https://craigslist.com/Personals/PacificNorthwest/FunGuy

Fun Guy seeking Fun Girl for a spontaneous retreat to commune living for scholarly horticulture survey. Chance of a lifetime! Must be good conversationalist. Must have interest in speculative fiction films, including but not limited to: Outbreak, The Andromeda Strain and Twelve Monkeys. Fun Guy seeking Fun Girl who is comfortable camping. Comfortable in enclosed spaces. Comfortable with radical ideals. Must enjoy board games and have distrust of deep state agendas. Fun Guy seeking Fun Girl who is willing to break all ties with old life. Must not have meddling family. Must not be fingerprinted. Must not have genealogy samples in any DNA heritage service. Fun Guy wants Fun Girl willing to stand in crowded subway terminals with an Element X for approximately 8.7 minutes. Must love mushrooms, moss, and molds. Must be willing to spread the fun with Fun Guy. FDM.

It was ninety-four, summertime when you came to my last game, your first. That was a big major league nothing game at the start of a nothing season but I had thrown seven innings and shut them out seven times. I could feel the strain in my joints. A perfect game is a tension between having a really great night of pitching and the possibility of making that streak of perfection last into those purple-early nights. For other guys, that’s what it is but for me, you being there made it perfect. But this next kid takes the plate and somehow I know that this isn’t my big night–it’s his.

I can feel the strain in my elbow like there’s a pin in it.

This kid, you should have seen him, this deer in the headlights look, his face is skinny and pale. Kid keeps licking his lips wet. And keep pushing that bat out in front of him and then winding it back. He doesn’t know me.

My fingers feel like I have been catching and throwing rocks all night.

This Kid is on the back end of their line-up, he’s only out here so that they can give him experience standing on the diamond with us, learning to look for my breaking ball in the white blaring stand-lights out here. There’s something in his eyes, maybe he had a good warm up in the bullpen. Like he knows what I’m about to throw.

So, I give it to him.

But the world pitches too much. I feel the stitching depart too late.

And I hear that smack, that sound of solid wood.

My arm doesn’t work. It fills up hot. Then it gets cold from my shoulder down to my fingers. And I know it’s gone.

And the manager comes out. And Harvey on third comes over and Lasorda, my catch, comes over. They don’t even have to ask. They know I left it here.

I sit on the bench.

I sit in the car with your mother. I’m watching you sleep in the rear-view. And I decide that I won’t have the surgery. That was my last game. But it was only your first. FDM

In our small aluminum boat by the shadow of a birch tree, Mom, in her tight dark curls, has to be sure and yell out at any friendly and waving fisherman, to be careful, and that they might get hooked if they don’t clear out of Dad’s way. Mom is like that and I think I can see it embarrassing Dad or maybe he thinks it’s funny because he laughs. He has a high and tight military haircut and his pressed shirt on. His eyes are pale blue like snow colors. Mom’s shoulders have burned the color of lobster while she worries about the mosquitoes on Dad, spraying him. And she worries that he hasn’t put enough sunscreen on, so she falls about him–adjusting his cap’s bill, or anything else also that falls under the scrutiny of her architect’s eyes. Since the accident mom feels she has to be loud and protective of us, her boys. But right then I’m grateful for the relief from her scrutiny. I pick my nose and flick the green bits into the water at the ducks. Dad is better with her, he touches her wrist sometimes. Like he is letting her know he sees her even if he can’t see her.

When Dad calls out to me he uses my long name and says, you’re going to help me catch the big ones right, Christian Phillip? And I say, yes, Sir. I pick up his ‘spinner’ from the bottom of the boat and walk toward him, even though I am sometimes afraid of those eyes. He holds my elbows in his hands and shows me to cast carefully, from the feel in my wrists and the sound of the water lapping off the sides of the boat, and all of the geese honking, rising up in a swell. Pull it back. Cast an arch. Listen for it. FDM.

