Dad Man Talking

September 11, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 13:26:00 +0000

The following was written the morning or 9/11/11. With Wall Street now occupied, a Jobs Bills stonewalled and the next budget battle looming it seemed more than time to post it.

I woke up this morning afraid of you. You were driving alone in a pick up on an Indiana blacktop … taking the stage before a crowd in New York City … feeding oatmeal to your ten month old at a Starbucks in the Panhandle … waking in a warm bed on a silver Sunday in the Pacific Northwest and then rolling back to sleep when you remembered that you did not have to work that day … and there and then you were afraid of me too. It took us ten years to get here, but by that morning all we had to do was to think about each other – the wrong-headed ideas I was sure you had, the plot you somehow thought I was hatching against your class, the words we twisted from what we heard each other say - and we were afraid. You were afraid that I was up to no good, and I was afraid of you.

We had climbed from the rubble of those buildings into the arms of rescuers marching into the righteousness of two wars arm-in-arm believing in justice and confidently spending our nation’s blood and our people’s money until the blood soaked our feet and the money hemorrhaged from a hole in our banks and we saw but would not believe that our leaders had lied to us and the banks had cheated us and then - with no other choice and because we had realized that this was an enemy not of the greatest generation but of the worst - we turned on each other; you turned against the god of my beliefs and I turned against the god of yours, and, unlike any America we had ever know since a nation divided against itself could not stand, we began to hate and fear each other while the devil laid on a dirty mattress in a third-world high rise clutching a cell phone and laughing at us across eternity because he had accomplished what he had planned all along.

Do you see the trail from there to here? Does it sound simple to you to say that we have come to hate and fear each other because no one in ten years has been able to find a real enemy we can defeat? Do you feel tricked and outgunned when you realize that you have been taken advantage of by politicians of all persuasions who knowing that they cannot lead us have chosen instead to use and divide us simply so they can put us in their pockets? Is it clear to you that Red States and Blue, Tea Parties and Freedom Marches, Budget Ceiling Standoffs and Stock Market Crashes really only exist because I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me? When you woke up on that morning of September 11, 2011 did it occur to you that the thing we need to fear most now is our fear of each other?

I am not the faceless face of your enemy and you are not a nightmare threatening my American dream. When I search my soul I know that all you want is to eat and be sheltered and live in peace and if you look into my heart you will see the same longings in me. The sun shines, strength abides, love is eternal and I cannot take that from you nor can you take it from me. Remember. We said the buildings would rise again and so they have. Remember. Ten years ago we knew were all brothers and sisters and had to do it together or not at all. Remember. When we compromise with each other we are not giving in to an enemy, we are giving in to America and giving back to ourselves.

Top 5 Best Selling iPad Apps for Hard Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:49:00 +0000

App #1

Garbage Grab Gourmet

[Humiliatingly] Free

Description

Just because the U.S. social safety net has completely failed you and you’ve hit rock bottom doesn’t mean your palette has to suffer.

From the dumpster to your streetlamp-wired hot plate to a finished epicurean feast that will satisfy the most discerning of distended stomachs, Garbage Grab Gourmet teaches you how to turn ingredients scrounged from every day trash into fine dining on the go.

Gourmet Recipes Include:

· * Lemon Skin Braised Crunchy Chicken Ribs with Squishy Tomato Glaze

· * Chilean Cow Fat Flambé in Roasted Watermelon Rinds

· * Runny Flan Apple Core Surprise

What the Celebrity Chefs are saying about Garbage Grab Gourmet:

“I once ate the raw scrotum of a Bangkok river rat served to me on a bamboo skewer, but even I wouldn’t touch this stuff… Hey, fuck you - coming from me that’s a compliment.” - Anthony Bourdain

“I may be dead, but I’m not as dead as some of the ingredients you’ll use in Garbage Grab Gourmet … Bon Appetite!” - Julia Child

“365 days, 365 garbage cans, no repeats - this is gonna’ be the next big thing in real American cooking.” - Rachel Ray

Top 5 Best Selling iPad Apps for Hard Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:39:00 +0000

App #2

Prostitutipedia HD

Description

The definitive App for the desperate career enthusiast facing a shrinking mass of traditional vocational choices.

Prostitutipedia is the ultimate compendium of ways for you to sell your body in the face of economic hardships.

DID YOU KNOW THAT…?

- A single testicle can fetch up to $10,000 on the black market!

- Jazz whistlers in Tokyo will pay you for your saliva!

- Some Saudi Arabian business men will write a blank check for just ten minutes of sex with you and a blood relative of your choice!

- Your toenail clippings can fetch up to $400 an ounce from the right foot fetishist!

- New trade agreements with the EU no longer make it a crime for American’s abroad to attempt to sell human organs removed under a doctor’s supervision!

- Many pornographers work from home and pay NO State sales tax!

- In some Mexican brothels you don’t even have to have teeth to get hired!

HD FEATURES MAKE IT REAL

Select from over 1000 legal and illegal schemes with pictures and video that show you what’s in store for you
Upload your own pictures and graphics and then cut and paste yourself into the action
Filter categories and career opportunities to find the least distasteful choice that’s right for you
Search thousands of prospects, organizations and syndicates looking for you and your body parts - Pimp My BodÒ feature lets’ you name your price
100% Guaranteed “Happy Ending” or your money back

★ MAKES A GREAT GIFT FOR THAT RECENT GRAD

★ WINNER OF THE 2011 RNC ‘AMERICAN PLUCK’ AWARD!

* You’re not a cop are you?

Top 5 Best Selling iPad Apps for Hard Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:36:00 +0000

App #3

“Foreclose This” Pro

Free*

Description

The bankers are coming for the house; but you’ve got a plan …and a shotgun to go with it.

THE LENDERS DONE YOU WRONG!

You had a credit score so low your own mother wouldn’t lend to you … but the bank gave you a mortgage anyway.

You told ‘em you couldn’t afford to pay it back, but they laughed and told you they’d take it easy on you with interest-only payments and an adjustable rate loan that you could take “a hundred years” to pay off if you wanted to.

So you signed on the dotted line and that’s when you found out that you and the entire country were about to take a fall.

WHO’S LAUGHING NOW!

Get comfortable on your pixilated weed-infested, unfinished circular driveway and WATCH THOSE LENDER’S FACES as you take aim when they pull up with the sheriff.

Enjoy 360 degree range of fire with REALISTIC SHELL EJECTION and DOUBLE BARREL SOUND.

FIRE ENDLESSLY in practice mode as lenders duck, dance and crawl for cover.

CHOOSE from debt-forgiveness and hostage styles of play.

Join the fun online and CREATE A VIRTUAL ARMY with millions of other angry ex-home owners all over the U.S. and all fantasizing about getting even.

Pro Version Add-Ons Include

Bonus Pack with over 10 million foreclosed homes to choose from

Hyper-link to Real Estate Agent Business Card Picture Target Galler

Unscrupulous Contractor Slave Chamber with realistic hammer and tong

Federal Home Own Bailout Button with sarcastic clown laugh and pop up, middle finger, “F You And Your Bailout” repeating action

* No money down – Buyer assumes all taxes, assessments and penalty fees, interest only for 10 day trial period with $250,000 principle payment due 11 days after signing - Sponsored by United Usurers of America, LLC; Member IMF, FHA, FHLMC, FDIC, NRA, NJ Teamster Local 883 and Federated Casino Workers of Greater Singapore.

Top 5 Best Selling iPad Apps for Hard Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:14:00 +0000

App #4

I'm Employed! (Deluxe)

$.99

Description

Out of work for more than 18 months? Run out of federal unemployment insurance extensions? Well you just got hired and it’s the job of your dreams!

No more fighting for one job against hundreds of other applicants who would kill you for health benefits.

No grueling series of endless interviews where you lose out to someone willing to work for a warm place to sit during the day.

No more laying around naked under a dirty blanket while you stare out the window jealous of the Mexican teenagers who get to shingle your neighbor’s roof.

You’re a fully employed executive now, and you can never get laid off again!

Deluxe Feature Highlights

Reorganize, merge and hire and fire at will
Import endless bonuses and stock options
High resolution salary checks (as large as you can spend ‘em)
'Hyper-lawyer’ button for instant acquittal from illegal business activity charges
Sixteen different executive modes to choose from including: Ball Buster; Mr. Passive Aggressive; The Delegator; MicroMangler; and “Da Pimp”

Customer Reviews

1. Powerful

“I once tripped a pregnant woman on her way to interview for a job I wanted, but now I can spend my time staring at my iPad in a heroin-like haze pretending I don’t have to use food stamps to feed my kids.”

2. Awesome Awesomenesssss!

“One minute I’m dumpster diving for trash I can sell to pay my rent, and the next I’m firing a whole division of US workers so I can ship their jobs to Cambodia – More Please.”

3. An American Epic

“Well worth the purchase price. Being able to look safely out the window of a corner office at unemployed workers rioting in the streets of Boston or San Francisco gives you a little boost that makes you want to scream ‘God Bless America’ …What a deal.”

More ▼

Top 5 Best Selling iPad Apps for Hard Times

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:28:00 +0000

App #5

Fantasy Fed

$2.99

Description

You’re in charge of the U.S. Economy! That’s right; the fiscal health of America is in your hands.

STRIKE FEAR INTO THE HEARTS OF BILLIONAIRES

Turn up the sound and hear your own crashing footsteps and God-like laugh as you walk “The Street” while brokers and bankers avert their eyes.

MESS WITH THE MINDS OF U.S. PRESIDENTS AND POLITICIANS

Drop wizard-like into the virtual Senate and watch the President cower as you speak; then take the leader of the free world to dinner and see him jump as you pat your pockets pretending you’ll get the check.

CREATE YOUR OWN BUBBLES … THEN WATCH ‘EM POP

Bankers taken enough money out of those housing and stock bubbles you created? Well just raise the prime, Mr. Fed, and watch those bubbles pop - virtual bubble solution and giant bubble wand included to create your own housing, stock, gold, and sub-prime market bubbles.

SPIN THE WHEEL OF IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE!

Feeling a little sluggish today because of the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression? Well it looks like someone forgot they were running the show!! True life carnival sights and sounds put you at the center of an economic sideshow where there’s a sucker born every minute and you can spin until the rise in U.S. consumer credit card debt makes you giddy with delight.

CREATE PRIME RATE FEVER

Keep America guessing and wet your pants laughing as you play with the prime. 4%? 10%? How about No%? That’s right charge whatever you want. You don’t have to stop until we’ve been forced to mortgage every last national park to the Chinese.**

(** Available only in Deluxe Mandarin Edition with “Fat Yankee” Inflatable National Debt Feature)

What’s new in Version 1.0.1

Fixed Market Crash issues on Debt-Ceiling debate start-up

Resolved stability problems with U.S. Constitutional Amendment module

This is the first in a 5 part series of "the top 5 best selling apps for hard times as reported in Online Scammers Magazine ... Next Week - App #4: "I'm Employed! (Deluxe)"

Cell Mates

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:16:00 +0000

“Is that better, Mother, can you hear me? … I’m in the airport in New York … Yes, Mother, It’s evening here … No, Mother, I haven’t seen any terrorists … Well I wouldn’t know, Mother, but they have security for that … Dogs that sniff for bombs, that sort of thing … No, Mother, I don’t know where the dogs go to the bathroom … … No, not till Tuesday … What? … Yes, I did, Mother, I told you I’d be back in Bangalore on Tuesday … What? … No, there a lot of other people around me talking on their phones ... Yes, Mother, I’m praying … I pray all the time … Yes, mother, I pray while I’m working ...

... God damn it, Charlie, I can’t do a thing about it right now … Because I’m in an airport … Yes Charlie, Max Balzenger is an asshole but, then again, you might act like an asshole too if your accountant got you strip searched at your audit … Yeah, Charley, it’s always a bad idea to use sarcasm with IRS agents … No, Charlie, I don’t think I would have told them to go easy on Max because he had a bad temper and could have a concealed weapon ... Yes, even if I had a smile on my face when I said it … YES, EVEN IF I MEANT IT AS A FUCKING JOKE …Well then take a God damn Xanax, Charley, but stop whining …

... What Doctor? … I’m sorry, I’m in an airport and there’s a lot of noise around me … I said there’s a lot of other phone calls going on around me … No, I know you told me the tests came back negative ... Well one time a doctor said that to a cousin of mine and three months later they found a tumor inside her the size of a Mr. Potato Head... No, I’m not exaggerating, the surgeon used those exact words, he said "it was the size of a Mr. Potato Head." ... Other tests? Why do we need to do other tests? ... Look, doctor, you can tell me, how long do you think I have? ... Forty of fifty years ...?

… Hi, Dixie, it’s Daddy … No, I can’t guess, what did you do today? … Well, did Stewart like the lunch you made him? … Really … Does Mommy know that Stewart threw up in her purse … Well did you take everything out before you put it in the shower? … Yes, Dixie, keys and money are waterproof, but cell phones are not … No, those are other people talking on their phones … Yes, some are probably talking to their children … … Yes, Dixie, I know when I’m old you and you call me from an airport wouldn’t make me tell mommy if I did something wrong …

… Peggy, I swear to God I wish she would just die … Oh, yes, I really I do, I want her to die and then I want Johnny to go to her funeral and see that’s she dead so he won’t text her … Because she threw herself on him at the wedding … No, he was like ‘Oh, I haven’t seen her in so long, isn’t she cute…’ and I was like ‘yeah, cute, if you think a 35 year old with her boobs hanging out is cute.’ … He went to the bathroom … Well for all I know she followed him and is in there with him … I know … I still wish she would die … I don’t care if they can hear me; you think I’m the only depressed woman in this airport … ?

