, slipping headfirst from where he’d been awkwardly perched. To this very day I can still see his hands, white at the knuckles, glistening, holding onto the top metal shelf, the rest of him lost beneath the angry, swirling brown water.

“Helmut?”
     The hands were still there.
     I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t moved, why I hadn’t heard him smack into the river below. A conversation ran through my head, one I’d once overheard, between two policeman, about how a suicide jumper who hits water often forces his stomach right through his rectum.
     “Check this out, douchebag!”
     The hands suddenly disappeared, the top of Helmut’s knit cap appearing behind the wall. Completely confused, I stepped forward, enough to see him, standing on one of the spindly light fixtures that marked the bridge for the benefit of passing barges. Speechless, I just watched him out there, hanging above oblivion, one bare foot on either side of the twin metal brackets that ended about seven feet beyond the wall, secured to the bridge by two metal cables. His back now to me, he proceeded to make his way further along, stepping ever so slowly, as if he were on ice. As he approached the end of the fixture, the blinking light caught him in its blood-red glow, illuminating his jeans and ski jacket. Watching the light moving, rising up and down, made me swoon, the veins at my temples draining. I was certain I was having another of my attacks, the episodes that the doctor at the clinic hadn’t been able to diagnose, even though F was all but convinced I was epileptic. Mother hadn’t been any help when I phoned her to talk about it. She evaded my questions, instead going on about her painful corns, and the weather, her neighbor’s dogs, anything to change the subject. She was always a terrible one to pin down on the telephone.
     Still hardly breathing, I dropped Helmut’s shoes, my hands numb, almost as if they weren’t there. The wind howled at my ears.
     “Check me OUT, Totty!” Helmut suddenly laughed, turning about at the very end of the fixture. “I’m Like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever!”
     He began to bend at his knees, making the whole fixture drop inches. Bouncing up and down in the eerie scarlet light, he waved his arms, the ties of his jacket hood dancing about his flushed and drunken face like seaweed in a broiling sea.
     Somehow I found my breath again. “It wasn’t Travolta – it was the other guy!” I hollered, squeezing my hands together, beginning to back away from the wall, not wanting to see his white toes curled about the edge of the metal holdings, knowing they were all that separated him from falling a good fifty feet, into the merciless current.
     “Phuck YOU, Pizzburgh, you fancy town! You’re for pussies!” he yelled, slurring his words, his eyes rolling back in his head. “I am Ubaman! Ubaman! Gain my supapowah wif Nigh’ Twain! Woo-HOO! Woo-HOO!”
     I couldn’t take any more. I turned and began to make my way towards downtown, leaving his socks and shoes and the half-empty bottle of bitter wine on the sidewalk, swearing at him, crying that he was going to die and I didn’t care, I was leaving.
     “Uba! Ubaman!” he cackled, clearly oblivious to where I was. “Phuck You, Pizzburgh! Phuck YOU, Unided Stades ov ‘merica! Phuck YOU, eveyone – I am Ubaman! Ubaman distroy!”
     I kept going, half-hoping he would fall, realizing that I’d never have to put up with his shit again. At the same time I was terrified, terrified he might leave me all alone in the strange, compact metropolis, rife with its exotic enclaves, its crowded hillside neighborhoods, the old houses, those moribund upright caskets of working class refuge, brick edifices of a whole world of represented peoples; Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Greek, Irish, Czechs, a generational tidal wave of immigrants who’d shifted themselves to this graven marker of a bygone industrial era. Moving on quickly, I closed my eyes, my hands deep in the pockets of my uncle’s coat, imagining that Helmut’s dream was true, that father really was dead, that Helmut had been chosen to shovel the first earth upon the coffin, that he’d spotted the large stone in the soil and that he’d laughed hysterically, hurling it at the brass memorial plate over where father’s shrunken head lay.
     “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there, seeing myself grinning in the shiny blade of the shovel.”
     I also saw him plummeting from the bridge, down into his own watery grave, where father’s hands appeared, darting the surface like furtive fish. I imagined the two men embracing, father’s grayish arms wrapping about Helmut’s neck, clawing at his insulated jacket, which billows out about him like the body of a sea ray.

“One more box! You get me one – more – box!” father gasps, pushing Helmut’s head under. “You’re not coming up until you do!”
     There was Helmut, barely a teenager, stripped to his underwear, shivering at the top of the basement steps, begging not to have to go down into the cold, dirty water, father pointing the way.
     I turn, seeing mother, her eyes closed tight, clutching at the front of her dressing gown, softly praying to herself, pressed against the kitchen counter, leaning into the sink.
     “But I helped get you out! I don’t wanna go in anymore! It’s cold!” Helmut cried, before father put his foot into the door, slamming it shut, Helmut’s whimpers disappearing.
     I was staring right at him, as he turned, squatting, his hands going to his knees as he approached me, his hair plastered to his face, his vest soaked and soiled, translucent against his arms and chest, the veins on the backs of his hands blue and angry under the matted black hairs. “You best be watching this, Totty Vogel, you best be paying attention. We family are a team – understand? The one who swims best does the swimming in this house!”
     “I whip the rock right onto his coffin –”
     I feel mother’s hands taking me, pulling me towards her, drawing me into the dry and warm dressing gown.
     “It makes the biggest thump in the world –”
     Father exhales deeply, straightening his back, lifting his hands to his face, running them through his hair, cloudy water splashing at his feet.
     “Everyone is totally quiet and I just stand there –”
     Neither mother nor I speak. We dare not even move.
     It is the wait we both know well, the wait we have endured so many times before, in countries old and new.
     It is that moment of absolute unknowing, that delicate, breathless balance on the edge of limbo, the breath that draws in from nowhere, as the man who has used us in order to make us peels off his drenched shirt, revealing the flattened tendrils of black hair across his chest, the obscene bulge of his belly, the fearful white scars disappearing into the waistband of his underwear, the body that can destroy, that knows no mercy, that suddenly doubles over in a burst of tears, that drops on its wet knees to the linoleum, that begins to sob like an old woman, that begs, that whimpers for forgiveness as mother takes it into her arms, leaving me pressed to the sink, the very fabric of my existence stretched so tightly before me that I can see the future, the blinking towers of light the beckon, even as I hear Helmut’s hurried footsteps behind me, the sloshing of the cheap wine, the cursing on his lips, the fury born of father’s drenched limbs.