I am a young man in his first car driving fast on endless horizons a wet beach mirror with no surf in any direction forever. I shift. I am driving all night because I am in love. The road feels too small beneath my tires. I can go anywhere in minutes. I shift and I am returned with nothing inside but smoke and mirrors and poison vial swishing back and forth on a pendulum, puffing cigarette smoke, and Bob Dylan songs. I shift out of the turn and trace the curves of Mulholland. Lombard Street. Portland’s arteries are clogged with cars. Shift and I am gray. In the hand-me-down, I am fast enough to outrun this insoluble fear that all of my days are only a dwindling number that ticks down.  I shift and I am gone. FDM.

It’s one of those sessions with not a lot of talking which suits me just fine since it is too hot to talk. Then when I have got the needle on him for the last pass at details on the prawn he starts talking to me about family history and a whole noble line of prawn fisherman. I laugh and say that I am relieved because I have been scrutinizing the shape and form of this prawn on the belly of his forearm for two hours. I am glad it’s not a lark. I am glad he’s not an idiot. Glad I’m not just wasting both our time. He says that, yeah–they had a prawn shop in the family on the East coast for a long time. Amazing, I say and finish the prawn. We start chit-chatting. I don’t have much of a family history. No ‘twenty-three and me’ spit in a tube for hundreds of dollars, bullshit. Furthest I feel like tracing my heritage back is a bar fight in Kentucky, when my great grandfather killed a man for embarrassing him in front of a woman. Story goes, they stepped out into the street and took off their jackets like gentlemen did and then my grandfather pulled a derringer on him and shot him. It was in the newspaper. No Hayes man has been in the newspaper since then. Anyway, I’m finally getting this guy set and ready to go when he starts getting red in his face and sighing and rubbing his face. He sent his father a picture of his arm and his father replied, Pawnshop. Your grandfather owned a successful pawn shop. It’s still in the family. Sorry, Man. I told him. No refunds. No do-overs.   FDM

After prom, Irene came back home and cried all night until the morning when we didn’t hear anything else from her. When she came out of her room, she was not crying anymore. After that, she was planning.

On the bench seat of the cherry red Chevrolet, we sat with our small packed bags. Irene got the garage door open with our father’s remote opener and that was louder than we realized. We were in a hurry to go before anyone could hear and stop us. Then there would be a family meeting. A lot of questions we don’t have answers to. And therapy sessions about the divorce. I turned the key, and the engine turned, that is louder than we expect too. But at least we were doing it. I somehow managed the gas and we lurched forward. We were out on the road and the ragtop flew back. Our neighborhood glittered around us.

It was a perfect moment.FDM.

When the sun gets low behind the bar, He checks receiving. Crates and boxes wrapped in cellophane come through and he drags them down into the dark of the storm cellar, away from the gold sunset at five or six o’clock. Here, amid the kegs and dusty bottles, he takes his time marking the orders in the shipment with little check marks from his pencil. Top Shelf. Mid Tiers. Bottom Shelf. Bottles of beer. Bottles of ale. Check. Check. Check. Upstairs, the bar staff comes in. Check. Young and attractive people who work for tips at night so they can study and go on to get good jobs and take selfies together out in the sunshine. Check. He was going to be a football star but nothing went right. Check. He spends time extra organizing in the cellar. Check. Making sure everything is where it should be. FDM.

Comfort is a plexiglass

arrangement of

butterfly wings in the stairwell leading down to my pediatrician’s office, Doctor K.

He is a warm man with firm tone of voice.

With a lot of gray in his hair.

I am six years old on my mother’s shoulder,

taking in the lights and colors.

Unaware that I am about to take a shot in my arm.

I scream and plead. But there is no memory of the shot.

I cannot remember Doctor K’s face. Or the advice he gave the last time we spoke.

He is long dead now.

The hospital is a crater.

Or a parking lot.

After the shot, I come back up the winding stairwell

again.

FDM.

When she was tired from keeping everything so real, Maricela had in the past played a game in which she would try to manifest a disappearance. Not a real disappearance. It was only a game really. The trick of the game was endurance. She would always ask herself, how bad do you want it? Can you change until the hangers-on, the boy, the friends at work or in your reading club, come loose?