… Yes, Mother, I’m happy … Yes, Mother, even without a husband … No, Mother I don’t want you to introduce me to Aunty Baba’s Brother’s business partner’s son … I don’t care if he did design a cell phone app that lets you do surgery using kitchen tools … No, It doesn’t make me feel better to know that he’s a real doctor … No, Mother, it wouldn’t matter if I met him at his office …

… Yes, Charley, yes you are, the first thing in the morning you’re going to meet Max at his office and beg him not to fire us … No, Charlie, I’m not your mother, you’re going to go by yourself … Well go to a doctor if you feel sick Charlie, but one way or the other you’re still going to go meet Max as soon as his office opens in the morning …

… Do you think you could see me when your office opens in the morning, Doctor? … Well not actual pain, pain, more like a dull ache everywhere in my body … A couple of days? I don’t think I can wait a couple of days … No, I don’t think it’s all in my head … Look Doctor, I’m not one of those crazy people who makes things up and then starts to talk to themselves …

… Yes, Dixie, people on their cell phones do look like they’re talking to themselves … Yes it is kind of funny … No, I don’t think it will make mommy feel any better to think of that before you tell her you put her cell phone in the shower … Because we need our cell phones, Dixie … Well, for one thing if you took my cell phone I wouldn’t be able to talk to you anymore when I’m away …

… Because Peggy, If I took his cell phone he wouldn’t be able to talk with her anymore … Yes, I know she’ll be a thousand miles away, but she’s such a whore she’ll probably start texting him pictures of her boobs … “Woops, how stupid of me … I just took a picture of my tits …” Look, let’s just …

… Talk about something else, Mother … Yes, of course, Mother, it’s every woman’s dream to die alone and childless … No Mother, I’m being sarcastic … Well, Mother, I don’t really care if men find sarcasm unattractive in a girl … Because right now I don’t want …

… A man, Charley … Just be a fucking man … Well, we could just fire you, Charley that would solve all our problems … … yes, assholes like Max Balzenger do like to see other people in pain but in this case you can understand why he might want to see you in …

… Pain, Doctor, I’m really in pain … Yes, I know I told you it was more like a dull ache, but now I’m really feeling pain again … Well if I leave the airport to check myself into the emergency room, I’m going to miss my flight … Look, Doctor, if you’d just let me make an appointment, I’ll …

… See you first thing in the morning, Dixie, and we’ll tell mommy together … Yes we will, Dixie. If you haven’t told her by then we’ll tell her together … No, Dixie it can’t just be our little secret like the time you ate Skittles for breakfast … Because this is …

… Different than that, Peggy … Well, first I don’t dress like a prostitute and second I only texted Alan a couple of times because I felt sorry for him after he divorced his wife … No, I don’t think she feels sorry for Johnny … Are you saying that she should feel sorry for him because of me, is that what you’re …

… Saying, Mother, that I should get married before I get blown up by a terrorist? … Okay, mother I have to go now … Because they’ll be calling my flight soon … No, I’m not just trying to …

… Get off the phone now, Charlie … … No, I won’t stay on the phone with you until the Xanax kicks in … Look , Charley, just get some sleep because tomorrow at 9 a.m. …

… When you open, I’ll just come by your office and see if you have a cancellation … That’s okay I can wait; I have the whole day off … Well, that’s not ….

... Very nice of you to say to me, young lady … Because, I don’t think putting the cell phone in the dryer is going to help … No, I’m not yelling … That’s the announcement that …

… They’re calling my flight, Peggy … No, he’s not back yet … I don’t know, Peggy, how do you get a boyfriend whose texting his ex-girlfriend in the toilet to come out so he won’t …

… Miss the flight, Mother, and not …

… Get there tomorrow, Charley …

… To see you in the morning, Doctor, and …

… Talk with you when I get home, Dixie …

… To show me that cares, Peggy …

… And, tell me that …

… What happened to you …

… Is embarrassing and a painful, but nobody …

… Else has to know, because we …

… Should keep this little situation …

… Just ...

… Between …

… You …

… And …

… Me.

Dick and Jane Want You to be Happy

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:43:00 +0000

Dick and Jane will not always be happy. But happiness is what they want for you. So as you read, touch the icon [∆] on the screen whenever you are not happy and Dick and Jane will adjust their story to fit your needs.

For instance, let’s say that you’ve had enough for one day of the world’s hardships and economic disasters. More specifically, let’s say that your grown daughter is again in rehab or you have just today finally summoned the courage to break off with your abusive boyfriend or to tell your husband’s mother that she needs to stop meddling in your family’s affairs. Let’s then also say that at the same time Dick and Jane are in a rough patch in the story and you cannot bear another moment of pain, least of all the specious pain of fictional characters. Simply touch the icon [∆] and Dick and Jane will adjust. Likewise, should Dick and Jane’s actions make you anxious, or should you feel that their behavior is too perfect or silly or unbelievable in any way, or should they somehow bore you or make you angry, remember that the icon [∆] is there to remind Dick and Jane that you too need to be happy with how their story unfolds.

Ready? Okay. Begin.

∆

Waves are striking the nearby shoreline and this methodical thump and whoosh of high tide has caused Dick to think of a baby’s heartbeat the first time you hear it through the speakers of a fetal monitor. In his daydream, Dick knows these two things have nothing to do with one another, and yet at the same time right now he believes they have everything to do with one another. Jane has just told Dick that she is pregnant with her first child, Dick’s fifth, and she is waiting for Dick to fully register the thought that at 68 years old he will again be a father.

“Dick, put the car in park and look at me.” More and more Dick has been doing this. You show or tell him something even a little profound and he’ll take so long to acknowledge it that you wonder if he’s heard you. And now, with Dick staring out the window of the car where he stopped it on the gentle slope next to the low sea wall looking down into the cove, Jane wonders if she shouldn’t have waited to tell him until they got to the beach house. It might have been better to mention this when he was on their patio behind the dunes with a drink in his hand where even if his mind wandered she wouldn’t have had to worry about his foot slipping off the brake and rolling them into the sea.

Yes, he’s older than her by nearly 35 years, but that’s not it. He’s still sharp when he wants to be. God knows hearing him on the phone with one of the younger brokers Jane often feels sorry for them. Dick can still rip open one of their deals using the kid’s ego as ingress and then peel out millions more where no other partner would have been able to find another cent. It isn’t that Dick isn’t still smarter and more with it than any man half his age. Give him the mechanics of his profession, his houses, their travel or their finances, and Dick doesn’t waver for a single second. It’s only at those times when his older kids bring by the grandkids and he is putting them to bed, or when he finds out that a friend’s chemo is no longer doing the job, or times like today when Jane – more than two months into her pregnancy - couldn’t wait any longer and had to tell him about the baby, that Dick stops in his tracks and time stands still as you wait for him to reach through eternity and back into the moment.

Truthfully, Jane is getting sick of this. She wants to be patient and sensitive but right now she really just wants Dick to be younger. Why should she subject this baby to a semi-depressed man who will probably be dead before the kid even learns to ride a bike?

∆

Then again, maybe if she just tells Dick the truth about the baby; that the baby is not his, that Alan at the garage has been coming over during the week not just to tune up the Bugatti and the Jag and the Mercedes but also to see her, and that this just happened. Maybe if she tells Dick he will somehow take pity on her and they can get past the pre-nup and Dick will support her along with the baby for the rest of their lives. Or maybe – and this thought thrills her more than she’d like to admit - maybe she and Alan can figure out a way to murder Dick and he will be out of the picture and she with the money and Alan and the baby will live by the sea forever without this old, old man.

∆

Forget it, she couldn’t never do it. And Dick will be gone soon enough anyway. Besides, if she never tells Dick, it will make for a better story someday. She can even picture it. Her daughter and she on the silk-covered Chinese love seat looking out at the ocean through a rain storm when Jane just springs it on her. They will be confessing sins and regrets and will have gotten to the moment where the most transgressive of secrets are ready to emerge. “Honey, your father is not who you think he is.” Her child will be a grown woman by then, well-married with kids of her own, and Dick will be long gone. Indeed her daughter will barely remember Dick and will decide on that dark afternoon that it is time for her to meet her real father. Wow, that will really be something.

For now Dick continues to stare at the sea, and Jane begins to think about Alan; how he takes her into the long back seat of the Jaguar, the sunshine from the skylight in the converted barn double-filtered through the moon roof of the Jag and subdued into dark gold across Alan’s naked chest as she crawls all over him. Alan. Jane has to suppress an audible moan of pleasure lest Dick catch on. And now both of them are daydreaming.

Alan. Yes, the sex is something. But it isn’t love. And there is something else. Something Jane doesn’t like to think about. How much she likes it when Alan hits her; how she begs him to do it. Is that why she is drawn to him? This ex-marine with two tours in Iraq who has come back with a lust to hurt things? She hides the small bruises from Dick but she does not hide the pleasure from Alan.

∆

Just then Dick speaks, “Did you ever feel as if someone else were pulling the strings to your life?”

Yes, yes Jane does. But why would Dick bring that up now? It actually frightens her a little bit and she makes herself resists the thought that some other force is controlling her destiny.

“Dick, you haven’t said a word about the baby. Are you happy?”

“Yes.” Dick snaps to and looks at her. “But I’ve been sitting here thinking that maybe it’s a little late in the game for this to be happening to me again.”

“I thought you said you wanted us be happy.”

“Yes. But there are many ways to be happy. We don’t have to have a baby to be happy. Do we?”

∆

“Well I suppose not Dick. What are you suggesting?

∆

“Nothing. Do you want this baby?”

“Yes … I mean if you do.”

“Then we’ll have the baby.”

Jane now has a nearly uncontrollable urge to pull out the cigar lighter in the Mercedes and burn herself with it. A minute ago she had a way out. All she had to do was to emphatically say that she didn’t need a baby to be happy and then lead Dick away from it and the both of them toward an abortion and with that she would have been able to keep up the afternoons in the Jaguar with Alan slapping her hard enough to make her forget the abuse of her miserable childhood.

∆

Jane abruptly snaps out of it. “I’m so happy, Dick. It doesn’t matter how old you are, you’re going to be such a good father to this baby.”

Dick smiles and hugs her. Their heads resting on each other’s shoulders, Dick finds himself wondering which of them is which. Who is the man and who is the woman? Who is the father and who is the mother? What does that even mean?

∆

Yes, okay, Dick also knows he needs to bring himself back into focus. He shuts his eyes tight and starts to do mental calculations. He takes a basic corporate bond deal and starts to complicate it with tax loop holes and accruals and collateralized debt obligations until in his mind he fills up the back seat of the car with money. Then he does the same thing with some housing foreclosures executed under his broker’s license, filling up the front seat until property deeds and cash reach just below his and Jane’s noses. Now he feels better. More like himself again.

Money makes it all okay. Doesn’t It? He’ll just float this baby on a cloud of money and all will be well.

Dick smiles again and he realizes he’s been holding his breath. So he breaths deeply and when he does is when he feels the first stab of pain in his chest. Then comes a second wave of pain which feels like someone is knotting a thick cotton towel under his sternum inside his body at the base of his throat. He pulls back from Jane’s shoulder and when she sees his face her mouth sags open.

“Dick?”

Dick cannot speak, does not even seem able to hear Jane as he reaches down and laces his fingers between the buttons of his oxford. A cascade of small wooden disks starts popping into the windshield and cup holder as Dick rips open his shirt, one button even grazing Jane’s cheek. Anyone looking on would think that Dick was trying to find a path to his own heart.

Reflexively, Jane lowers her eyes to watch the button dribble from her cheek to her lap. A rattle in Dicks’ throat causes Jane to look up at him again but when the rattle turns into a rasping screech Jane just tilts her head as if she is studying a painting on a gallery wall. Dick sees her expression and he begins to grab at her with the terror from eyes, hoping his eyes alone will shake her with a sense of urgency, but Jane will not be shaken.

She has always figured that this moment would be coming, and – though she hears a lost whistle of guilt like the cry of an animal far away in a forest - Jane does not see why she should get excited now. Just sit still and make Dick comfortable. It will all be over soon and it is all going to turn out as it was meant to be no matter what. Jane tenderly pulls Dick’s head to her breast and says, “Okay Dick, just rest now honey. I’ll stay with you.”

Dick’s rattling and screeching has stopped anyway, and Jane feels contentment in the way fate can take control of things for you, just the way you wanted things to be to make you happy if only you could envision it.

∆

So Jane is as surprised as anyone when the car starts inching toward the water. She glances from the “D” on the gear indicator to the floor where Dick’s foot has slipped off the break of the idling car and she says, “Oh shit.” Jane almost feels as if someone is laughing at her, and it might be funny if she didn’t have such a clear sense that this same someone wanted to kill her.

Calculating the path from her foot to the brake pedal, Jane lifts her legs over Dick’s body and jams her heel toward the floor on the driver’s side. She misses with her heel but does manage to catch the pedal with the pointy toe of her ankle boot. And then the car stops; it doesn’t want to do it - what with the mild gravity of the slope and the power of a five hundred German horses urging it toward the low rock ledge that is meant to keep cars from plunging into the ocean - but for the moment Jane’s boot is hanging in there holding back these unseen forces.

∆

Not for long, though. As fate would have it, Jane’s skinny leg will not be enough to hold back the force of righteousness. In fact it will be Jane’s leg that actually expedites what fate has in store.

Jane can even feel it happening and she tries to stop it, but her calf muscle is tired and cramping and when she shifts her foot a little to ease the pain her toe slips the rest of the way off the brake pedal and slams down onto the accelerator. Before Jane can do anything else, the car leaps forward, jumping the double ledge of bricks that make up the top of the sea wall and throwing Jane backward across Alan’s breathless chest. And this is when Jane starts to pray.

∆

As if prayer could save her now.

The car isn’t going very fast when it tips nose first into the water. And the curb has slowed it down even further so that it isn’t a very violent fall. Moreover, owing to high tide, it hasn’t even fallen that far. Still it doesn’t take long for Jane to realize that now that the car is in the water and washing out away from land, it is going to sink fast and she is going to drown if she does not figure a way out.

Gaining some composure, she finds the sliver of brushed metal that opens the passenger window and she claws it toward her. The window starts to open and she can already see herself climbing out and swimming back toward the wall where she will pull herself to safety and then call the police, crying when she does as befits a pregnant widow who has just herself escaped death. Then she will call Alan.