Dodo, Chapter Nine, Father's Saharan Exit

I was transfixed, standing in the corner of the tiny motel room, watching the beetle amble its way across the bed, its body the color of blood and bruises. It moved with uncharacteristic sloth, over the indentations made upon the mustard bedcover, marks left by my father, who had lain there only moments before, his arms and legs all akimbo, like some dropped ventriloquist’s dummy.
     Outside the room’s sole window, glowing a diffused orange behind the thin, matching mustard curtains, was the rotating light of a police cruiser, making a regular, lazy rhythm, one that seemed to acknowledge the beetle’s languid, sated pace. It was like a metronome, whispering “it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone, it’s over now, he’s gone”.
     I noticed there was a paper bag sitting on the bed stand. I recognized the coffee shop logo. Inside, I found one uneaten, powdered donut. Wondering if it had been father’s or if one of the many attending policemen and paramedics had left it, I took it and hurried to the far side of the bed, trapping the beetle inside the sugary hole. “There’s your dessert,” I announced, turning to see a pair of father’s pants hanging over a straight-backed chair occupying the tiny causeway between the bed and the dark, paneled interior wall of the musty room. The pockets had been turned inside out. Again, I didn’t know if father had done this, perhaps looking for a match, or if the young detective with the crew cut had been searching them, for what I couldn’t guess. “He’s been dead since about five Monday evening,” the detective had explained, seconds after I’d first arrived, gesturing about the room, as if to say “And there you have it – not much is it?”
     No, it wasn’t much, but it was everything father had and that still meant something. After so many years of worry, and fear, and resentment, father had finally left mother for good, having retreated from our lives, becoming just a painful memory. I’d not really ever expected to come across him again, dead or alive.
     I’ve always heard that having a parent die is the first real introduction to your own mortality, but it didn’t feel that way, not the way it did, just fifteen days later, when I stood at mother’s bedside, feeling her hand tighten one last time about mine and then go soft, the life disappearing from it with a shudder, a wash of energy that I took to be her final goodbye. I was suddenly besieged with a series of random memories. It was like being ushered into an unwelcome surprise party.

     “Mind yourself on that road, Totty, it’s not safe.”
     “Don’t let your brother see I gave you that dollar, Totty, it’s yours – you earned it.”
     “This is the old key, Totty. You be a good boy and make sure your father watches you hang it on the hook. We don’t want him knowing where I’ve put the new key.”
     “I’m going to pray for you, whether you want me to or not, Totty Vogel – pray that you don’t end up like the other men in my life.”

     Father’s passing was very different. It was more about recognizing the life I still had ahead of me. It was as if the old man had finally stepped aside so that I could see my future, even if that future might be nothing more than an echo of his own sordid existence.
     They never did give me a clear cause of death, other than the county coroner’s somewhat awkward, hopelessly vague “Died in response to a variety of failings in major organs,” an epitaph more suited to an accountant or mailman, some colorless drone who had performed with the regularity of a clock, not the wild wind of emotion and unpredictability that was my father, that was Georg Stefan Vogel.

“The inside of your foot touches the ball, Totty, the inside.”
     Uncle Alder looked ridiculous, his pale, boney legs protruding from his ill-fitting cotton shorts, his thick socks bunched about his large, dirt-brown gardening boots. Having removed his trousers, on a mocking dare from father, he was still wearing his Sunday shirt and vest, a pipe stuffed in one pocket, a handkerchief sticking from the other. He was sucking a mint, the way he often did, holding it to one side as he spoke. Father was slumped against the front gate, ostensibly guarding Alder’s trousers, busy wetting the tip of a cigar in his mouth. It could have been Grandfather standing there, I thought, as Uncle Alder raised his right foot, pointing to his instep, like I didn’t know exactly where such a thing was.
     “You’re wasting good time with that one,” grumbled father, sighing as he lit his cigar. “His brother’s the footer in the family.”
     Alder grinned my way. “Teach them young, Georg, and the teaching will stick,” he replied, winking at me, as he lobbed the scuffed football across the lawn. It hit the grass inches in front of my foot. I reached out, intent on connecting as instructed, but my toe struck first, sending the tightly-inflated ball shooting sideways, right into father’s rose bush, creating a flurry of showering pink petals. Alder laughed nervously, hurrying over to fetch the wayward ball, one eye on the gate, and father, who hadn’t missed a thing.
     “There’s a reason you do these things on a Sunday, boy,” father intoned, pushing away from the gate, his cigar held between his teeth. “Nothing more wicked than a devil on a Sunday, is there?”
     I hadn’t moved from where I’d met the ball, my hands deep in the pockets of my wool shorts, studying the ground at my feet. I knew father was striding my way for the horrible smell of his cigar preceded him. I barely had time to steady myself before I felt his hand strike the back of my neck, sending me forward into the grass, my jaw cracking as I hit the turf with my chin. I lay there, my arms over my head, my knees curled up defensively, a position I had learned well in my five years.
     “Watch the little worm, Alder, make sure he doesn’t wriggle himself down into the dirt and out under the front gate,” declared father, his voice moving off towards the house. “I’ll be back.”
     I dared open an eye, peering between my fingers, seeing Uncle Alder still standing by the be-headed roses, holding the ball with both hands, wearing an awkward expression. He didn’t say a word to me.
     A moment later father returned, exiting the house with something cradled under his arm. I closed my eye as he neared, pushing my face deeper into the grass, feeling the back of my neck starting to sting from where I’d been hit. “Get up on your feet, little worm,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”
     I did as I was told, following the dark-toned man to where a carpet of pink and blush petals lay scattered about the roots of the rose bush. Uncle Alder stood aside as we approached, still wearing that uncomfortable look on his face, a mix of embarrassment and fear, leaving him with a queer half-smile, and wide-open eyes. 

