TV STARS

I grab my last three Pabst Blue Ribbons from the fridge and carry them out into the back yard along with Leeann’s green K-Mart shovel. It is almost dark. I pull one of the beers from its plastic ring and set the other two down in a clump of grass beneath the Bradford Pear, which looms over me like a large tattered canopy with patches of purple sky bleeding through.

I start on the beer and begin digging a hole in the ground just large enough to rest a tea box comfortably. Inside the tea box is a tiny gray mouse that I have wrapped in toilet paper and blessed at least half a dozen times. The ground is hard from lack of rain and the shovel stings my hands as if I am digging through concrete.

When the hole is finished, I finish my beer and open another. I place the tea box inside the ground and cover it with dirt. I fashion a small cross out of two sticks and a blade of grass and place it in the fresh dirt beside the other crosses. One for each child Leeann and I will never have. It is almost completely dark. I try to put a name with the mouse so I can say a little prayer. Carl, the little retarded boy who lives in the trailer next door, turned his pet mice loose after they multiplied and became too numerous to care for. Apparently every last one of them made itself at home inside of our little mill house before Leeann and I moved in with four cats. The mice are named after TV stars and Carl likes to stand at the fence and tell me about their characters and about the shows they come from. I don’t tell him all of his favorite TV stars are buried in my back yard. I suppose in his brain, the mice are all out in a field somewhere having a little cocktail party, rehearsing their lines. I try to remember their names. I cross myself and then I cross the dirt. “God bless you Skippy,” I say quietly to myself.

I sit down on the back steps and open my last beer. In the darkness, the old broken-down school bus in the back yard glows faintly orange like a small planet. I try to imagine a planet where mice are safe from cats. Then I try to imagine a planet where everything is safe. Why couldn’t the mice have moved into the bus? I picture their sweet little faces and imagine how their little hearts must pound as they race around the house looking for an escape. Christ, I can almost imagine it.

Carl keeps his dog chained to a tree. I can see it under the streetlight pacing back and forth and I can hear its chain being pulled one way and then the other. He’s a shepherd-hound mix with one blue eye. His name is Shiloh and every few minutes he emits a long mournful wail. I am secretly planning Shiloh’s escape when I notice heat lightning just over the trees way off in the distance. It looks like an orange flash bulb going off up inside the clouds about a million miles away. I imagine St. Francis up there taking photographs of all the animals as they enter heaven. I imagine him greeting Skippy as he makes his way through the clouds. “Welcome to heaven,” St. Francis would say. Of course Skippy would be a little nervous at first but St. Francis would calm him right down. “Look this way and smile.” I can see it perfectly, St. Francis capturing Skippy’s sweet little face in the viewfinder, the whole black sky turning orange for just a second or two.

THE CHIROPRACTOR

The chiropractor jumps up and down on my neck and shouts a string of four-letter obscenities. We are having a bad day. “This mother’s gotta give,” he says. His voice vibrates like the voice of a small child bouncing on a ratty old box spring. He nearly pulls my arm out of its socket and holds it behind my head. “Say uncle,” he says. His arms are muscular and sun-tanned. He wears one of those Hawaiian shirts with colorful flowers.

“Are you okay?” I say.

“It’s the wife,” he says.

“Christ,” I say.

“You’re telling me,” he says. He jams his thumb into my shoulder blade until it nearly goes right through. “What about you?” he says.

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” I say. He shakes his head. He tries the ultra-sound, x-rays, the step-over-toe hold. Finally he cradles me in his dark, hairy arms, his shirt flowering around me like a tropical island.

“There, there,” he says. “You will soar like a Green-breasted Mango, drink rum and papaya with dark-skinned hula dancers. This crick in your life, we’ll get it worked out.”

JESUS MASTERS THE ART OF WATER SKIING

Jesus slips his feet inside the skis and pulls the rope taut. He is ecstatic, ready to fly. Blackbeard sits behind the wheel of the little boat, which chugs and slurps at the frothy green water. He clinches a knife between his teeth just for the hell of it. “Ready?” he calls to Jesus, despite the knife. “Yo!” Jesus yells back. Within seconds, both are laughing maniacally. Blackbeard standing, eyes closed, face toward the sun. Jesus already on one ski, blowing kisses to the mermaids, his long hair trailing behind him like brilliant streamers waving in an endless parade.

GEORGE HARRISON WENT TO HEAVEN TODAY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY AKNLE SPRAIN

I climb up onto the roof of my little shotgun shack and jump. First with my clothes on and then with them off. After a few attempts, my neighbors gather around my driveway and point and stare and scratch their heads. “Up, up and away,” I shout one time. “Goodbye cruel world,” I shout another. I jump over and over until my ankles and knees are numb, my feet stinging with the sting of a thousand bees. After a while my neighbors become bored and retreat back into their homes. But I don’t give up. I know sooner or later, with the right incantation, God will pluck me like a grape from the vine of my rooftop. “Momma, I’m coming home!” I close my eyes and imagine myself floating up. Just like those whose souls are pure. Just like the skate-punk angels who left their sneakers dangling from my telephone line just before they slipped off into the sky.