∆

But Jane isn’t going anywhere. From inside the future where she is calling Alan, Jane can hear the faint pop of a fuse under the dash and when the passenger window stops moving about three inches from the top of the door frame Jane remembers what Dick said about someone else being in control of their lives. Then Jane thinks back on the pop of the fuse and what she thought of when she heard it; it was exactly like the sound of someone spitting a tiny gob of disgust into her face.

The water is topping the window now and beginning to flood the car and Jane has begun a desperate search for her cell phone so she can call for help. Frantically rooting around inside her bag all Jane can hear is Dick’s voice scolding her for never being able to find anything in her purse. When she realizes she will never find it – and that it would do no good even if she could - she gives up and looks over at Dick whose eyes are open and unblinking and who appears to be smiling.

Salt water has started spraying at Jane now with the force of a fire hose and a stench that makes her want to vomit. She tries grabbing the door handle and pushing at door of the car, but her thin shoulder applied against the door is no match for the weight of the all the world’s water on the other side. Bearing down hard on what she might to do next, Jane inserts her fingertips into the open slot at the top of the window to try and pull it down, but the force of the water knifing at her hands won’t let her keep her fingers in there for long. So she feels down along her leg under the water for her boot and she rips it off, trying to smash open or loosen the window, but the window is having none of that either.

Rapidly the water is rising past Jane’s chest now. Jane closes her eyes and starts to scream for help. She understands she is about to sink to the bottom along with the car and realizes that she will soon have nothing to breath but putrid sea water. This is when Jane goes quiet. She knows what is coming and she knows who she is. She decides in that moment that if she has always been the kind of person who takes control of things, she must stay that way until the end. With the horrible sadness and fear it must take to invite death into the last moments of your life, Jane floats her butt high up off the seat and with a sharp jerk backwards lets her head go under the water, pushing out - as she does - all the air she has left in her body.

Drifting into unconsciousness, Jane starts to think about many things all at once. Dick – floating there and smiling beside her. Alan - likely not even shedding a tear when he hears about her and Dick. And, in the last moments before she loses control of her brain, the baby; how tragic it will be for the baby to have to die with her.

∆

Then something mystical happens.

In her twilight coma sleep, Jane slowly starts to drift away and begins to dream that she is living in another life, a life separate from the life she has lived with Dick. It is the life of someone who can love without having to have pain inflicted on her to do it, someone who could care for this baby more than Jane ever could. Had she been able to realize it Jane would know that this is the woman she could have been, a plain, honest girl who likes to read and longs for children and who is soaked with promise yet to be realized.

∆

Still, this conjured woman is stronger and more alive than Jane will ever be; a point easily made as Jane, held helpless in the flooded car, is forced to swallow more water. Gulping, Jane's lungs and sinuses fill with liquefied microscopic particles that come from the bottom of the sea, all the way back from the beginning of time. If only Jane’s body could remember, it would remember that once, as with that baby inside her, it breathed a fluid much like this and not only lived but thrived and grew.

But it doesn’t matter now, because Jane is no longer really under water. She is in an apartment sitting on a window seat glancing up from a book of short stories on her reader as a siren cuts through the gassy yellow sunshine of the city. This sound has distracted her momentarily from finding out how the rest of this will turn out.

∆

When he swims down there, the paramedic actually has a pretty easy time opening the car door now that passenger compartment is completely filled with water and has equalized with the pressure of the sea outside. He has only had to dive down a few feet to get to the car where, even through the blur of his naked eyes against the water, he can see that Dick is dead, but that there are still air bubbles coming from Jane’s nose. He grabs this dying woman from her seat and kicks the both of them up and into the light of life.

On the sea wall a family watches the rescue. They pulled over as they saw the car go into the water and now the man and woman hold hands – right to left - across the backs of their two little children. In her free hand the woman holds the cell phone she used to call 911.

When the paramedic swims to the sea wall with Jane, his partner reaches down to pull her up onto the parking area where he pumps her chest, ejecting the sea water from Jane’s mouth onto the steaming tar. He then blasts Jane with the paddles of a defibrillator until her heart beats again and she again regains the shallow breathing afforded to the half-dead when oxygen has been forced through their noses and mouths.

Jane will live.

∆

It’s how she will live that is the question.

Later that night in the hospital, the mother who dialed up the rescue will visit the intensive care unit and she will find out that Jane is in a deep coma and that her brain is dead. “But what about the baby?” she will ask. “I heard the woman was pregnant.”

The ICU nurse does not confirm or deny that Jane is with child, but when the mother walks away wondering if what she has heard is true, she is startled to see a young, mop-headed woman staring at her from the doorway of a room across the hall. She knows this woman has heard her conversation with the nurse and she is worried momentarily by how fluidly this woman seems to have appeared from out of nowhere. It is almost as if the woman could not wait any longer and has suddenly decided she must enter these lives.

∆

For five months the doctors will keep Jane alive on life support and watch the baby grow inside her. Though Dick is not there to hear it, doctors, interns and nurses - along with the woman from across the hall who appears and disappears now at will into Jane's room - spend hours listening with awe through the speakers of a fetal monitor to the strong heartbeat of a baby boy who will be delivered by c-section, nearly full term, just before Christmas. It is a miracle, and the sound of the boy’s heartbeat does indeed make many of those listening think about the sound of waves rising and falling on the shore.

But when the boy is born, he is born with nothing to call his own. Having never known that Jane will have a son, Dick did not provide for him in his will. Dick’s oldest daughter says that she and her husband will adopt the boy, but even the greenest of the case workers can see that these two really want no part of this baby, coming as he has from a gold-digger who married the old man for his money at the weakest moment in his life. The daughter’s husband even has his suspicions that the baby may not belong to Dick.

But it doesn't really matter because Dick is dead. And once the plug is pulled, Jane dies too. To whom this baby belongs now and what his fate will be is up to those disconnected men and women who swarm around this motherless child.

∆

Or is it?

On the night before the baby is to be released into the custody of Dick’s daughter, the woman once again appears from across the hall and quietly walks into the nursery to stand over baby’s cradle. She has come again from the window seat in her apartment where she can hear the singing laughter of the children in the playground across the street. As she stands over the cradle, she drops little verbal sounds of love onto the soft blanket that covers the boy, and the boy responds with a gummy open mouth that releases the quiet peace of recognition.

The woman hears footsteps walking in a small nurses’ station behind a wall. She cannot see who is there, but she’s knows she is about to be escorted out of this life and not a little kindly either. Her eyes fill up with tears as she thinks about having to say goodbye to this boy along with everything else that both of them have longed for and not yet gotten.

∆

Deciding that she can no longer hesitate, she reaches down into the cradle and picks up the baby. She sees her hands as clouds. The child is the sunshine pouring down on those clouds.

The woman does not believe she is a kidnapper. She believes she is a savior and protector of life. That Dick and Jane would have wanted it this way.

And this, as you might expect, makes her happy.

∆

This Is How We Say I Love You

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:16:00 +0000

We were fools, my father and I. He was a fool for women. And I was a fool for him.

It started in a saloon with a woman sliding her fingers up the outer edge of my pants pockets. I was three years old and standing on the floor in a thicket of trouser legs and nylon stockings. This woman raised her hands up along the little xylophone of shivering ribs behind my shirt and then she hooked me under my armpits and lifted me onto the bar whereupon my chin fell into her cleavage. Raising my eyes and looking up at her face I could see that it was not my mother’s face. My mother did not look like that and she never would.

The woman was young, but I know now that this was the kind of woman who was never really young. She was painted to be pretty and she smelled of smoke and I could almost taste her perfume as I tried to fit my head in a comfortable place above her breasts. My father was there somewhere, but fixed as I was in her bosom I know longer knew where. Until this woman kissed me on my cheek. Then something happened.

My father appeared from over the top of the woman’s right shoulder and he put his hand on the back of her neck and for a minute all three of us were connected. The woman buried her lips deeper into my face and that’s when I remember thinking the thing that begins and ends this memory. When this woman kissed me, I closed my eyes and found myself believing that it was my father and not this woman whose lips were hidden in my cheek.

Sometimes these days when my wife lowers her book or mutes the TV to look over at me and study some hare-brained, personal theory I’ve just hatched, I want to beat myself in the head until I forget that my father ruined me in this way. Through that practical attitude that women have when they are tagging a man out on his self-pity, I can see that nobody much cares about why I let my father trick me into accepting his lust for women other than my mother. My wife looks at me and laughs using only her eyes, and I know that - between my father and me - I am the bigger of the fools. But then my son Marshall, in all his brilliance and goofiness will wave a perfect math score in my face (as if he believes that this is what will matter between us in the long run), or he’ll sit me down in front of some tilting tower of art he’s built for me out of junk he’s found at the edge of our neighbor’s lawn, and I can see how easy it would be to turn this kid’s desire to love and please me into a smoking cartridge of backfired passion.

My wife gets that my father was a womanizer and a kind of emotional pimp for me. But she’s also told me that – because she loves and understands me so much – she’d bounce me to the curb like a cartoon Tomcat if she ever caught me cheating on her. So we’re all good there; except for this. My wife knows that I won’t cheat on her. In fact, she knows that these days I won’t even let other women get close to me.

Ten years ago I stopped speaking to my father. For a time, it was the best thing I ever did. I’d tell my mother to let me know when he’d be going out so I could stop by and see her and with that little scheme I quit the old man cold turkey. Then about a year ago, my mother called to tell me he had cancer and that it wasn’t looking good. Talk about an emotional pimp. The guy would do anything to get me back.

Looking at it now I don’t like to admit how easily I went along with it for all those years. The truth is that the women of John Tosca, Sr. were good-looking and hard to resist. These women had a veneer of beauty and they were as tempting as soft pillows which could be molded to the head of any man who laid on them. They complimented you in public and they didn’t fight back in private (as might your scorned and jilted wife). As far as I could see back then the only problem with these women was that they were also crazy – crazy, I believed, because they thought that having sex with John Sr. could make him love them.

It took me years to figure out the truth about my father and these women. I certainly didn’t know it that first time in the saloon at three years old. Nor did I even realize it that day years later when my father took me to the beach to introduce me to the second of these women and tell me in unspoken but no uncertain terms that he was fucking her without the express consent of my mother.

You’ve got to hand it to him, my father worked hard to turn himself into someone who could attract the type of women that would have affairs with a married man. I heard guys call my father handsome John. But they flattered him. He wasn’t handsome. He was balding and stooped shouldered and he had nothing much in the way of a chin. His nose was flat and broad, and his lips didn’t fit his face. But none of that – not one bit of it - stopped my father from believing he was beautiful. And that made all the difference. He lovingly tended to himself and he walked the earth as if the earth should be glad that his flat feet trod on her dirty ground. He fluffed and styled his thinning hair. He scissored his mustache until you were drawn to admire it above his thin upper lip. And when his gut started to grow and he couldn’t make it stop, he sucked it in and pinched his shoulders back to the blades, whereupon his chest would get large and his eyes would get bright and his smile would tilt until it turned the crow’s foot above his right cheek into a web of character and charm. God knows after all the work he did you could fall for this guy. God knows I did. God knows that first time at the beach I fell hard.

As I recall my mother had turned her back on my father’s philandering early on. I came to see it as her way of getting even with John Sr. She made the old man work and work at his high-commissioned insurance job to keep her in style in a late model sedan and a large house with her one devoted son, and in this way she could pretend to her friends that this was all she really cared about. Revenge and ego made a potent chemical mix in the social circles where my mother traveled.

So whether or not my mother knew what he was up to when my father put me in the car to take me with him to the beach that day is anybody’s guess. My guess is that my mother saw me being carried off in my oversized 1980s flip flops and day-glow t-shirt and she figured that - one way or the other - she had lost me and there was nothing more she could do about it. I remember waving to her out the car window as we drove away; she was standing on the porch sorting through the mail and she didn’t even look back at me. The feeling I had is that she had been waiting for me to leave with my father for quite some time.

In the car on the way to the beach that morning I figured my father had finally seen some potential in me and that he was taking me alone with him to the beach for the first time to start to try and make something out of me and my joyless lump of a soul. The old man loved the beach; he tanned as if it was a sacrament and the beach was his altar. So on that summer morning of my thirteenth year as my father and I drove into the breeze coming off the shore, I felt as if I was about to be inducted into the priesthood. I had no idea what was coming my way.

She stood out right away, shimmering in the emptiness of low tide even before my father pointed her out to me. This woman was hard to miss. She had laid down a flawless, white bath towel near the edge of the water at the exact point where the sand had started to dry from the retreating ocean, and she was reclining there on her elbows. Her back was arched and her eyes were looking up through moon-sized designer sunglasses into the admiring faces of three young city girls in bikini tops and stringy cut off shorts. Across the scooped neckline of her candy-striped bathing suit she wore a tiered necklace of red and white stones that was never meant for the beach. When one of the girls pointed to the necklace and then leaned down to touch the tip of it nearest the woman’s breasts, I thought I would burst through my swim trunks. And when the girl started fondling the jewelry and the woman arched higher and tilted back her massive head of feathered hair, I opened my mouth and started to stare like an idiot boy with his nose in the flap of a circus tent. That’s when my father called out her name and put a stop to the whole thing.

“June.” At the sound of my father’s voice, the three girls broke off and scattered away. “That’s June,” my father said more quietly, not taking his eyes off her. It was clear from the way John Tosca, Sr. looked over at June when he called her name that he had temporarily forgotten I was there.

June got up from her towel. She fluffed out her hair with one hand, dusted the sand from the arches of her feet with the other, and then she tip-toed toward us backlit by the sun that was still rising in the east. We spent the rest of the morning with her sitting on our blanket, she and my father laughing and making small talk and me laying on my churning stomach reading my Jean Craighead George novel about a boy who leaves his family to move into the woods and build a home in a tree From time to time June would attempt to bring me into the conversation in her own flirty way, tickling my back and asking me about school or some such other inconsequential nonsense. But, even though each touch of her fingers sent my groin burrowing deeper into the sand, I knew what this poor woman was really asking me. She was asking me how I might like it if she were my mother.

My father did nothing to stop June’s unspoken question from hanging out there in the salt air around us. He knew that I didn’t want June to be my mother. Knew that what I really wanted was for her to be my girlfriend. He knew it and that’s what he was counting on.