     I now could see that father had mother’s sewing basket. “You’re going to sew my roses back together,” he explained, setting the basket on the ground, opening the lid, pointing to mother’s needle case. “I expect them to look just like they did before – do you understand, boy?” I nodded, holding back the tears that strained to flow. “Your Uncle and I are going for a drink – your mother won’t be back from her church duties until one. That gives you almost two hours – plenty of time.” I swallowed, kneeling before the basket, afraid to look up, not knowing how on Earth I’d do what he’d told me to, but knowing I must, somehow, do it, all the same. I heard Uncle Alder begin to protest, but his mutters were quickly drowned out by father’s commanding voice. “The right-minded know all too well what happens to idle hands,” he growled. “Get your trousers on, Alder, I’m not drinking with a half-naked dolt!”

The young detective looked at his notes, then at the bed, then back to his notes. He turned to me, a quizzical frown on his face. “Did you put the donut there?” he asked, trying to sound stern.
     I nodded slowly. I was still standing in the corner of the room, my arms now folded behind me, resting against the stucco wall, inches from the door.
     “This is still an official investigation scene, sir,” he stated, scratching at his notes, making adjustments. “I need to ask you not to touch anything else, or move anything, until the initial investigation is complete.”
     “You think he was murdered?” I replied, offering a quick grin.
     “We’ll telephone you with our findings, sir, along with the coroner’s report.”
     “Of course you will,” I breathed, wondering if he was going to move the donut.
     He walked towards me, stuffing his little notebook into his shirt pocket, the one decorated with the badge. He stopped inches from me, looking up, momentarily meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry about your father, sir – I can’t imagine what I’d feel if it was my dad, I mean, it’s got to be hard, I know.”
     “They’re all different,” I said evenly, as he made a quick movement, heading on through the open door, out into the parking lot, where the ambulance holding father’s body still stood. There were two paramedics drinking coffee, leaning against it. I saw one of them cover his mouth to laugh. The other had just stood on one foot, imitating, I was quite sure, the peculiar positioning of father’s arms and legs, the way he’d been discovered on the bed. It didn’t take a genius to know what they thought was so funny, the infamous symbol father’s body strangely mimicked was the first thing I’d noted when I’d stepped into the room. It was perfect fodder, a story that would be spread from county agency to agency by the end of the day. Once a German, always a German, I thought, turning back to the bed, my jaw set, trying to recall how many times I’d walked through a room of silent stares, wishing to God I’d been born an Italian, or even a Englishman.
     “Mr. Vogel?”
     I turned to see a pleasant-looking, middle-aged, female paramedic, a clipboard held in her arms. She smiled warmly. It seemed genuine.
     “Yes?”
     “Can I ask you a few quick questions about your father?”
     I sighed, rubbing at my brow. It was still before ten. The call to come out to the Sahara Motel had awoken me from a troubled sleep.
     “It won’t take very long, I promise,” she smiled, her large eyes full of sympathy.
     I nodded. “OK.”
     She looked to the bed, grinning. “I’d usually say have a chair or sit on the edge of the bed.”
     “Official investigation scene,” I replied, smiling.
     “Right,” she agreed, making a funny face, glancing at the donut. “Was that there with the body?”
     It was my turn to grin. “No. I put it there just a moment ago. I had a reason. Go ahead and have a peep,” I suggested, motioning towards the bed.
     She gave me another odd face and walked over to look. Her eyebrows shot up when she leaned across the bed. “Is that what I think it is?” she said, her voice rising with her surprise.
     “Carrion beetle,” I stated. “Body’s been here almost four days, right?”
     She looked doubtfully from the bed to me, and back again. She shook her head slowly. “Still, that’s pretty f’d-up – shouldn’t have been able to get in here, you’d think. What a dump – it needs reporting.”
     “Never imagined my father would die in the Sahara,” I grinned, appreciating her candor and friendly tone.
     She smiled quickly and then her face went serious. “Your father, George Stefan Vogel, he was a German immigrant?” she asked, putting her pen to the clipboard pad.
     “We all are – well – we all were,” I replied, sliding my hands into my front pockets.
     “Georg is survived by?” she asked, writing as she went.
     “Just mother and I now,” I offered, wishing Helmut could have been there to witness the morning’s events.
     “Your father was seventy four. Did he have any ailments or chronic conditions that you might have been aware of?”
     “No,” I replied, wanting to avoid the complicated truth. “But he was a regular smoker, a pretty decent drinker too.”
     She nodded knowingly, writing quickly. “Any major accidents – head trauma?” I must have given her a suspicious look for she smiled. “These are really just basic, routine questions, Mr.Vogel, I promise you.”
     “No, not that I know of,” I offered, quickly realizing the error. “Oh, well, he did knock himself out once, a long time ago, tossed from his car – an accident,” I explained, wondering, for the first time in my life, just what role that icy road had played in father's troubles. An image of mother, bent at the kitchen table, polishing that tiny mint spoon, flashed before my eyes. The paramedic wrote feverishly, biting her lip.
     “This was in Germany I take?”
     “West Germany,” I corrected.
     “A long time ago,” she grinned.
     “Yes,” I said, sighing. “A very long time ago.”