She would change political parties and let them know it at work. She would stop waking up early to look ‘cute’ and begin wearing her brother’s old clothes. And stop putting contacts in, that’s when she would really become invisible. Unapproachable. Truly dissonant. If that did not knock at least a few people out of her friends list, she would quit her job altogether. She had done it before and considered doing it again. It was not hard to find something she liked better than working the dispatch switchboard–listening to all those people alone, asking her for help while she sat in a chair on a linoleum floor with shoe streaks in it.

If she was still playing the game after the job, she might change her name, Maricella reasoned. She had done so twice before. It was a bitch but it always felt rewarding to have your name called different by a stranger who did not know the difference. That new name sound. If she was still playing and the partner still coming, or texting, or inviting her to dinner, she would switch phone numbers so the gulf between her and everyone else could be a protective shell.

Once Maricela played the game, so long that Luke came to the door to pound on it when he found his keys did not work in the new lock. Out in the hallway, he began to shout and cuss about the dirty things they had done together so that her neighbors would know. And Luke told her she was trash and a crazy-burn-out-flake-bitch who would never be anything. But that did not matter. He was not screaming at her. He was not disappointed about, or angry with, or murderous at Maricela. Luke wanted to kill someone, named Daphne, whom she only knew distantly. Someone Luke could never know at all. FDM

The flyer was coming off the telephone pole at the edges. It was faded up while we were laying tar out on the interstate in a field where there was not anything for miles except corn and thick buzzing clouds of swarming bugs like dust. See the world. Become awakened. Leave your small life behind. Transcend, it said. And it had, I could see, the shape of Tibet and stairs on it. So I took that flyer down and folded it in my pocket.

Beneath my drafting lamp, I could see it more defined. There was small print and a mention of twelve stairs at the top of which a man could find enlightenment. I grew up in the sixties. I remember seeing a man take a gasoline bath and light himself up. And I laid tar. Some days I laid tar so that old blisters opened up, becoming fresh blisters. It was the life I could lead but maybe there was a reason I took that tar laying job today–Sunday which is my usual day for sleeping and going to the movies. I was bored so I worked it. I said to myself, what have I got that I might lose from leaving to go to Tibet and climbing up twelve stairs. And I better do it now before my legs give. So I worked it out with my foreman. I would use all my overtime and sick days for the rest of the year on this, then I would come back to be on his crew around the clock. Totally transcended. I would not take any more movie days. Would not need them.

A few times I got lost, on account I did not know the language. We moved up these foothills that were foggy and that shone gold when the sun come up and burned the morning off em. It looked like giants, these hills. At night I slept on the ground beside our sherpa. None of us got any sleep on account the cold was in my lungs. Since I was a boy I had trouble with them. I would wake up drowning in my bed, turning blue with my dad looking scared and wild. Beating me in my back until I was awake. Breathing. Alive.

By the third day it was raining, I found the steps. My sherpa, a hard man in a wide brim hat who owned a ranch at the bottom of the valley, pointed at my flyer and pointed at these steps leading up onto a plateau. I went up careful, with my knee already beginning to grief. And when I stood up on the top, I just went back down. Nothing to it. I just felt heavy as hell and dumb. It takes a special kind of fool to go half the world over on account of a piece of faded trash. I swore I would never think of Tibet again. I would never be foolish again. Or think about the hills I had seen or the way the light looked different there than here.

When I got home from work, it was late but the landline was ringing. I turned on a light in the hall and another down in my sister’s kitchen. My leg giving me worse hell than ever. And the phone line was dead but I knew what it was. And I busted up crying. Like someone was pulling a line out from the bottom of me and all of the sadness I never cried about was coming out. I don’t want you to tell anyone. I will not include my name here. I am only writing to inform the mayor’s office that there was a sign on I-92 out by Short road advertising enlightenment. I lost it but it should be replaced. It read as follows: There are twelve steps in Tibet and a sherpa at the bottom of the valley who will take you there. They aren’t much to look at. But if you run up them you will transcend. FDM