At one point June got up to go to the bathroom and that’s when my father looked out at the ocean and said all he needed to say to me about June or any other woman like her.

“Some women are just fun to be around and some aren’t, and you’ve got to admit that this June is fun to be around.”

I nodded yes, and with those words about this one woman my father made me complicit and bought my loyalty to him forever, guaranteeing my silence about any woman of his to whom he would ever introduce me. By getting me to admit to myself that I wanted June as much as he did, my father made me his ally and assured it that I would never speak a word about any of this to my mother. Even though I was still a kid, my father knew that I would feel as guilty as he did, simply because I was becoming a man.

When June returned from the bathroom, my father took a quick walk with her to the shoreline and when they got back to our blanket he told me that we would be dropping June off at her apartment on our way home. In the car as we drove, June hung a cigarette out the front passenger window and hummed along with the tape deck. Once we got to her place she blew a kiss to me and then my father and she disappeared up into her apartment for the next hour and a half. The time went by surprisingly quickly given that my father had, for the first time ever, trusted me with the keys to the car so that I could sit alone and listen to the radio.

A couple of years ago, I was working at the rickety kitchen table which is my desk in the unfinished basement where I write freelance for a couple of agencies in New York. The basement is also where Marshall has his desk for homework along with the building toys and other stuff he tinkers with as he takes apart the 21^st century and puts it back together into something that resembles the world as seen through the mind of a twelve year old boy with an IQ roughly double that of his parents. Marshall and I are both down there because the house above us is only five small rooms. And the house above us is only five small rooms owing to the fact that I’m not what you’d call an ‘earner.’ I’m content with my life and my relative failure, but contentment, satisfaction, happiness, ease of living – that whole bag of inner peace which we kid ourselves into thinking we have sewn up tight in our middle age - can be very unreliable. So when I saw that email a couple of years ago while sitting down there at my wobbly table, I suddenly felt anything but content.

I’d almost completely forgotten about Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. Amy Rainey. After we broke up, I used to say her name over and over again until just the sound of it tongue-twisting together like that could make me want to cry with longing. I loved Amy Rainey. But in truth, I have to say that I fell in love with quite a few girls back then.

When Amy’s name popped up in that email, I gasped and said the words ‘my god’ out loud like some guy who’s taken his wife’s Subaru into a body shop to have a dent taken out and then come back to find that they’ve painted it to look like a Porsche he once owned. My audible disbelief brought Marshall to my desk. “What?” Marshall asked, and then he zeroed in on the screen and asked “Who is Amy Rainey?” Who indeed? By that night Marshall had already told his mother and within five minutes she was telling me that I should get back to Amy Rainey just to see what had become of her. Thanks Melissa. And thank you Marshall. You smart-assed little shit.

The truth is I wanted to see Amy Rainey again. But I couldn’t let Melissa or Marshall know that. So I told them both that I had no desire to get in touch with Amy, let alone see her again.

Still, for some reason Mellissa kept teasing me about it until I got a little angry and told her she should leave me alone; that I did not want to see Amy and that was that. But this only made Melissa kiss me on the forehead and laugh at me like she was a little too polite to tell me that I needed to have my head examined. I mean, come on. What married man doesn’t want to see one of his old girlfriends? What man wouldn’t be thrilled if his wife were giving him permission to do it? The truth is I was just trying to prove to Melissa how different I was from my father, and Melissa – god bless her - was just trying to prove to me that she trusted me more than I trusted myself. I was a lucky man to have a wife like Melissa and as soon as she went to bed that night I showed how lucky I was by going down to the basement and replying to Amy’s email.

Within two hours I had set up a time to see Amy and I was feeling really good a couple of days later when I was supposed to meet her again after more than twenty years. Really good, that is, until I actually saw Amy so beautiful and so alive sitting in the window of the Dunkin Donuts. And then I went a little crazy.

Twenty-two years ago on the night that Amy broke off with me for good, I let her off at her apartment and went directly to a club where there was another girl with whom I was also in love. Robin was a bartender at a place called Woodhaven’s and I sat on a stool and waited for her to cash out after which we went back to her place and had sex until Robin got up to make us breakfast at 4 a.m. “I love you, Robin,” I said as she climbed out of bed. But Robin didn’t answer me, preferring to let the sound of eggs cracking into a bowl do the talking for her. I can’t say I blame Robin for not telling me she loved me on that or any other night, nor for the fact that Amy had broken off with me even though I’m sure she really did love me. Though I had fallen in love with each of these girls (and a few more during those years), I think they probably knew better.

Watching Amy sitting in that Dunkin Donuts from inside my car in the parking lot a distance away, behind a ridge of landscaping through which she would have a hard time seeing me, I found myself with a bad feeling about why Amy had gotten in touch with me in the first place. Irrational as it was, I couldn’t help thinking that she was going to lure me out into the open and then ambush me along with every other girl who I ever said I loved. There I would be, brazenly walking across the lot waving at Amy, believing that she had come to see me to tell me how much she missed the times we had together, when suddenly Robin Rizzo and Donna Sherman and Paula Cavanaugh and all the other girls I ever told I loved would emerge from cars all over the parking lot while Amy got up, kicked open the door of the Dunkin Donuts and unfurled a sign that read, “You Never Loved Any of Us!”

And what would I have done then? Would I have tried to tell them that I actually believed that the only thing that separated me from my father was that I had the decency to let myself fall in love with a woman after I had sex with her? Would I have shouted that I understood that women needed love to get to sex and that men needed sex to get to love and that this was a nice little arrangement as long as you weren’t like my father who only needed sex to get to more sex? Would I have tried to calm them all down by letting them know that – in any case – I was now happily married and in love with my wife? Would that have made them feel any better? Would it have helped if I told them that I believed I was not my father simply because I could actually fall in love over and over again?

I looked at Amy softened by the glare of the window while I sat in my car shivering from my guilty delusion, and all I could think of was what my father would have done in this situation. He would have waltzed into that Dunkin Donuts and seduced Amy with a good haircut and crooked smile. He would have put his manicured hands around her and told her any god damn thing he needed to tell her – that she was everything to him, that he was going to marry her, that she was meant to have his children – anything, as long as she would let him fuck her. The real problem was that – at that very moment - I also wanted to be able to do the same exact thing with Amy.

When Amy finally got tired of waiting for me, she rose from the table, got up and left. Just got in her car and drove away. For her, it seemed as easy as could be.

After that things changed. I had not seen my father for years by then but after I saw Amy that day I wanted nothing more to do with any woman who might even make me think of my father and what I might do because I was his son. Melissa and Marshall saw the difference in me, saw how I avoided social situations, how I stayed in the basement and worked much of the time. But they never asked about it, and I never told them. How could I tell them that I was avoiding women I might fall in love with simply because of how much I loved them too?

It wasn’t until after I was out of college for a couple of years that trouble finally caught up with my father and me. Thinking back on it now, when it came our way it wasn’t even all that hard to miss. I could see just from the way she sat on the bar stool and crossed her legs with that sharp right knee pinched up so high above her left that she was going to be some kind of trouble.

She was taller than any of the other women I had met and she had a hungry look, like someone who had been starving herself so she would more effectively be able to devour what it was that she wanted when it came her way. Plus she was older than any of the other women my father had introduced me to those times between my thirteenth and, what was then, my twenty-fifth year. John Sr. was by then in his late forties but this woman was older than that, pushing fifty-five, maybe pushing it closer to sixty. Still, she packed up her tall frame very well - slim waist, big chest, high cheekbones, long, wiry legs - and when she drilled her eyes into my eyes, I knew that this woman was taking this kind of care of herself because she was looking for something she had never been able to find. I also found myself thinking that she could probably do serious damage to a man when she didn’t get what it was that she was looking for.

This bar I had been working in as a waiter was my prize for an English degree that my father had largely paid for during the six years it took me to get it. So I wasn’t feeling all that good about having had to work here for the last year and a half, especially when my father was around. Still I had my own apartment by then and I was pretty much supporting myself, so when my father came in with Sondra that night I was ready to prove to him that I was just as much of a man as he was. Sondra, on the other hand, was ready to prove to my father and me that she was just as much of a woman as we were men.

Between that first time at the beach with June and that night with Sondra, my father had found two or three other occasions to put me in front of these women in his life. Not all that many as I think back on it now, but more than enough for me to get the point of all this. There was that time John Sr. summoned me one midnight deep in the winter to help him jump start his car which had died in front of his latest girlfriend’s apartment, and we couldn’t get it started and ended up sitting at a kitchen table with this woman drinking hot cocoa like we were the fun house mirror version of June and Ward and Beaver Cleaver. And there was that insurance company picnic where my mother didn’t come and my father sat me down at a bench and let little curly-headed Shirley what’s-her-name - the executive secretary to my father the regional VP - tell me what a great and caring and powerful man John Sr. was and how she “just loved” working for him, all while my father stood at her back with his hands on her shoulders. There was even that one night in high school when I found myself in a park singing grunge rock songs along with a couple of my guitar playing friends, and my father actually walked by with a women and they applauded and whistled at our depressing and badly-tuned aria of pain.

So by that night when my father walked in with Sondra I had pretty much figured out what my father was doing all these years. With each of those women he put in front of me, he was both seeking my blessing and asking me to understand him. I think he believed that if his own son could accept and identify with these terrible betrayals of his mother – a son who, after all, had been sent to him by God and who was already complicit in God’s plan for him– than it must be that God would also understand why he was fucking other women. You’d have to admit that the guy did have a set of balls on him.

In the bar that night, Sondra started drinking the minute my father started buying. And after I had run down my side work and stuck my punch card into the clock next to the walk in freezer, I started drinking one-for-one right along with them. After a while we left and walked the three blocks to a late night place that my father knew and when that wasn’t enough for them we staggered to a dimly lit, all night bodega and bought a bottle of scotch and a six pack of off-brand club soda to take back to my two room walk up. As odd as this situation was becoming, until we got to my apartment there was only one thing that seemed just a little wrong to me – just one little oddity that I caught winking at me from time-to-time through the heat waves of my fuming alcohol buzz. While my father and I got drunk and drunker, Sondra looked to me like she hadn’t touched a drop.

Once we were settled into my apartment, my father immediately started rambling on about what a great son I was, how much I meant to him, how much he loved me - liquored emotionality flowing from John Sr. like piss from a race horse. I could tell that he was doing it for the benefit of Sondra; nothing like this ever came out of his mouth when we were alone, drunk or sober. But Sondra, dear girl that she was, just sat quietly across from us, listening to my father blather and smiling like she was waiting for a child to talk himself to sleep. I kept glancing at Sondra and each time I did her smile had gotten a little larger, her mouth opened wider, her teeth a bit farther apart exposing more of the dark inside of her throat. Drunk as I was, the more I looked at Sondra, the more I thought that she might be getting ready to walk over and sink her teeth into me.

“Johnny, you make me so proud of you,” my father gushed. “Sondra, don’t I tell you how proud this kid makes me?”

Sondra nodded at my father and then removed the thin, beaded sweater she had been wearing over her strapless dress. With her shoulders exposed I saw a mature, chiseled angle to her body that was kind of attractive while at the same time being more than a little frightening for a young man like me alone in his apartment with his father and his father’s mistress.

“This kid … this kid … he’s really gonna be something,” the old man bellowed.

What exactly I was going to be, John Sr. couldn’t have told you. This was largely because - as he knew - I had no firm plans to be much of anything at that point in my life. Still, that didn’t stop my father from kissing me with wet lips and stinking breath just below my right eye.

“Okay, get up off the couch now Johnny and let your father lay down and close his eyes for a few minutes.”

I got up and let him raise his feet onto the stained couch that also pulled out to be my bed. And now there was no place in the apartment left for me to sit, the only other chair being the one Sondra was on - a springy, three-legged recliner that I had found in the street and propped up on its back left side with a patio block prosthetic. When my father closed his eyes and started to snore lightly, Sondra shrugged her naked shoulders and then patted the seat of the recliner next to her folded legs, slightly rocking the sad old chair with her invitation and sending me into the kitchen to hide.

But that didn’t stop Sondra. Once in the kitchen I could hear the leatherette whoosh of the recliner’s seat cushion as it inflated and - after what seemed like minutes inside my liquored time warp - Sondra and her naked shoulders appeared in the kitchen doorway. Turning away from her, I muscled up as much sobriety as I could and pretended to look for something inside my doorless and nearly empty kitchen cabinets.

“Your father really does think the world of you,” Sandra said, clear and ominous as a bell on a foggy night. “You really are a sweet boy. And you’re so good to your father.”

I turned around to look at Sondra, starting to sober up and not liking what I found myself thinking. For her part, Sondra lightly kicked off her heels, sending them into a corner near the stove and then she slipped over the linoleum until she was about two feet from me, backing me loosely against the sink. Though she had been just a little taller than me before this, with her heels off we were now just about the same height. This, I abruptly realized, was the whole idea behind her taking them off in the first place.

“What is it you said you wanted to do with your life?” Sondra asked. And this was odd since I’d never mentioned it to her and – even if I had – this did not seem like the time to get into it.

“I’m not really sure … I like to write.”

“Well, I’ll bet you’d be good at that. But you know what else I’d bet you’d be good at? I’d bet you’d be great at acting … you certainly are handsome enough.”

I nodded and felt as if was I about to lose control of my bodily functions. Sondra could see that I had nowhere to go from here and that’s when she closed the gap between us. Stepping in to me, she put her hands around my waist, and then she opened that large mouth of hers and kissed me until I felt like I was being pulled inside her.

And, here again, I lost my mind. I closed my eyes tight like I was trying to hold out brilliant sunlight and I kissed Sondra back, my hands blindly tugging at a dress for which I could not seem to find a way in. There in my insanity I remember that Sondra was very helpful. When she felt me struggling, she neatly dropped the top of her bodice to reveal her breasts while simultaneously – and may I say expertly – she unbuckled my pants with a single one of her hands. It wasn’t until she started pushing my head and body down toward the floor, until I was about even with her beaten down breasts and surprisingly hard nipples that I caught sight of myself in the reflecting glass of the oven door and became overwhelmed with a feeling of sorrow, as if it might be tears and not sperm that would soon be leaking from me.