Black Weather, Scroll Nine

Black Weather, Scroll Eight

Dodo, Chapter Eight, The Wild West

I opened my eyes and saw the purple shape floating on the surface of the filled tub, just between my knees. It reminded me of a rose petal, drifting across some quiet pond.
     Mother had opened the door moments before, without knocking, the way she always did. Quickly averting her eyes from the sight of me, submerged up to my chest in the grayish water, she’d backed her way towards the bath, holding out a small carton. “Epsom salts, Totty,” she’d whispered, as if lowering her voice was somehow making her entrance more discreet. “Sprinkle some in the water, it’s good for aching muscles.” She’d then hurried out, closing the door ever so gently.
     I lay there, my arms circling the back of the tub, watching the bruised nail that had separated itself from my big toe, seeing how it cast a c-shaped shadow upon my stomach. I was alarmed, but not surprised. I had, after all, run almost ten miles, along a grueling course of hilly, unforgiving country road. My legs no longer felt like my own. It was as if I were Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, awoken to find myself attached to another’s limbs.

“How many miles can you run?” I’d asked Helmut, earlier that morning, my foot perched on a kitchen chair, working the laces of my high-top sneakers.
     “Twenty, twenty five – a marathon I guess,” he’d replied, sounding as confident as ever.
     “You’ve really run that far?”
     “Almost, maybe – doesn’t matter, I can do it,” he shrugged, avoiding my stare. He was standing before me, adjusting the red, white, and blue wristbands he’d bought the day before at Barker’s, the discount store located less than a mile from our house, a cavernous emporium of discarded merchandise where we’d recently begun buying sealed boxes of original-label 45s, ten for two dollars, sweetening our ears with the likes of James Brown and Wilson Pickett. It was early summer, 1972, the family had only been living in America for a few months.
     Helmut, desperate to blend into his new home, was clearly willing to meet any challenge. He seemed to believe that by besting the Americans he would gain their acceptance, like some nomadic warrior, stumbling into a strange camp, wrestling their strongest brave into surrender. This, in fact, is how he essentially saw the world, and himself.
     “I hope I can do the whole thing,” I breathed, satisfied that my sneakers were adequately tight. I was referring to the twenty-kilometer running race we’d entered the evening before, riding our bikes to the local fire hall to register our names and pay our six-dollar entry fees. Sponsored by The Pioneer Steakhouse, a popular local gathering place, the fee had entitled us to bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the restaurant’s logo; a prime rib, crossed by two muskets and topped with a coonskin cap. We’d both proudly worn them to breakfast, earning quietly critical looks from father.
     Following my older brother into his latest reckless venture, as desirous of fitting in as he, I soon found myself on the starting line, having made my way through the tight throng of two hundred or so runners who had gathered on the narrow road before the drab concrete building that housed the Hudson County Volunteer Fire Department.
     “Don’t let any of these guys muscle you off the pavement, Totty – you hear me?” instructed Helmut, giving me one of his serious looks, before cracking a toothy grin. “Watch the heels in front of you too – trip in this bunch of turkeys and the red shirts are going down like freakin’ dominoes!” He loved his new mastery of current American slang. I watched as a bald man pointed a gun to the white sky and fired a single, muffled shot and we were off, a parade of moving advertisements for The Pioneer Steakhouse, all ages and disciplines, from the seasoned county champion to an eleven year-old West German immigrant named Tot Vogel. “Take it easy until we start thinning out!” I heard Helmut call out, as I was quickly swallowed by the mass of early morning runners. “You hear me, retardo?” I was quite happy when, coming to the first of many winding turns, I was cut off, forced almost to a complete stop, losing sight of Helmut in the crowd ahead of me.
     Hudson County, Ohio, consisted of a few hundred thousand acres of rolling, tree-choked hills and smelly farmland. The nearest town was a good four miles from where our small house sat, at the foot of a steep ridge, only yards from a busy railway line, rocking cars full of coal and ore passing so regularly the pictures mother had hanging in the front room made half-circle marks on the wall as they swung on their nails. The Fifth Annual Pioneer 20K Steakhouse Run wound through this rough-hewn territory, making a mockery of any pre-planning on the part of novices like Helmut and I. Less than two miles into the race I was stooped over a low stone wall, coughing my lungs out. I didn’t know it then but it was allergies, the swaying grasses, ripe with seed, giving rise to a throat of mucous. Sitting on the uneven stretch of moss-lined boulders, which reminded me of home, I watched at dozens of runners pass me by, before my lungs allowed me to continue. Biting my lip, I rejoined the mostly-older procession, trying to ignore the burning nausea building in the pit of my stomach.
     The morning sun was soon bleeding across the sky, replacing the thin clouds with dramatic patches of blue that appeared sporadically, directly overhead, as the gulag of amateur athletes padded through arches of blowing, green leaves, the road at their feet tattooed with the shadows of listing trees. I had given up looking for any sign of Helmut long ago. He was obviously far ahead. The hot sun was soon making me wish I’d bought wristbands too, salty sweat running the bridge of my nose, pooling about my upper lip. My knees were beginning to ache, my shins all but numb, my feet throbbing inside my flat, pinching sneakers. I didn’t know it then, but my white socks were already pink with blood.

“What do you want with running in a race?” father had questioned us, sitting at the breakfast table, shielding his head with the paper. We rarely saw his pained-looking face before lunchtime.
     “It’ll be a kick,” replied Helmut, scooping boiled egg from its shell, spreading it across his toast, like butter. “I’m going to win.”
     I could almost see father’s sneer through the newspaper.
     “Twenty kilometers is a long way, Totty,” cautioned mother, reaching out to touch my arm. “You shouldn’t go. Why don’t you just watch your brother?”
     “Let them kill themselves,” father snorted, turning noisily through his paper.
     “I don’t want you leading your brother into such foolishness,” exhorted mother, now squeezing at my arm. Though talking to Helmut, I knew she was really appealing to me, digging for the weakness she knew was there.
     “Mother,” I moaned, twitching at her touch, afraid to catch Helmut’s eye, more afraid of the rustling newspaper across the table.
     “They go together – or no one goes,” father stated, his tombstone face suddenly appearing over the morning headline. I could feel mother’s hand soften its hold, slowly pulling away. “A joint funeral is cheaper,” he laughed, enjoying his own joke, his eyes all shiny inside their reddened lids. He’d managed to remain sober for the first three months at his new job in the new country. I think he considered it some sort of a gift to the rest of us, one he was now eagerly taking back, night after night, bottle after bottle, filling the garbage can by the shed with green glass, as mother lay in bed, pressing the cover to her ear, preying into a tear-stained pillow, already knowing that the alternative was worse.