GABBY GIRL

this is my baby. eleven years old this month. she was about the size of a shoe when Jack the daytime security guard for the city of lexington ran out and picked her up off the sidewalk after she was thrown out of a car in front of city hall. i took one look at that face and knew she would spend the rest of her life with me. how lucky can one man get?


















happy birthday gabby girl.

THIS IS FUTUREMAN

also known as:

futch, futuremans, tubby, snorty jones, my little prairie home companion, mr. sexy-pants, and hunka-hunka burnin love.

POOL BOY

APRIL

I stand on the deck at Milledge Place staring in disbelief at the toilet that lies on the bottom of the deep end. I can’t decide whether to jump in and retrieve it or quit. The water is freezing, about sixty degrees. I strip down to my Marky-Marks and stick my big toe in. “Son of a bitch,” I say. Two hawks circle directly above my head. I hold my hand against the sun and watch their rust-colored tails shift this way and that against the crisp blue Georgia sky. I’ve been told red-tailed hawks are messengers. Today I think their message might be: You’re a fucking idiot if you jump in that pool to rescue a toilet. One of them emits a long, mournful “skree.” There’s something mournful about all the birds down here. I close my eyes and slowly fill my lungs with whatever it is that perfumes this tiny little town in the spring. Does honeysuckle bloom in April?

My first plunge lasts about a second and a half. My body goes immediately into shock and I come up gasping as if I’ve been punched in the stomach. I sit on the edge of the pool shivering and wait for the sun to wrap its fuzzy yellow blanket around me. It occurs to me I’ve just discovered something I’ve been searching for since about the tenth grade: An instant cure for the All-American Hangover.

I tilt my face into the sun’s rays and see my mom slicing a watermelon on the Fourth of July. She wears a pale yellow apron and stands beside a picnic table covered with a red checkered table cloth. She lays the knife down and picks up a pack of cigarettes. Her disheveled blond hair hangs down in her face and she swats at it like she’s shooing a fly. I keep waiting for her to smile but she seems too tired.

I stand up to get a better look at the position of the toilet but see myself instead on the rippled surface staring back. I’m completely mesmerized and confused by the various hues of blue, the incalculable angles of light, its prisms and gold-tinted reflections sparkling on the surface. Sometimes I can’t tell the pool from the sky. Sometimes the bees can’t either. Some days there are at least a dozen bees spinning and slowly drowning and making the saddest, most beautiful sparkling concentric circles on the water like striped synchronized ballerinas with tiny wings. I pull them out of the pool one at a time on the tips of my fingers and blow them all back into the sky.

My second plunge lasts all of seven or eight seconds. I squirm around in the freezing water but I can’t find the toilet because I can’t open my eyes. I flail my arms like a drowning man but I can’t find it anywhere. And then it hits me. Somewhere inside of these few seconds on the bottom of the pool it occurs to me that I could very well be the only thirty-nine year old man on planet Earth ten feet down in sixty degree water searching for a toilet for eight-fifty an hour. I’m not very good at math, so I’m not entirely sure what it means. But I’m almost positive that it means something.

I lie back down on the warm concrete and close my eyes. Despite the grit and sharp little pebbles digging into my back, I’m sound asleep and dreaming within seconds. I don’t sleep very well at night so am constantly falling asleep and having little daydreams during the day. In fact, most nights I don’t sleep at all unless you count the nine minutes it takes my alarm to go back off after I hit the snooze button. I try to hit the snooze button at least three times so I’ll get at least twenty-seven minutes worth of sleep a night.

Somehow I’ve developed the ability to dream without actually falling asleep. Some nights I dream I am writing invitations to my suicide, only I don’t know who to send them to. Other nights I dream I am standing on the edge of a rusty old bridge peering down at fragments of light reflecting off of the Ohio River like a million votives sparkling in the inky current below. I know the water is cold as hell. That’s what the whiskey is for. “You won’t feel a thing,” I whisper to myself.

My third plunge is dead-on the money. I dive straight down to the bottom of the pool and grasp the rim of the toilet in my hand but it’s too heavy and I can’t pull it up. I move it a couple of feet toward the shallow end but then I have to come back up for air. After several minutes of holding my breath and tugging and grunting and making little bubbles rise to the surface, I finally step out of the shallow end of the pool cradling the toilet in my arms as if I have just saved a drowning co-ed, a hot little blonde who twists her suntanned arms around my neck like delicate swans and whispers something into my ear.

I sit down finally on the steps of the shallow end beside the toilet to catch my breath. Water drips from my body and puddles around me on the concrete like a shadow. The honeysuckle or Bradford Pear or whatever it is that smells sweet gives way finally to the burning odor of chlorine. I close my eyes to make the contents of three large garbage cans scattered across the pool deck disappear and take a long, deep breath. When I open my eyes the mess is still there, along with three or four broken deck chairs and countless beer bottles lying in splinters. “Go Dawgs,” I say to myself. “You motherfuckers know how to party.” I can’t decide whether to clean it up or quit. The red-tailed hawks have moved on. Only nine more pools to go, I think to myself, and then I can go let my dog out and see how many beers it takes to make me forget what a fucking idiot I am.