Who I was, what I was doing, what was going to happen to me and exactly what my future would be all came rushing in on me at that moment. Kneeling on the floor, Sondra getting ready to come down there with me, I suddenly knew what love was and I knew what love was not in a way I’ve never been as clear on since. I didn’t actually cry, though I may have whimpered as I sprung up, buckled my pants and ran out to the street without a coat or jacket, leaving my father and Sondra behind to explain god knows what to god knows who.

They must have gone to a hotel. Or maybe my father just took Sondra back to that hotly lit and artificially scented place in which I imaged she lived. Whatever happened to them, when I got back to my apartment Sondra and my father were gone.

After that I never again met another of my father’s women. After that, I started avoiding my father more and more, using every excuse I could think of to stay clear. After that I met and married Melissa and three years later Marshall was born. After that, this was how I said I love you.

In truth, I often wonder how it is a father is supposed to say I love you to a son. Most of us turn out to be clanking lug heads who thump our way around our boys with shop talk and sharp tools, deploying an increasing array of sports equipment or bad jokes until we hit on something that kind of works. I don’t know one single man who does it well from beginning to end. And after all that’s happened to me, the best I can tell you is how I said I love you to my own son on a hot day in July when I decided that my father and I were finished.

Marshall was outside crawling around on the little kennel of grass that we call our backyard, and Melissa and I were hovering over him like sheepdogs tending strays. Marshall was not thinking of us, nor was he thinking of the effect he was about to have on our lives. My boy had just turned one and he was out there in his disposable diaper and snap-crotched t-shirt, his chubby thighs and pork chop feet poking out the bottom of the leg holes and chafing against soft spears of grass as he scooted toward my father who was waving and waiting to receive him with open arms.

By this time, John Sr. and I had really been little more than civil to each other for the past five years. Even still, I let my father see his grandson from time-to-time, doling out my kid to my old man like John Sr. was a heroin addict and I was the keeper of the methadone at a clinic. I wanted John Sr. to see the job I was doing with my own son. I just didn’t want him so close, so often that he might have a chance to steal the kid’s love from me in the way a junky will steal anything from you that he can use to get himself high. So far my father had given me no reason not to trust him around my son. No reason at all except for all those women he had been with over the past 30 years.

“Look at this boy go. Look at him crawl. Come on Marshall, get over here.”

I didn’t like the way my father was enjoying this. I didn’t say anything about it.

“This kid is a thoroughbred. How can he not be with these blood lines, right Melissa?”

My wife smiled and nodded and tilted her hand toward my mother who was on our back porch smoking and blowing it into the sky. I pretended to play sheepdog again and reached down to course correct my son so he was actually now just a little out of true with the point at which my father was standing.

“I’ll tell you Johnny this kid is going to break hearts … Over here Marshall. I’m over here ...” My father shifted position so he was once again in line with Marshall who crawled toward him all the faster now. I felt myself resisting the urge to pick up Marshall and carry him off.

“That a boy, you got it Marshall.” Marshall squealed and covered the rest of the turf to reach my father in a sprint that left my old man breathless and apparently unguarded as he lifted Marshall up high and into the sun, yelling, “When the ladies see you, Marshall, we won’t be able to keep them away from you.”

I looked at my father and he looked at me, tender-faced and wagging his head slightly as if he were trying desperately to say something that would persuade me to do other than what I was about to do. But I did it, anyway. I stumbled toward my father and Marshall at exactly the speed the earth might have been moving had it not stopped beneath my feet. I took my son from my father’s arms and I walked past my mother on the porch and through the peeling French doors into the house. And that was how I said I love you to Marshall on that hot day in July - by deciding in a single moment that I would never again see my father or let my father see my son.

There were no words, no hesitations, no sorrowful glances. Not on my part anyway. Though in that last glimpse I caught of John Sr. for what would be the next 10 years he looked to me like someone had beaten him black and blue before cutting him in places that would slowly drain the blood from his body little-by-little over time until he had been completely bled dry. So I guess I won. So what?

When my mother asked me why I wouldn’t see my father any longer, why I wouldn’t let him into my house or allow him to see my son. I told her she’d have to ask my father that question. If she did and what he might have told her, I don’t care to know.

I got used to living without John Sr. pretty quickly in the years after that. If most men believe that sooner or later they have to kill off their fathers, I guess I just believed I had a better reason to do it than most. I actually felt pretty proud of myself for those ten years that I lived without my father. Proud and pleased right up until the instant I found out that my father actually would be dying and that soon I really would go on living without him.

Still, I can’t exactly say what it was that caused me to change my mind about seeing my father again after my mother called me a year ago with the news. There is one thing that I kept thinking about, however. It was a single moment when I was ten years old when my father was just about perfect.

I had started riding my bike a mile every morning, up a hill, past some old factory buildings, on my way to school. This lone bike riding in a poor section of town made me feel free every day until one morning when I found myself lumbering up that hill in the pouring rain. With water dripping from my slicker and running down the legs of my pants, the front tire of my bike skittered into a rut in the sidewalk and my freedom and I went flying over the handlebars into a sopping patch of grass and mud that bordered the street. Down there on the ground I could feel the parts trucks stinging me with evil chuckles of rain each time one of them flashed by on their way into the factory lot and I truly believed that at any minute one of these motorized monsters was going to slip their chain and crush my skull into mash. I was a mess of a boy with bloody hands and nothing left of my pride and I felt certain I was about to die. I froze and started to cry, moving toward a full on panic. If those two hands of my fathers had not picked me up from the ground where he found me as he passed by on his way to work, if he had not pulled me into the dry front seat of his car and let me slosh rain water and tears on his suit, if at that moment he had not told me that he would stay with me as long as I needed – all day if I needed it – I don’t think I would have found the strength to see him again in that last year of his life. In the end I guess it was just as simple as that.

We got along pretty well in those months that I took to him to medical clinics and hospitals, keeping track of things for him and driving him to restaurants where he could still hold down the food, escorting him into barber shops and shoe stores where all the guys liked him and knew him by name. Though you might think otherwise, we didn’t talk about anything truly important during those times together and I actually found it easier to be with him than I had ever found it before. He never said a word about what had happened between us and he never asked for my forgiveness. It was just as well, his silence about it and the things I saw during those months were more than enough for me.

One day as I was pulling my old man’s steadily loosening flesh out of my car to walk him into a place we were going for breakfast, his day planner fell off his lap and onto the sidewalk. Why he still carried this thing, what important appointments he still had to keep track of (save for one last one that I knew about), I really had no idea. Anyway, this ancient planner with his “Regional VP” title etched in white onto the black leather now laid on the sidewalk and when I reached down for it a bookmark fell out. This 2x4 inch slip of heavy paper lay face down on the concrete and when I picked it up I could see that it had The Our Father printed on the front: The Lord’s Prayer, the gold standard of forgiveness. John Sr. never went to church. John Sr. was as profane in the life I saw him lead as ever a man could be, tempted away from the finer movements of the spirit day-by-day, dollar-by-dollar and woman-by-woman. John Sr. must have known that he was going to have a hard time getting into any heaven he could envision but when I picked up the card to put it back, John Sr. told me to keep it and put it in my pocket. It was as close as I would ever get to seeing that my father was asking someone - maybe even me - for forgiveness.

During those final weeks there came a night when my father called me up at home and asked me if I could pick him up from his house and just drive him around for a while. When I got there and got him in the car, he told me that he had lied to me and that he didn’t just want to drive around, that there really was someplace that he wanted me to take him. He knew I didn’t like the sound of it but he didn’t seem ashamed nor did he hold back in telling me the truth. “You don’t have to come in with me Johnny, I just need the ride. Please.” I held the car key in my hand for so long without putting it into the ignition that John Sr. finally opened his door to get out. That’s when I shoved the key in the ignition and started the car. He shut the door and I drove him the 15 miles out of town without saying another word until he had shown me the way out to that old house in the middle of nowhere.

The place looked haunted out there in the dark, dimly lit as it was by the wicked glow of a fly flecked bug light on the porch. The shingles sagged against the cinderblock foundation and the windows were all drawn down tight with snap spring window shades. I couldn’t help wondering how many of my father’s old girlfriends might actually be rattling around inside. Was it just one or had June and Sandra and all the others gathered together tonight in a single place to say goodbye? Were Amy Rainey and Donna Rizzo in there too? Was it a farewell party that everyone had been invited to except me? Had I been invited and actually not realized it? I have to say that I was desperate to know the truth of who was in that house.

And yet there was no way I was going in. Nor was I even going to help my father out of the car and up the front steps. You might think it was agony for me to watch him find his own way in. After all, here was a man in the last stages of a disease that was eating him from the inside and that would kill him in less than a week, a man who hadn’t walked a single step on his own for days now. That I would pity him as he walked the path and looked for things to hang onto - a post mailbox, the stouter branches of a hibiscus bush, a porch railing that shook when he landed his hand on it with his full weight – is an honest mistake you might make. That I would be compelled to get out of the car and run to his aid is just what anyone with a heart would have felt they needed to do. And as proud as I would have been of anyone else who did that, on that night I was more than happy to watch my father take this walk alone. Call me an asshole, a stone-hearted fucker, a sadistic piece of shit of a son without an ounce of love left for his father. Call me what you will, I found myself thrilled with the old man’s struggle. I knew that there would be plenty of time left for agony and sorrow and at that moment I couldn’t have felt more at peace.

So sanguine was I that when father got himself up the steps and onto the porch I actually even shifted my position a little so I could get a better look. I had a nice view now as he knocked on the door and I was settling in to see who would open it when my hand brushed my father’s planner on the seat next to me. There would have been no reason for him to bring it into the house with him and there was no reason for me to even look at it except that I did and when I did I saw a white envelope sticking out. For a moment I didn’t think anything of it and then I realized that whatever was inside this envelope was meant for whoever was inside that house. I couldn’t stop myself from pulling it open and when I did I found a greeting card. It was one of those sap filled thank you notes where the only words that make any sense are the ones that you write in them. And though there was no name written above the printed words inside the card, there was a name written at the bottom. The name was “John” and the words written over it were “I love you.”

Now maybe God would forgive John Tosca Sr. for loving whoever was in that house. Maybe John Sr. actually did love this woman. Maybe he loved all of them. So maybe God would understand and he would forgive my father for loving over and over again like this. Maybe. I just knew that I never would.

Last night I was putting Marshall to bed and he started asking me questions about my father. He’s at the age now where this seems to have become critical for him. Still because Marshall is who he is, so much wiser than his years and much too smart sometimes for his own good, his questions can drive you a little nuts and pull you into places where there are no easy answers.

“Did your father make you laugh?”

“Do you think your father was smart?”

“When you were my age, what kind of things did you want to do with your father?”

For God’s sake, Marshall, I wanted to tell him, just go to bed now, will you? Just go to bed and get some rest. Please. Please … my broken boy … just rest.

Luniverse

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:45:00 +0000

“ … Is the universe we are living in the only one? What if, when you got into your car this morning to drive to work, another you in another universe got into a different car and drove to the beach instead? Seems hard to believe and maybe more like science fiction, but some theoretical physicists say we might exist in one of many universes, or in a ‘multiverse’, as they call it …”

Ira Flatow introducing the author of The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos on National Public Radio’s Science Friday

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 8:30 a.m.

Hi. Are you one of the other me’s that I’ve been hearing so much about? I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical about this new Facebook Multiverse App, but with my wife Janice finding so many of her other selves in parallel universes I thought I’d try it out. Anyway, I’m getting into my car to go to work right now, so - if you’re me … or I’m me - write back when I get a chance. I’d love to find out more about myself.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 8:30 a.m.

Yep, you found me. I was just about to get in my car to go the beach when I saw my message. I’m actually just one of my other me’s. Not sure how many other me’s are out actually there, but last time I checked on Facebook I counted 574 me’s in 575 different universes (not sure why there’s no Bert Esposito in that 575th universe except that I might still be embarrassed about getting drunk at Bobby Klosterman’s barbecue and trying to unhook Melba Puccini’s bikini top). Anyway, I’ll be home from the beach by the time I get home from work so write me back if I want to (unless I write me back first in which case I won’t have to).

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:30 p.m.

Hi. I just got home from work and it was no day at the beach, let me tell me. By the way Freddy at the courtesy desk told me to tell me that the next time I go to the beach when I’m supposed to be at work in a parallel universe he’s going to talk to Mr. Owens about it. Don’t worry, I didn’t say anything about it to Mr. Owens (because after all I was at work), but I would watch myself If I were me. I’m just saying. BTW – Don’t say anything to Janice about that thing with Melba. She really means nothing to me, but I don’t have to tell me that, do I.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:30 p.m.

No Bert, my secrets safe with me, and I wouldn’t feel guilty about Melba if I were me. All 575 of me know that Janice doesn’t really understand the real me. And speaking of guilt, tell Freddy that if I want to take a day off and go to the fucking beach, I’ll take a day off and go to the fucking beach. I gotta tell me that it was a lot easier to take a god damn day off before theoretical physicists figured out a way to break through to parallel realities. And by the way, just wait till I tell Mr. Owens about the time that Freddy spent three hours with that hooker at the sports book in Atlantic City while he was at the courtesy desk in a parallel universe trying to help that Pakistani woman exchange her deep fat fryer.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:31 p.m.

Bert, it sounds to me like I’ve still got a little leftover anger from my childhood. Isn’t it time that I outgrew that? And, BTW, don’t forget that revenge never got me anywhere (remember Ernie Kelly and that time with the elephant dung at the petting zoo for handicapped animals? Just think about that mess for a minute and tell me if you still want to get even with Freddie at work).

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:31 p.m.

Bert, I’d really appreciate it if I’d stop patronizing me. Who do I think I am anyway? Do I think I’m so much better than me? How about that time at Sarah Berman’s house when her little sister found me in their upstairs bathroom fondling her mother’s nylons. I forgot about that, didn’t I? Remember, Bert, if I don’t forgive me, who will?