Looking about me, I realized how much younger I was than the vast majority of the runners. This shouldn’t have been a revelation, for Helmut had lied to the lady at the registration table, telling her I was thirteen, the cut-off age for the race clearly posted as twelve. Being tall for my age had helped.
     It was becoming increasingly more difficult to keep my arms bent, pumping them at my sides in accordance with my stride, as Helmut had shown me. I now dropped them every few steps, letting my fingers hang loose, giving momentary comfort to my aching shoulders. My hearing was going all funny, like it did when I was upset or confused, making everything sound flat and muffled. It could have been the allergies, or the humidity, but it was more likely my nerves, the condition that was then only a larva, buried deep underground, just beginning to sense its own existence. I caught the dim cacophony of running shoes hitting the road and the constant flapping of the paper number Helmut had roughly pinned to my right shoulder, catching my skin, leaving a thin trial of blood along my forearm. “This is so they can shoot you with their camera at the finish line,” he’d explained, making me stand still. “Means they’ll have your face on record, retardo, so don’t go robbing any banks or assassinating any elected officials – they share their files with the FBI, you know.” I winced, recalling a film we watched in school back in Worms, J. Edgar Hoover gesturing at the press with his cigar, pointing towards a shape lying under a blood-stained tarp, dumped squarely in the middle of a squalid-looking Chicago street, like some dog’s accident.
     America was an endless source of fascination. Any worries mother had of us not being able to adjust were unfounded. We’d both taken to the cultural displacement with a determined gusto, an enthusiasm that belied our nervous trepidation. It had always seemed somehow mystical, less than real, a country one read about in books, perhaps saw in movies, but not a place young German boys ever imagined they’d visit, let alone live in. Being barely eleven when we stepped onto the dark tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, I was full of miscomprehensions about my new home, myths that Helmut’s teasing and father’s silence had done little to remedy. Mother was the only one I could ask questions of, but her knowledge was hardly more accurate than mine. “Rock Hudson has a home on both coasts,” I remember her explaining during the flight, dabbing at my cheek with her napkin as a pretty blonde stewardess retrieved our dinner trays. “And the Empire State Building is so tall, airplanes have to fly around it!”
     The idea of this had instantly caught my imagination.
     “Will we fly around it, mother?” I’d asked, glimpsing past the stoic profiles of my brother and father, seeing the endless blue sky that peeked through the little window.
     “I’m sure we will, dear, I’m sure we will,” she’d replied, returning to her glossy magazine.
     “Huh – we’ll probably fly right into it,” breathed Helmut, his eyes closed.
     “No we won’t!” I cried, causing father to stir, making Helmut flinch nervously.
     “Hush, boys, you’ll wake your father,” whispered mother, busy absorbing all she could about Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, those glamorous, iconic metropolises, the sparkling jewels in every immigrant’s eyes, places we’d hardly ever see, at least not as a family.

I was now walking more than running, the pain in my feet making it hard to do even that. I’d not noticed the change at first, my every stagger, every limp shuffle, a welcome distraction, bringing me a moment’s respite from the stinging coils that seemed to be tightening about my toes.
     “Like some water?”
     I looked up, seeing a teenage girl standing beside the road, just ahead of me. Her long, straight hair was almost white in the brilliant sun. She smiled, holding out a small paper cup as I hobbled towards her. I managed a grin and took it, drinking so fast I splashed half the cool water down my neck. I meant to say “thank you” but instead a weak “danken” came from my throat. I saw the girls’ eyes widen with surprise. Digging my chin to my chest, I gritted my teeth and forced myself on, into a trot, my pride the only thing keeping my going.
     It’s impossible to explain the immigrant experience to those who have never immigrated, other than to suggest one imagine being transported to a world that looks much like Earth, but which is otherwise entirely different, its every movement, every sound, wholly unpredictable. Of course, it was much easier for Helmut and I than it was for mother and father, we had mastered English in school and regularly digested as much of the American mythos as we could. Like most Western European children, my head was dizzy with imagery of the romanticized “Wild West”; cowboys twirling ropes, shooting each other in lonely standoffs, red-faced Indians looming behind every rocky crag, squinty-eyed sheriffs passing through swinging saloon doors, tumbleweeds rolling lazily by; it was all waiting for us, just beyond the horizon, seemingly as tangible as Heaven’s promised harp and wings. The day I learned that the Americans had acquired the automobile, along with other modern conveniences like the telephone and television, was a day of much confusion and consternation. I asked mother how this could be, how the Wild West could have airports and electric toasters and Beatle boots. She pulled me to her and kissed the top of my head. “Your cowboys and Indians lived a long time ago, Totty, they aren’t there anymore – just like the knights and the Vikings of Europe.” That evening I’d retreated to my side of the tiny bedroom I shared with Helmut, spreading my collection of plastic and metal “army men” across my bed, an assortment that included rifle-shooting cowboys, arrow-aiming Indians, shield-toting knights, Cossacks, barbarians, and German infantrymen, along with the prerequisite British paratrooper, gouged with a penknife to indicate the wounds of combat. Though confused, suffering a curious sadness, I was soon giggling to myself, imagining my fierce Indian brave sitting on a toilet, the gunfighter in the sombrero loading his dishwasher. It was a joy that suddenly vanished, the instant I heard a violent pounding on the back door and mother telling Helmut to hurry off to his bedroom.
     Mother and father continued using the old language in the home, right up until father’s death. Only then did mother begin talking to us in English. Helmut and I had used it around her from the very start, the day we’d first raced up those narrow stairs to the dusty, empty room that would be our haven for so many years to come. Around father we reverted to the old way, not daring to offend or upset him, for we never knew which way the wind was blowing.
     It was a strange thing, being so openly referred to as a “German”, for I’d never thought of myself as such before. In America, my identity preceded me, from the classroom to the street corner. I was called nastier things, of course, like “Hitler-Boy” and “Nazi-Fuck”, but these came mostly from the bitter-faced grandson of one proud WWII vet or the other, men forever stuck in the past, still clutching invisible rifles, much like the little men in my cigar box.
     At first, it seemed I could do little to please anyone. Those who wanted me to be American were disappointed with my accent, my awkward politeness, my somewhat aloof, cool nature, those who were looking for an exotic foreigner were frustrated with my limited knowledge of my own country, with the fact that I looked very much like they did. I was, after all, just a boy. I might as well have come from France or England. I had not packed the cultural history of my people in my suitcase, I had, in fact, determinedly left all that I could behind, keeping what I chose in my memories of Grandfather Amwolf, Grandfather Meyer, Uncle Alder, and the grey, damp stones and nettles that lined our garden wall.