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:32 p.m.

Bert, I really don’t appreciate my tone. And how dare I bring up that time at Sara Berman’s house. I thought that that was just between me and me. We’ll I guess I’m seeing the real Bert now. I have to say that I never did like me from the first time I met me. Look, don’t try to get in touch with me anymore. I’ll write me first if I want to hear from me.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:33 p.m.

Bert, don’t be this way. Think about how much I love me. Don’t you remember when I took me out to get drunk after Sara Berman dumped me? Remember how I held my head over the toilet all night so I wouldn’t break my neck and then how I sat up all night crying with me? Doesn’t that mean anything to me?

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:33 p.m.

I told me not to contact me anymore.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:34 p.m.

Bert, please don’t be this way.

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:34 p.m.

Bert???

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:35 p.m.

Bert???

Bert Esposito, July 1, 2067, 5:35 p.m.

Hi. Are you one of the other me’s that I’ve been hearing so much about? I have to admit that I was pretty skeptical about this new Facebook ‘Multiverse’ App, but then I checked on Facebook and counted 574 me’s in 575 different universes …

Pla.net

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:13:00 +0000

Right now, from where you are sitting, if you want to spin the globe and spy on the beggars in the streets of Mumbai, you can spin the globe and spy on the beggars in the streets of Mumbai. Should there be a lady you’d like to meet in a dark room in Saint Petersburg, that lady will appear to meet you tonight. That old drum-tight circle of life as we know it no longer applies. So fly on a theoretical wing of relativity to stare at that woman teaching you from a classroom in Paris then smash your mind’s reason until you are admiring the bronzed face of a tycoon to whom you’ve been connected - through a friend’s friend’s friend - on his mile wide terrace at the edge of a private beach in Hilton Head.

Touch the keys. Swipe the screen. Tap your finger, and go.

A generation of master minds has labored to bring us the world in just this way. And they have created it all from a lace of mathematical magic and the tiny truth of electrons flaming through an infinite array of atomic eyes. We don’t know how or when they did it. All we know is that they did and living now is no longer what it used to be.

Connect through a billion cameras. Network yourself into a million lives. Stare through an ocean of screens. Be a part of everything while you become a part of nothing at all.

That son of yours in college has linked to a webcam hanging from a streetlamp in Rome. In the morning light of his dorm, he watches Italians walk home from work through the exhaust of evening. A girl with an exotic sway walks toward the lamp and, looking up at the camera, she smiles directly into your boy’s eyes. He melts and out loud he tells the girl that he loves her - then he stops in mid breath when her older lover sneaks in from out of frame and thrills her with the reality of his kiss.

Your aging mother finds herself in the life of some suddenly new friend to whom she and hundreds of others have connected through that flip top box which sits on the kitchen table. This new friend, a woman your mother’s own age, posts videos of her children, her grandchildren, the old man outside her window who picks tomatoes from his garden, the days she spent last summer on a cruise in Alaska. One day this new friend stops posting videos and she no longer respond and your mother begins to grieve. Is she dead? You whisper. Was she was ever really alive?

Tonight, when you finish here, you will Google the earth to look down from space onto the home where you were raised. The porch will sag more than you remember it. And you will try to push the bar on the screen to get a better look. But the more you push and the closer you get to the home you left a quarter century ago, the more you flatten it until it ultimately sinks into the ground and disappears. This is only what you should expect from something that doesn’t really exist in the first place.

So you’ll stumble up away from the planet, fly back into your mind and heart, and you’ll fire up your camera and open up a screen so you can see your sister who lives miles and miles from you. The last living and closet trace you have to your parents who are long, long gone. She arrives and the grey wires of her head jerking and poking this way and that makes you want to cry from longing and loss and the real, living, passage of time . And so you weep, just a little. And when your sister sees it she says I wish I was there to hug you. And then you do it, both of you. You hug the screen.

Today you can see the traffic and the human rage on just about any choked street from anywhere you are anywhere in the world. You can learn Tai Chi from the sweep of a tutor’s hands in a studio ten thousand miles away. Should you be one who needs this sort of thing, you can even connect and share secrets with someone so disconnected from you that neither of you really exist. But that’s the point. You may get something from all this. But it won’t be flesh and blood. It won’t be living as it we have known it to be.

Someday out of a desire for connection you will spin the planet and you will root around until you find a home and descend into a room where you pull up just the right angle to find the only connection that is left to you – the image of another person who has spun the planet and rooted around to find a home and descend into a room where they have pulled up just the right angle to see your face looking back at them looking back at you.

And if you think reality is strange today – that the world is too much too bear and sometimes you can’t seem to believe what is happening all around you – wait until then.

And if you believe there may only be a thin veil between this life and the life of the hereafter, imagine what will happen when what we know of the hereafter becomes just another image on your screen.

Imagine when you are staring into the face of God and he is staring back at you wondering what we have made out of this reality he gave us.

To You Who Will Follow

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 16:06:00 +0000

You know who you are.

Starting as a child you sat for those standardized tests and you took them well. Very well, indeed. In high school and college you excelled, impressing the intellects and powerbrokers with your brash grasp of facts and your sharp tongue. You used all the right words at all the right times. And you rose fast out of school and into a newly ordered world, honed as you were by the algorithmic tutoring of the video games and programmed electronics on which you were suckled very nearly from the day you were born.

Then one day - let’s call it a day not too long ago - you arrived in a place where you were in charge of men and women, some nearly twice your age, all of them eagerly anticipating your reputation and your brilliance. And they looked at you and they waited. And after not too long they knew one thing that you did not. They knew that as smart as you were you had no idea what you were doing and they wondered how, in God’s name, you got to be where you are today.

Put simply, you had not yet learned that the truest measure of intelligence is humility. You just cannot understand how anything you think is right can ever be wrong. Nor can you ever believe that any idea you have ever had might ever have been had by anyone one else but you. And all that would be okay in a well-ordered world where, in those arrogant moments of youth, we are handed enough rope to hang ourselves with the surprising tensile strength of our over-wound egos.

The problem is that somehow you have made it to a place where you have been given enough rope not only to hang yourself but to loop it twice around the neck of everyone else who works with you. You, yes you, you brash young thing. You are enthusiastically throwing the rope attached to our necks over the lights in the conference room, about to kick out the chairs from under all of us. Only now, because the world values your vanity and youth over any wisdom or common sense, when you strangle us all there is no one in the room who has the power to stop you before you turn out the lights.

Yes, I am afraid. But I’m also laughing my head off. The conversations you have with us and the language you use to advance your career are a study in American comedy. Only in America, with our low self esteem subconsciously buried under our self importance, would you be able to use words and ideas that sound real, but mean less than nothing at all.

. . . Going forward, if we can find the bandwidth and acquire the resources we’ll be able to drill down to a set of deliverables that sweat our assets and create enough synergy for an internal paradigm shift. Let’s not forget that we need to carpet bomb the competition and wow our customers while ramping investment and motivating stakeholders. The bottom line here is to give the team a heads up that we’re about to open the kimono and create some visibility in order to think outside the box and put ourselves in the right mindset to push the envelope and get in the ballpark so we can hit a home run. My goal is to empower each of you to fill the strategic gaps and facilitate an enterprise wide strategic fit . . .

We nod our heads as if we understand. Then we go outside and laugh until our eyes fill with tears of pity. Even if we have no idea what you’re talking about we still know what you need. You need us to save you.

Now I ‘m not saying I’m better than you. Nor will you ever hear me say that I’m wiser than you because I’m older. The truth is that because we’re all human and imperfect there’s really not all that much difference between us. Except for this. Before I open my mouth, I open my heart.

It may surprise you to learn that the people sitting around you in that conference room aren’t motivated by how smart you are; they’re motivated by how much you care. Charles over there may spend a little too much time slapping up sticky notes to remind himself of things he should be able to remember, but he’s the most honest man alive and if you start to think about him as a person, he might just put up a sticky note to remind him to do something that will make you look like a genius. Stephanie who just sat down with her second bagel of the morning can be a bitch sometimes, but just throw a compliment her way once in a while and she’ll stay at her desk all weekend living on food left behind in the office refrigerator just so she can get you a promotion. And, Michele and Kevin over in the corner, well let’s just say that no matter how much Red Bull they drink they run on human kindness, and when you stop talking long enough to listen to their point of view you might find out that they have an idea or two that could save your job. Yes, caring about us before you tell us what you think might make you feel a little dumb at first, but it could be the smartest thing you ever did.

The truth is we know how smart you are. But we also know that you’re just a scared little child, afraid of making a mistake. Afraid that if you stop trying to prove how smart you are the world will leave you behind. Well guess what, my friend – in the end that makes you just like the rest of us. Sooner or later the world is going to leave all of us behind.

So while you’re here and in charge there’s something we need you to do. We need you to remember that while you think we’re following you, you are really following us. Left behind to do it right or do it wrong after we’re gone. And as much as we don’t like it at this moment, in this conference room, the future is in your hands.

So please, don’t screw it up.

Your Father and Mine

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 17:28:00 +0000

It started small. Coming deep from a place of innocent courage which only a young man can feel and then only for a whisker of time. With a baby to feed and a home to protect, a wife to serve and vows to keep, one night he brings home a small fiberglass case within which rests the false hope of an amended constitution. Barely a quarter of an inch at the mouth of the bore, it is encased in custom cut foam with six shafts carved in for the bullets. There is oil to grease the spark and a cute little brush to keep it clean. This piece fits in his hand like the jaw bone of a small animal and he believes he will he never need more than this talisman to keep other animals from his door.

Starting small in this way, who would deny this man his sanity or his right to be safe and free? To know him is to love him. And if you understand the seeds of his reason then you understand his actions and what he might do next.

He is only your father and mine, a man who loves us so much that he would kill another man to save us.

But then his family begins to get larger and his work hours get longer and the pay checks don’t stretch as far and the taxes the government are taking are killing him. There are people of color moving into the neighborhood and men of terror kicking in the doors of the airplanes on which his friends and family fly. The government uses his money to protect the civil rights of criminals and third world thugs while his youngest son waits patiently for his older brother to outgrow his next pair of shoes. He remembers a time when as a young boy he collected stamps and coins, baseball cards and toy soldiers. And he thinks, why not. His hoarding served him well in the past, vesting him with control and a sense of power. He knows how obsession can bring focus and readiness and so it only makes sense to begin to collect again.

He is already well into middle age when he walks into a local gun mart to begin his collection in earnest. He wants to build wisely. But it doesn’t take long for him to see that if you can crave one gun you should crave them all. Sir, if you don’t care about accuracy and sheer stopping power is your aim, you can do no better than the 12 gauge pump action over and under. Then again if distance and precision are your goal - owing, let’s say, to a small group of armed men you need to stop at the crest the hill 100 yards from your home – well then you’ll want the hunter’s Westchester with a self-sighting scope and a modified clip. On the other hand for personal protection on those family outings, the 9 millimeter, with ten in the bank and one in the chamber, goes a long way toward showing the bad guys who’s boss and letting your wife and kids know that you’re the man (put it on our wife’s night stand and you might even get laid tonight). If however - and I can’t sell it to you here - but if, god forbid, you should find yourself in one of those end-of-the-world situations where you need to set up perimeter fire (where you need to be both first and last), then I would recommend you check into the American Eagle assault; air cooled and rated at 20 rounds per second I’ve seen this little monster cut a pine tree in half in just under a minute. You can call this guy I know but don’t tell him you know me. Breathlessly, he hands over his driver’s license and speedily his background is checked after which a cart is stacked with boxes of weapons and holsters and straps. Two shopping bags full of ammunition are then piled on top, and a stock boy is dispatched to help him haul it all to his car. In the quiet of his front seat he sighs and grins and picks up his cell phone to buy the American Eagle. He wants that too and only hopes that he can also buy enough bullets at one time to last him for the rest of his life.

He is only your father and mine, and he loves his home so much that he could kill a crowd of people to save it.

For two years thereafter at night when his family is asleep, he goes to a room he’s etched out at the back of his garage and he counts and polishes, cleans, stacks and dreams, watching his collection grow bullet by bullet, piece by piece, month by month, his face glowing in the light of a halogen desk lamp. He seldom fires his guns, preferring to conserve his ammunition, but when he does, out in the woods in a place where no one ever goes, he sees himself as the last good man on earth, his wife and sons trailing behind him in his righteous footsteps. He loves the feeling of quiet freedom that comes over him as he fires – single fire, rapid fire, cascades of fire – parading explosions of liberty crashing against his brain pan, helping him think more clearly and more evenly then he ever can at home or at work, giving him the strength to endure what he now sees as the insane laws of an increasingly insane land. Then one day, just back from the woods, he turns on his TV and he too begins to go just a little insane.

There at home, within his flat screen, he finds politicians smugly rattling the swords of law, one of them loudly calling for a limit to the amount of ammunition one man can hold in the pockets of his person or the privacy of his private property. At a time when unbalanced ex-college students and disgruntled factory workers are being sucked in by a climate of political hate only to be extruded into America wrapped in belts of ammunition and pondering which congresswomen or senator they should murder, this politician is simply suggesting that it might make sense not to give these men or women enough bullets to kill an entire mall full of people. But these are our father’s bullets they’re talking about and by now his stocks of munitions have become that which makes him who he is today. Take them away en mass and you would rip out his wisdom and his soul. His very right to be.

Slowly he feels his self separating in two. He is a madman standing side-by-side with the loving husband and father wondering which one of them is real. Forcing his hands to work for both these selves he gets to a computer and finds the phone number of his senator. He dials the phone and when it is answered by a young and eager intern, our father is both pleased and terrified by the man who starts to scream into the phone. He startles the intern so much that there is momentary silence. Then suddenly he begins once more, this time more slowly.

Son, I am a father and I could be your father and the day our government tells me how many bullets I can and cannot buy is the day I can no longer be your father. Do you understand? Do you know how many guns I own? Do you believe in god? Why would the senator let this happen? Why would he limit my right to be free? I am an American. I will not be punished – my family and loved ones will not be punished - for the acts of criminals and crazy people. Let me tell you, son, right now I can understand why someone would want to kill a president or a member of congress or a judge. I can truly and goddamn well understand it. Yes sir son, I can really see how some people might start to feel that you and the rest of our government are the real enemy …

And then he stops. The selves have separated again but this time the loving father has been watching the madman. And he is frightened of himself.