I don’t know exactly how long I had been out on the road when I heard the car engine approaching. Amazingly, I was very nearly still managing a run when the horn sounded. Almost stumbling over myself, I turned to see a familiar station wagon, leading a trail of dust. Apart from a farmer on his tractor, it was the first vehicle I’d encountered all morning. It suddenly dawned on me that the race was all over, that I was the very last person still out on the course. I tilted my head to the sky. The sun had already passed its highest point. I gasped, searing pain racing from my toes to my hips.
     “Hey, retardo!” came Helmut’s voice, sharp and critical, as the station wagon pulled beside me. “What are doing?”
     I saw father’s shape at the wheel. He was smoking. It was strange thing to see, for he never smoked around the house, more a response to his own upbringing than any sort of consolation for mother.
     Helmut was leering out of the passenger side, an unlit cigarette between his red lips. I saw a pack of “cowboy cigarettes” on the dashboard. This is what father and Helmut called Marlboros. It was their favorite brand. Father often enlisted Helmut to hide the contraband from mother, often in the ceiling of the garden shed, the secret stash usually consisting of a carton of Marlboros and a twelve-pack of Budweiser, always cans, never bottles. The shed was commonly referred to as The King and Cowboy, as if it were a public house, even in front of mother. “Marlboro and Budweiser, two things America does like no one else,” I can recall Helmut once claiming, parroting father, as we chugged sweet, cold soda, waiting for mother outside the local supermarket.
     “Dad’s really pissed,” Helmut whispered, now leaning out of the car, cupping his hand over his mouth in confidence. The engine suddenly cut off. “Seriously,” he added, with uncharacteristic solemnity.
     I came to a stop, standing very still, staring at the ground, my lower body insensitive, my head spinning, feeling the heat of the car’s engine rising over me. I was sure, after all I had endured, that I was going to pass out, right there, in front of Helmut and father.
     “You’re goin’ to get it,” whispered Helmut, the tease back in his voice, just like that.
     I heard father’s door open and his hard shoes on the road. The car was parked half on it, half on the broken shoulder. I counted the footsteps, hearing them soften as they reached the dirt. My eyes were now closed, a heavy feeling coming over me, as if I were about to swoon. I wondered what I would do when father hit me. A great terror blossoming, I bunched my hands at my sides, preparing myself for the worst.
     “You beat your brother by almost two miles.”
     I held my breath, going dizzy.
     “Never knew you had it in you, Totty. Doubt you did either,” father added, putting a hand on my shoulder. I winced, pulling away from him, before I even realized it, almost tripping. He steadied me and drew me back towards him. I heard a low chuckle coming from within the car. “What should we do to celebrate? Hmm?”
     My eyes stinging with sweat, I turned, blinking, catching the big grin on father’s face. I couldn’t believe it. Still terrified, I grinned back, wiping at my eyes, realizing I couldn’t feel my feet at all. “Celebrate?” I heard Helmut whine, his voice all but disappearing into the car.
     “You made yourself a real man today, Totty Vogel –yes, you sure did,” father announced, giving me a solid slap on my back, making the sour feeling in my stomach take a dangerous climb. “Give me that pack, Helmut!”
     I glanced over at the car, seeing Helmut, wearing a queer look on his face, one as much wounded as fearful. He handed the Marlboros to father.
     “Here you go, boy, you’ve earned this,” said father, holding a cigarette before my lips, waiting for me to mouth it. I hesitated, not knowing if I could even manage. “Go on, boy, take your prize,” he added, touching the filtered tip to my lips. I took it, terrified of dropping it. “Raise your head, cowboy, you get the champion’s smoke today,” he insisted, with an odd chuckle, something I couldn’t ever remember him doing, not in my honor. He lit the cigarette. I just held it there in my mouth, my arms at my sides, inhaling and inhaling, until it seemed my ears were about to emit great plumes of smoke. Then, all at once, I was pitching forward, my trophy lost on a gushing cascade of all that Helmut had forced me to eat for breakfast.
     “Gross!” came my trainer’s voice, from within the car.
     I was instantly on my hands and knees, losing my guts with dramatic fashion.
     “Look at your mess!” declared father, his mirth a fleeting thing. “I should make you walk home. Clean yourself, boy, and get in the back seat, your mother is worried sick about you. Why would you run on like that, after your brother had stopped? Do you enjoy making your poor mother worry herself over you? Hmm?” I was sure my vomiting was the only thing that had stopped him from striking me. I could hear the violence rising in his voice, a tone I knew all too well.
     Staggering to my wrecked feet, wiping at my new shirt, I climbed into the car, unable to restrain the tears, my eyes flooding with the realization that America wasn’t going to be any different, after all. It wasn’t going to change father, not like I’d been secretly hoping, ever since I’d raced through those sliding doors at JFK, breathing in the first taste of my new home, listening for the gunslinger’s discharge, the war cry of the Indian, never considering that I’d brought the wild west with me.