He is only your father and mine, and he loves his country so much that he is afraid he might bring down our government to save it.

And Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan each say they loved their countries. And so did John Wilkes Booth and he was a father too. And John Hinkley and Jared Loughner each loved someone or something so much that they would kill to have it. And all of them had fathers who loved them. And through each of them runs a line to each of us. And through each of these assassins holding a gun or two or more, runs a line to all those fathers who have loved us so much that they would kill to save us.

But that does not make them right. And that does not make us free.

They Were Done

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:59:00 +0000

They were done for now and they were looking for what came next. The unlocked cars had been ransacked of the cash they found tucked inside shifter consoles; cameras and purses ripped from where they had been shoved under passenger seats. They had swept by all the vehicles on the second level of the garage to see if any fool had left their key in the ignition so they might joy ride up and down the ramps, but no keys were found. They had sat dialing numbers on the black phone inside the attendant’s booth until they got a woman of any age at the other end of the line - and if she sounded old they told her that her husband was dead and if she sounded young they told her they wanted to fuck her in various ways - but now they were done with that too. The cash they could skim from the cars that would check out two dollars at a time from the concert going on in the arena under them would not arrive for an hour at least, and with the stuck-fan, 2000 watt heater drying out their brains and blasting them out of the booth away from their homework and into the swirling nighttime snow on the exposed ramp, they were looking for something to do and free to damage anything they chose.

A young pigeon confused by the wind and snow escaped from a buried nest under an iron roof strut, skittering blind into the sky a few feet above them. Tillie watched it fly into the storm-shaded city beneath him. Hard music tickled up from the concert in the coliseum below rubbing itself against the spiraling ramp and rippling upward into the knees and shin bones of each boy. Sledge stepped forward into the dry area of the garage proper where the level above protected him with a roof lot that was tonight filled with snow and empty of cars. He liked this movement so much and, urged on by the beating and rocking beneath him, he kept walking. Where are you going?

The music ceased and everyone in the arena stopped with it – sisters and brothers holding their breath for the next exchange of drums and guitars, for the next weather beaten cries of rock and roll. And now there was not a sound under or between the boys except that which came from the acres of Japanese and German and American cars still chirping warm oil all around them. And as Sledge continued to walk toward the next boredom expelled, no consequence act of defiance – whatever he and his partner might find that to be - Tillie scampered along behind him. Where are you going? What are you going to do? We can’t both leave.

But they could. And they did leave. No matter that Tillie’s uncle the cop moonlighting security at the garage would read them the riot act if he found them absent from their fort at the end of the ramp. No matter that a whole system of graft and earning were dependent on these two boys and the cash they brought into the manager’s office at the end of the night where a police captain would first take out his share and then protect the rest along with Tillie’s uncle as they walked it to the little steel door of the night deposit on Church Street. No matter that in the scope of history more courageous boys then these had abandoned more strategic positions after which massive fortunes were lost and whole countries fell and entire cities of babies died because of their leaving. No matter. Despite the consequences that they still did not understand, Tillie and Sledge walked onward anyway. A vast roof of snow awaited, and who knew what they might do now that they were finished with what had come before.

Cavanaugh was done too, for once and for all. He was done with the bullshit of noisy second hand cars and a brood of crying daughters needing to be fed and a red headed wife with fat cheeks and a loud rosy mouth who had trained herself to open a purse wide under his chin every time he got comfortable on the couch. He was done and he was ready to shut them all up with cash. He loved Nixon and he even loved that new egghead Ford and he loved these guys even more now that they had ended the war and he might once and for all be able to stop herding platoons of cops through crowds of hippies as they wafted inside clouds of protest smoke, braless and freaky, on the New Haven Green. Cavanaugh loved that order was being restored so he could stop fucking around and make some real money. Not stupid money. Not money without limits. You had to understand how things could turn bad quickly if you weren’t thinking, understand how greed and hubris, greed without caution, did in Tweed and Mussolini and Huey Long. A smart man of money, money he could keep for a long, long time was, after all, a man who remembered history. And he was a smart man and he was done.

He was so completely done that even parking his car was an insult. He was a captain, and a captain had juice and this car most certainly did not. German cars his ass, engineering marvels his grandmothers tits. Not this Nazi tub of butter, not this dome-topped orange bug bag of shit. What the fuck was he thinking trading in a perfectly good Buick sedan for this VW tugboat? Gas crisis. Better mileage. Save a few bucks. Did that matter if you had to break the balls off the shifter handle every time you needed to get this pork chop into first to park it?

Back and forth, sawing at the iced tarmac of the surface lot adjacent to three stories of parking, he cranked the bug into a tight spot between two lamp poles, far enough away from the tour busses and limos to keep it safe from the drug fog of long haired hired drivers and truck and bus jockeys who might blindly crush his ride home. He’d come to the event just before it was over, get up into the garage office with a few minutes to spare to shoot the shit with Tony and that ignorant WOP sergeant he didn’t like but could tolerate. And then in a little while, in came the money, delivered right to him in a canvas bag with industrial zippers. You had to earn a spot like this in the pecking order, a spot like this could buy him a car so big that no truck or bus or limo would fuck with it. He was ready for that. He had ascended and he knew where he belonged.

With the car snug between the poles Cavanaugh popped the door and swung out his legs and buried his shoes all the way past their old high water mark into the snow that was again reclaiming the surface lot. It got plowed, it got covered, it got plowed again but in this January weather no crew would ever be able to keep it clean for long. Cavanaugh thought of the poor shits that had that job. Of other poor shits working other never-ending, poor shit jobs. Of the endless work of life and how it was up to you to choke the shit out of work until you squeezed out every dollar you could get – what belonged to you and, god dam it, even what belonged to others if you could get away with it cleanly – until work was dead and you had yours and more than yours and what you had left was not the work, but just the life, eternal and good. He looked up at the snow falling from the sky onto his face, at the girders buttressing the outer edge of the top level of the tiered garage, but now that he was done all he could see was a castle veiled in white at the edge of a kingdom that he could rule.

Tony Mendoza and Mickey Amendola were not done, but soon they would be. They were going to drink themselves toward an inflection point – a tiny, sharp moment when each of them would in kind feel the spark of realization that one drink too many would bring. And then they would be done. A light would flicker through the warm haze and they would see how a drunk cop and tippling garage manager could sabotage their own freedom of expression – a captain showing up to find the cop smelling of scotch and tripping over himself as he tried to wrangle a crowd of teenagers; a political boss looking across the desk into the eyes of the garage manager to see the pinwheels of his inebriation unwinding the mechanics of a functioning city business. And that ram rod image of reality would give each man pause and it would be enough to push Tony to swipe the bottle back into the false bottom of his desk while Mickey stumbled over to aim the coffee mugs back onto their hooks above the Mr. Coffee: that place on the peg board where the “world’s greatest dad” and a bikini clad model eternally smiling under a handle of “man’s best friend” could quietly share a vertical bed.

And when they were done drinking, Mickey and Tony would then do next what they had always done. They would sleep. Because sleeping was easy; and sleeping was safe. Because even if someone had found them dozing, there wasn’t much for Tony and Mickey to do anyway at this moment, not while the crowd was still safely tucked into their seats and Mickey had his police radio to alert them awake in any case. And there wasn’t much any wiser or more powerful man who found them napping would say about it either, except to ask what more you could you expect from two schnooks who unhappily worked double shifts just to make ends meet. What could you expect from a garage manger who was good at keeping and cooking books but not at knowing there was more he could earn with that goodness? What could you expect from a city cop who was so dumb that he slapped around his sons and nephews just because even at their ages they were already much smarter than he would ever be? What could you expect from a couple of guys like this who got winded and gave up just a few feet from the finish line of a high school graduation? What could you expect?

You couldn’t expect much and because of that these guys were easily forgiven for sleeping on the job in a way that they would never have been forgiven for drinking on the job. Because drinking lead to a whole other level of high school dropout stupidity. Drinking till you were out of control and dangerous was something that even guys like this knew you just did not do. And in that small way and other small but deadly serious ways just like it, Tony and Mickey were still infinitely smarter than the sons and nephews that Mickey slapped around because their raw intellect had surpassed his.

On the streets below, the plow drivers were making their second pass, flirting with the snow to see if they could strip it down to the naked asphalt underneath. Tony and Mickey could hear the dim drop of the plows and the scrape of the blades some stories below them and they knew that the plow drivers were having the time of their lives attacking the streets with all the joy and power of little boys turned loose on the city. Hearing this, Tony and Mickey knew now that they were done. The bottle was quietly put away; Mickey hung up the cups. With their feet up on opposite sides of the same desk, they leaned back and began to doze. It was a simple sleep. A sleep where they could go back in time and would forever be little boys turned loose on the city. A sleep where they were not done and would never be done. A sleep where the lives they hated so much would never end.

Snow was now was everywhere their eyes could see. Flat and whisper perfect, untouched; a virgin field begging to be desecrated by the two boys standing at the edge of it. So they ran into the field from the top of the ramp where they stood and they began to jump and roll and kick each other into the freeze. They turned snow angels into snow devils as they raised their arms above their heads and pulled each other’s hair and wrestled each other into submission. They swept the snow with their bodies and faces until the cement of the parking lot shown through in a cross-hatch of tar patches and rubberized parking lines, until the little white plot around them was blistered with the grey of their snot and the grit from their sneakers.

But it was not enough. The more perfect snow they destroyed with their bodies, the more there was left to destroy. Cubic yards of it, whole pastures of it, hundreds of parking spaces filled with the stuff. All of it left untouched even after they had attacked as much of it as they could. There was more of it than Tillie and Sledge could ever destroy. So they had to think of something else to do.

It was Sledge who came up with the idea. In actual fact it was just a seed of an idea at first, in the truest way that something can be called a seed. Because as soon as Sledge scooped the snow into his hands and packed it into a rough roundish thing - right after Tillie thought it was meant to be thrown at him - Sledge saw the snowball as something more, the start of something much larger than both of them. It was a promise that they could nurture into a thing as large and destructive as they could ever hope it to be.

Tillie also knew they were onto something big as soon as Sledge dropped the snowball to a clean part of the field and nudged it with his hand. The nudging of the ball in the clean snow had turned it round 360 degrees and easily doubled its circumference and the boys looked at each other and knew they would soon have to work together to create the havoc they both now envisioned. At first they simply took turns nudging and spanking the ball along, but then as it got bigger and heavier they were each forced to lend a hand, pushing it with a hand apiece until it grew to be the height of their hip bones and they had to use all four of their hands to move it along. And when they rested momentarily and looked back over the field and saw the trail of carved snow that had started in a single five inch patch and grown wider and wider and wider as it snailed and hissed, zigzagging across fifty or sixty parking spaces, they knew it was the most brilliant plan that had ever been conceived by any man or boy who had ever lived on the face of God’s snow covered earth.

Still, it had to be bigger. As big as they could roll it and yet still lift it. So onward they pushed it, putting real work into it now, no longer seeing it as a prank, seeing it as a job they would be paid for in the spades of bragging rights and the long-lived memories of their old age. And when the ball of snow was no longer a ball but a bolder pocked by handprints and the size and uneven thickness of a large barrel, the boys stopped rolling and started trying to lift it up onto the flat-topped outside railing of the lot. The railing, a vertical girder, over which and out yonder was only the empty space of night and a porous net of swirling snow, and a sheer drop to the surface lot six stories below.

At first they could not get their monster more than a foot off the ground before having to drop it again. Then Tillie - the smaller but brighter and more inventive of the boys - told Sledge to wait while he thought for a minute. Though it didn’t even take a minute for Tillie to figure out that if they rolled this thing just a few more feet to one of the slightly angled vertical struts that held up the railing, they could use both their arm strength and the weight of their bodies to capture their bolder of snow against the angle of the strut and inch-by-inch roll it up and onto the wide iron shelf of the railing.

They were sweating now even without hats or gloves, the snow fairly boiling off the tops of their bare heads as it fell on them. But as they grunted their boulder to the top of the railing and then slid it finally into a place where it could rest, they became more and more desensitized to the heat or cold, to any outside force but the forcing function of what they were about to do. Now, standing on either side of the bolder, they pushed themselves up with their hands, lifting onto their tippy toes to see over the top of the chest-high railing, to look at the ground six stories below and find out what it held in store for this bomb they had created. But the storm was too thick and all there was to see were the faint yellow auras that blossomed at the top of the light poles in the surface lot, and not even the poles themselves. And so as with most of boyhood, it was a leap of ignorance and a great act of faith that brought Tillie and Sledge to solemnly tip the bolder the final inches off the railing into the history of that night.

For what seemed like a long while in the unscratched itch of time upon which a boy’s mind is built, they thought that nothing would happen. That the boulder had softly disintegrated as it fell, that the billions of flakes coursing around it had become jealous of its mass and size – of its arrogance - and had ganged up to scratch it into powder. In fact, Sledge had already gone into that crooked-lipped shrug he used when other plans he had conceived had gone lacking and Tillie -sweet Tillie - was just about to dissect what had gone wrong in order that he might make it right the next time around. Tillie, if not Sledge, would be patient enough to wait for the next time around, and if necessary the time after that and the time after that again.

Then came the explosion. And then the sound of a man bellowing from the bowels of some long ago outlived and forgotten night terror. It was the bombing of four hundred of pounds of snow onto something metal and hollow. It was the screaming of a man frightened beyond his mind’s capacity to understand.

Flapping onto their chests at the top of the railing like startled seals in wet-skinned coats, looking downward, Tillie and Sledge could see nothing except the faintest glimmer of orange and silver sparkling deep, deep below them. A glimmer that was gone in seconds as their ordinance of snow stopped cascading and completely covered anything they could see but the aura at the top of the light poles. And then Tillie and Sledge were gone in seconds as well.