Black Weather, Scroll Seven

Dodo, Chapter Seven, Naked Photographs

I awoke to a great humming sound, an incessant vibrational drone issuing from the blue, flickering bowels of the huge, octopus-shaped furnace that rested only inches above my head.
     I’d been startled by a queer sensation growing in my left hand, like pins and needles, but far worse, so much it made me wince.
     Staggering to my knees, I crawled across my bed, the musty mattress I’d procured the day before, the day I’d moved into the basement of the derelict nineteenth century townhouse affectionately known as the “Ice Palace”, as much due to its penchant for freezing tenants in their sleep (the octopus being less than reliable), as for it being the home of the troublemaker named Iceman, perhaps the nuttiest of Bettina’s nutty gang. “It’s – it’s – my – my –” I gasped, rolling onto the hand, hoping to suppress the pain, but it did little good, it felt like my fingers were about to explode.
     Beating my fist into the mattress, I began to whimper, like a scolded puppy, flashes of white light hovering before my closed eyes. I cried out, smacking into the base of the ancient furnace, where its rust-coated belly sat on a pedestal of concrete, its pilot light sending dull tendrils of shadow across the basement, reaching the corner where a red-haired punk named Laser was lying, coiled inside a dour-looking blanket.
     “Can you maybe keep it down?” moaned the blanket, opening one eye, watching me strike the furnace with the back of my hand. I was now offering up a rapid succession of howls and breathless expulsions, which lasted two or three minutes, before the pain finally began to subside. A moment later, there was just a numb, burning sensation in my fingertips. I lay there, not moving, sprawled across the dirty floor in my underwear and T-shirt, my chest heaving as I sucked in the warm, stale air.
     “What the fuck’s going on?” asked Laser, now blinking his eyes.
     “I think – I think I just had a heart attack,” I breathed, holding my fist to my chest, trying to assure myself it was really over, that the horrible feeling wasn’t about to come racing right back.
     Laser just laughed. “Heart attacks are for old people – you must have been sleeping on your arm, that’s all. You knocked me out of the best fucking dream.”
     “Sorry,” I offered, still clenching my fist, my heart beating in my ears. I suddenly felt very tired, weak, as if I’d run a great distance.
     “Won’t do any good now,” sighed Laser. “Madonna’s long gone – her girlfriends with her.”
     Normally I would have laughed, but all I could do was stare, my new roommate’s grin belying the poison look in his pale eyes.

“I swear, my hand felt just like a balloon.”
     “Was it “Comfortably Numb”, Pinkie?” F teased, keeping her back to me, her attention focused on a bulging shelf of old books marked MISC./ETC./NAME A PRICE. Just the week before, we’d seen The Wall, the new Pink Floyd movie.
     “I’m serious!” I stressed, frustrated I couldn’t make anyone understand exactly what had happened. “I thought I was dying – how funny is that?”
     “Rolling around the basement in your underwear?” she giggled, turning to glance at me from behind her thick, dark bangs, a familiar crease across the bridge of her nose. “That only makes it funnier, T.”
     I marched right by her, snatching an oversized atlas from a pile of boxes. “Maybe you should spend the day with Laser.”
     “Oh, listen to the poor little baby,” she remarked, selecting a small red book. “I was only teasing you. You’ve got to be the most sensitive guy I’ve ever slept with – I swear you are.”
     I slammed the atlas shut, shoving it back into the box, making a show of it, looking across the aisle, disappointed to see that she was still lost in her own book. “I am NOT sensitive,” I insisted, moving back towards where she stood. As I passed her she suddenly backed up, trapping me to the bookcase by the wall. She pushed into me with her backside, its familiar and inviting softness making me almost instantly hard. “What are you doing?” I gasped.
     “You’re too much sometimes,” she sighed, reaching back with one hand to cup me. “Do you even know how many guys in Pittsburgh would happily fuck me in a bookshop – right this very minute?”
     “I fuck you in bookshops! You know I do!” I stammered, wriggling free, the front of my jeans as tight as a boy scout’s tent. “In Squirrel Hill that one time – remember?”
     “Squirrel Hill? Are you sure? I thought we did it downtown, or was it in Oakland? Oh – wait – sorry – those were other guys I was dating at the time.”
     Shifting my belt, nervously adjusting myself, I strode noisily to the stairs that led up to the cluttered front of the second hand bookstore, a favorite haunt, one we’d retreated into, wanting to escape the heavy rains that had deluged the city for two straight days. “I’m going – I’ll see you outside,” I said, my voice taking on an uncharacteristic flatness. I caught F’s eyes following me as I went. Pressing the little book to her chest, she hurried after me.

“The furnace kept me awake half the night.”
     “I don’t know why you don’t just come and stay with me. It’s no big deal, you know,” F replied, busy investigating the red book, which now laid open before her on the table of the booth we’d secured by the front window of a George Aiken’s restaurant in a depressing stretch of Wilkinsburg, a rough, mostly forgotten neighborhood to the east of downtown. Wilkinsburg was the sort of place where someone would die in their home and not be discovered until the police dogs began their troubled sniffing.
     “I know, I just want to – I like hanging with the guys, that’s all. I see you pretty regularly, don’t I?” I said, wanting to tell her that I was really concerned with rushing into things, that I cared about her. It was a sudden sense of caution that made me nervous. Picking at my dinner, a piece of battered fish lying in a pool of graying tartar sauce and oil, I tried to remember what it was like before I met her. We’d only been going out for a couple of weeks.

I first set eyes on Effie Jones at one of Bettina’s wild parties up in Mount Washington, the one where Caligula had almost dropped Willy Blanefield III from a porch overlooking the steep hillside.
     She’d been sitting in the dark with another girl, ignoring the rest of us as we watched Meat guzzle a milk jug filled with Bettina’s toxic punch. They were so close together, whispering into each other’s ear, that I at first mistook them for girlfriends. I mean real girlfriends. Later that night, as we walked along Grandview Avenue, I told her what I’d thought, hoping to amuse her, but she instead snapped at me, calling me a witless jerk. Thinking that was it, that I’d blown my chances with the most attractive girl I’d met since moving to Pittsburgh, I just took off, leaving her to make her own way back to the dying embers of the party. I was completely surprised the next day when Helmut tossed her name and number at the couch, where I was still sleeping. “Treat her right, Totty,” he’d warned, giving me one of his hard looks, as I clawed out of my sheet, grabbing for the bit of folded paper. “Tina says she’s gone through two real jerks in the past year – she doesn’t need another.”

“T?”
     “Hmm?”
     “Are you even listening to me?”
     “Sure! What were you saying again?”
     F sighed, giving me a long, thoughtful look. “I was saying this is a Harver, a Mary Wilson Harver, one I’ve never even heard of – let alone seen before. Can you believe it?” She carefully turned back to the front of the compact book. “Naked Photographs, A Book of Words for Pictures not Shown, by Mary Wilson Harver.”
     “Naked Photographs?” I snickered. “Let me see one.”
     “Idiot, they’re just words – didn’t you listen?”
     “Naked words?” I suggested, watching the rain running down the greasy window, making the street beyond a liquid blur.
     “Eat your fish and listen, pea-brain,” she said, turning back to the middle of the book. “A young woman, perhaps twenty, sits on the lawn beside a red brick wall, her long skirt arranged about her like the petals of a marigold. Her sleeves are loose and billowy, lined with gold sequins, as is the hem of her skirt. She is squinting into the sun, smiling, showing bright and even teeth. Her complexion and dress suggest she might be a gypsy, of Mediterranean blood. Behind her is a house, the front of which has been all but consumed by ivy, covering everything but the doorway and two windows, which appear, nestled in the thick canopy, like the deep-set eyes of some aged man, watching the young woman from his solitary retreat.”
     “That doesn’t sound much like a book for kids,” I remarked, pulling the wet batter from my fish. Mary Wilson Harver was mostly known as the author of Spaceship Elleven, a popular children’s book. Popular in Canada, anyway.
     “I don’t think it is,” F murmured, checking the back pages. “It doesn’t even mention her other books.”
     “Are you sure it’s the same Mary Wilson Harver?”
     “It has to be – it’s printed in Canada. A different publisher, and there’s no date, but it’s her, I know it is. Listen to this one –” 

     An old man in the booth directly behind us suddenly coughed, a violent succession of phlegmy retorts, like you'd imagine a submarine backfiring. F looked up, her thick eyebrows at attention, until the sound stopped. She then continued.

     “A heavy-set man, about forty-five, with close-cropped, dark brown hair, wearing a cream-colored jacket and grey slacks, stands on a leaf-covered dirt path, a folded newspaper sticking from his jacket pocket. He is holding an open palm towards a doe that cranes her neck in order to get at what he is offering her. The deer seems tame, as if she is used to feeding this way. The man is grinning, apparently amusing whoever is photographing him. In the background is a small grove of mostly leafless trees, and a barn, listing to one side, as if it is very nearly ready to collapse.”
     I made a face. “So, that’s it? We’re supposed to imagine the photographs?”
     “I think so,” said F, sounding lost in thought.
     “Why isn't it called “Invisible Photographs” then?” I asked, pushing aside the soggy cardboard container that held the remains of my dinner.
     “Listen to this one,” she proceeded, ignoring my remark. “A woman, probably in her early thirties, crouches beside a boy, who appears to be about five. They are in a field, there is a long stone wall behind them. The woman is holding the boy close. He is wincing, arching his body away from her. She is looking straight at a man who stands to the right, holding a wooden plank in one hand. About the same age as the woman, the man is poised tensely, as if he is about to move. He is rather short, but solidly built, veins showing on his forearms, his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. His face is shiny and dark, his eyes white and large. There is another man, taller and thinner, standing to the left of the woman and the boy. Behind them all, leaning against the wall, is another boy, a bit older, perhaps eight or nine. His eyes are glued to the man with the plank.”

“Georg? Put the stick down, Georg, you don’t want to hurt anyone.”
     “Keep your distance, Alder. This is between the boy and me.”
     “Georg – please – listen to your brother!”
     “Let go of the boy, Mrs. Vogel – so I can beat the lying eyes from his head.”

“T?”
     I had been staring outside, watching the buildings and utility poles beyond the veil of rain that coated the window, mesmerized by how they were moving, up and down, left and right.
     “T?”
     I turned to look at F. She was moving too.

“I didn’t DO it! Helmut did it! Helmut did it!”
     “Release the little liar, Mrs. Vogel – God help me, woman – I’ll hit you too!”
     “Alder! Do something! Please!”

“Tot. Tot! What’s wrong with you? Stop it!”
     I don’t remember waving my arms about, grabbing the vinyl seat, crying out that my hands were on fire. I don’t remember knocking my drink over, soaking the little red book before F could rescue it. I don’t remember passing out. I don’t remember hitting my head on the table. I only remember opening my eyes, seeing F, seeing the lady from the counter.
     “Your friend is epileptic?” the lady was asking F, who was on her knees, leaning across the booth, holding my hands, gently rubbing them.
     “No, I don’t think so. T?”
     I looked up, seeing the concern in F’s dark eyes. I grinned. “Guess I’m a bit too “sensitive” for those naked photographs, eh?”
     She frowned, biting her lower lip, the way she often did. I caught the flash of a tear in her eye.
     “I promise, F, I’ll never do it again.”
     She managed a little smile, continuing to rub at my hands, as if she was afraid to let go. I didn’t know it then, but she had already fallen in love with me.