They tore, yelping across the bolder tracks and deepening patches of clean snow, alternating the steps they needed to carry them across two different surfaces. With mincing toe falls for the slippery, cleaner ground and fully pumped knee pulls to get through the snow that had drifted toward the opening of the roof lot, they made their way back to the car ramp, dropping to the breaches of their pants, using their asses and the incline of the ramp to sled to the bottom. Behind them the man’s screams had formed into a single word, repeated over and over again yet fading. Hey. Hey. Hey.

But Tillie and Sledge might just as well have already been dead. For now they were really and truly done. Snorting like beasts and laughing in a dry, covered place where they had fooled themselves into thinking that they would forever be little boys.

What these boys did not yet know is that there is no man who is too alive to be made to feel the terrible punch of God, the consequential drip drop of our lord’s dark laughter. Even a smug man like Cavanaugh with big plans and a pocketful of promises knew he could always at any moment be made to know the nature of that force which created him. One minute this man will be walking through a parking lot in a snow storm just a few feet away from a car he drives but hates, a police radio in his hand and cigarette he has just lit tilted in his teeth and glowing off the tip of his nose, and the next this man will be on his knees praying to Jesus.

So even before the mass of snow was pushed from the upper stories of the garage, Cavanaugh already knew it would be coming. If not then, than someday soon. If not exactly a boulder of snow, than something else that would be looking to lay him low. God, Cavanaugh knew, just had that way about him.

When he thought back on it later, Cavanaugh would even picture the scene with a touch of music underscoring God’s cunning. Four hundred pounds of snow begins to fall through space, going both backwards and forwards in time, and a corkscrew of strings begins to bleat lightly growing in speed and timber the closer the snow gets to the roof of the orange car. Inches from the bug the music stops momentarily and the boulder of snow begins to fall in slow motion so that you can actually see the final inches of black night growing smaller between it and the roof of the car. And when the film speeds up again and the snow impacts the curvature of the roof turning the cave of the car inside out, the music crashes in again one last time. It’s an entire 80 piece ensemble of woodwinds and brass and strings striking an A-minor cord that is detonated with a percussion of timbales and kettle drums and the ding of a delicate triangle still echoing even after the music has stopped and the snow has destroyed the roof of the car down to the head rests and Cavanaugh, hitting the ground out of instinct and fear, has started screaming for God to save him. Hey. Hey. Hey.

Even in the moments immediately after it happened, while Cavanaugh was still on his knees, he knew that God had had his shot but for the time being had missed. Just to be safe, however, Cavanaugh searched the night sky for another boulder of snow which might have had his name on it. When no second boulder fell, Cavanaugh, decided that he had to get himself under the protection of the coliseum’s open but covered portico. From this place he stared out at his car, that squashed bug which deep down he felt had gotten what it deserved, and he pulled himself together and began to understand who had done what to whom.

Cavanaugh cleared his throat and, thinking about the large, heavy new car he would now be able to buy simply by coasting on the momentum of pity everyone would feel for him, he adjusted the channel on his radio. He spoke loudly and with oh so much clarity of purpose. It is the way he knew that God would want him to speak after allowing him to live another day.

Before they were even fully awake they were on their way to the Cushman cart they used to get around the garage. Mickey Amendola was actually still wondering if he’d really just been startled out of his sleep by the crackle of a captain’s voice pulling him in through a police radio or if there was a slight chance he was at home dreaming it all. Mickey even felt down along his belt line before getting into the driver’s seat of the Cushman to see if he was wearing pants or just the Jockey shorts he wore at home in his own warm bed. Though for Tony Mendoza it was much simpler than this. He knew where he was and, though still half asleep, he knew he was no longer sleeping. He just wished that he was.

The Cushman was a funky, farting thing, an electric golf cart with all the power of a kitchen appliance, and a small one at that. Mickey drove it in shame, his plastic covered watch cap banging the underside of the roof, the rotating yellow light just above his and Tony’s head painting a continuous ring of amber as it tried to flash a serious warning but only succeeded in being a joke. It was a clown car without the clowns. Tony and Mickey, overgrown and bulging out of this cart with its toy steering wheel and push button accelerator, had all they could do to maintain any dignity as they buzzed away up the nearest ramp to the second level.

These men knew what was coming and the Cushman was too lightweight to do it justice. But it would get them there and once there they would have to do the rest. Boys would be boys. And tonight, when Mickey and Tony got out of this inconsequential cart near the bottom of the roof ramp, they would force that cliché to run for its life.

Which is not to say that Mickey and Tony were not tired. Maybe even a little too tired to do what needed to be done. It was not easy to thread this giant needle and then stick it through the heart of the problem without killing it dead. Not easy to be done and then to have to start again. But the poor Cushman - with its tires no bigger than a toddler’s pool ring and so helpless without at least one of their feet on the button that made it move - would get them there. These two tired angels, all feet and fists and no wings, about to try and save a couple of boys who lived in a world inhabited only by the ignorance of men.

It was done now. And Tilley and Sledge were no longer looking for what might come next. They no longer cared to damage or loot or destroy anything further that night. Though what was next was coming for them anyway. Any and every way you pleased.

First it came in the form of a stout, orange VW bug, cresting the ramp opposite the boys with its smashed roof and a police captain’s head leaning sideways and sticking out of the window like a trolley motorman just so it could be driven toward them. They ran in the other direction. Then it was a Cushman cart coming straight at them in the direction they were running. Then it was the ramp back up to the roof where they would actually and really have to be able to fly to get away. Then it was only a brick wall surrounding an internal elevator shaft 50 feet in front of them which, even if they could have defied gravity and walked up the wall and across the garage ceiling, would only have led them back to where they stood.

All things considered, there was nothing for them to consider doing but to wait for what came next. So they stood their ground while first an uncle and then a garage manager got out of the Cushman they were driving and stepped toward them on leather heels, the lazy spinning light of the cart swiping their faces in three second intervals. Slowly, slowly like a fat man parking his wife’s wheel chair, the police captain rolled his VW bug up just behind the boys, kissing them slightly on the seats of their wet pants before he ratcheted in the hand break and shut down this wounded turtle of a car.

Mickey got to them first and, brushing off some of the snow that remained on his nephew’s shoulder, he shook his head and tilted his lips into a dangerous smirk. Tillie read this smirk in the way it was intended, but Sledge did not and when he smirked back at Mickey, Cavanaugh, who had just squeezed out through the widest crack he could make with the sprained door of his car, reached across the hood and tapped Sledge on the shoulder. When Sledge turned around to face him, Cavanaugh un-seated the gun in his holster and lifted it from his belt.

In all the eras of the world there had never been three men who understood two boys more than these three men understood these two boys. Who understood their malicious looting and property defacement; who knew the irrevocable acts of prankish defiance and destruction that inhabited the soul of youth. It was an understanding that came from men who had barely survived the actions of their own boyhood, and who knew that a boy must die for a man to live. And because they understood in this way, there was nothing these men would not do tonight to teach these boys that it would all begin and end right here.

For Cavanaugh’s part, he believed that in our early years we all deserved the chance to be horrified by our own stupidity, that each of us had done something that by all rights should have killed us or some other human who got in our way. And Tony Mendoza, as he took off his winter gloves and rolled back the sleeves of his coat, also understood that even the most vicious of children needed to be given the opportunity to learn about consequences, to be so shocked by their idiocy that no court of law would ever have to touch them. Even Mickey Amendola, the dumb uncle serving tonight as a surrogate father, somehow sensed that these boys knew not the cost of what they had done, though he would gladly teach them before it was too late.

So the crack of Cavanaugh’s pistol against the back of Sledge’ head was done out of love. Each bare knuckled punch that followed, knocking out Sledges teeth and breaking Tillie’s nose, had the humanity of Jesus and Buddha and Mohammad behind it. And when the final kicks were ministered to each boy as he lay on the ground weeping, they knew that they had been absolved of their sins and that, without a doubt, as of tonight, they were done.

Artificial Inheritance

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:06:00 +0000

Colbalt, Catheter & Keen
410 Sperryfield Parkway
Hartford, CT 06101

In Re: The Estate of Betty Cordaro

Dear Josie, Jason and Jerry,

On behalf of everyone at Cobalt, Catheter & Keen, I want offer you our deepest condolences on the passing of your mother Betty. As your mom’s long time attorneys-in-law we have only the fondest memories of her as an energetic woman who lived life to the fullest. Although your mother was confined in recent months to the care of AmeriShade Senior Homes with only an Internet connection and laptop as her lifeline to the world, we know without a doubt that her final days where among the happiest of her life.

You may well ask how we know that her final days were among her happiest. Well, we know this because upon first unsealing her will and then having our IT department examine the contents of her laptop we discovered some very surprising assets. In addition to the $670 that remained in her bank account after AmeriShade took their share of her $530,000 estate, we also uncovered the following four items which your mother has directed should be equally shared and/or enjoyed by each of you:

Item One

An 800,000 acre Farmville estate worth 19,600,235 in Farm Cash Coins (or $1.67 in US currency)

Although this amount far exceeds the $35,000 your mother charged to her credit card for Farmville livestock, buildings, equipment and migrant workers to pick her crops, we are pleased to tell you that by the end of her life she had amassed a Mighty Plantation and reached the level of Hot Shot Farmer overseeing 4 Farmville agribusinesses – a level only ever reached by one other individual, a teenager in Japan who had a CPU, hard drive and wireless modem surgically embedded into her forearms under her tattoos of a giant Farmville strawberry and Black Angus cow.

Item Two

A Second Life home and family in a place known as Twinkle Town

You’ll be happy to know that your late, virtual step father Carl was a successful attorney who was also the mayor of Twinkle Town and who owned multiple tenement apartment buildings in the TwinkleSlum section of the city. It may also interest you to know that your onscreen half brothers and sisters, Magdalena, Minerva, Marius and Mickey, have all become very prosperous in their own right with their collected amassed estates and inheritances of 467,000,000 Linden Dollars and the 16 avatar grandchildren they gave your mother, your half brothers and sisters pleased your mother in a way only a virtual family can. Note that the Second Life assets which your mother willed to you are yours to split three ways, however, your mother did also appoint your virtual half-sister Minerva as executrix of her Second Life estate and these assets are now being probated in the first circuit court of Twinkle Town.

Item Three

A Pharos’s Circle platinum membership at the Crazy Vegas Egyptian Online Casino

Remarkably, your mother attained this level of membership in just the last week of her life by spending 138 consecutive hours at her laptop playing Texas Hold ‘Em against some of the Middle East’s most famous online gamblers, including Kid Oasis, Fatwa Fats and Riyadh Pete. You can also be comforted by the fact that, although your mother actually died in the middle of a hand where she was about to bet the remainder of her estate on a pair of Kings, her fearless gambling has made her a legend in Egypt. And although the Prince Ahmad Ali Corporation which owns and operates the Crazy Vegas casino is now suing AmeriShade Manor for the remainder of your mother’s estate, you can rest assured that there are boys and girls all over Cairo who wake each morning to look at the screen shot of your mother with her Ray Bans, Marlboro light and Jack Daniels and hope that they might someday be just like her.

Item Four

73,108 Facebook friends with whom your mother was carrying on hundreds of private chats

As you know your mother was quite a gregarious woman, and it didn’t surprise us in the least to find that she had accepted this many Facebook friend requests, including those from men and women in prisons and some from the PR departments at Walmart, Def Jam Records and the Halliburton Corporation. What did surprise us is that it seems your mother’s will directs that each of these Facebook friends be invited to her memorial service. In accordance with these wishes we have sent out an invitation to all 73,000 plus individuals and have already received over 27,000 RSVPs telling us they will attend your mother’s public memorial service which, as you have informed us, is now being planned for 9 a.m. on January 11th of this year, followed immediately by the cremation of all the data and drives in her laptop.

Please Note, regarding the last item above Cobalt, Catheter and Keen is not liable and shall be held harmless for any retaliatory murders, drug deals, or other illegal activities undertaken at your mother’s service either by the 12 members of the Lords of Flagellation motorcycle club or any other individuals who have said they will attend. Also note that Cobalt, Catheter and Keen is recommending that you find a venue larger than your brother Jason’s family room for the get together after for your mom’s memorial service, preferably some type of civic arena with its own security force.

Again, on behalf of everyone at Cobalt, Catheter and Keen, allow me to express our condolences on the loss of your mother but also to celebrate the way she lived out her final days which all of us here have come to see as a model for all of our parents as well as for each of us as we approach our golden years.

Sincerely,

Marvin Cobalt, Esq.

Choking to Death on Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:14:00 +0000

We live in a land with few limits. We are men and woman raised on the belief that the right to have all we want and say all we want is the fundamental right of America. Given this unbridled freedom, we have taken to smoking and spending and speaking our minds until the very things that we have been buying and breathing and saying - molecule by molecule and word by word – are slowly killing us.

Our government, seeing that we our spoiling ourselves in this overabundant sunlight of liberty, steps in to save us from our own killer instincts. It is noble. It is righteous. It is what civilized leaders do for the people they need to keep them in power. But time and again our leaders fail to save us. We wonder why, but the answer is simple. If you look closely, you’ll see that deep down the people who govern us don’t actually want to save us in the first place.

The FDA wrestles the tobacco companies to the ground, hog tying them into a law which mandates that images of dead smokers and cigarette addled men, women and children appear on the upper 30 percent of every pack we smoke. To enjoy our right to inhale these toxins we will soon have to get past the glossy sight of mothers breathing cigarette smoke into the faces of their babies; we’ll have to look at pictures of toe-tagged corpses peaking out of morgue sheets and tracheotomized men exhaling through the blow-holes in their throats. The government is proud of what it has done, studies say it just might work and our law-makers bloviate over their accomplishment. We all applaud and then we turn away, choosing to forget that the tobacco lobbies run Washington. We find it convenient to ignore the fact that the fetishized advertising and outlaw entertainment allowed by our creaking constitution is all but dragging our children into mini marts and 7-11s where they will likely ignore the images of death and beg shopkeepers to sell them this legal poison.

A young, gay man jumps off a bridge one bright autumn morning, and the ignorant prankish homophobes who outed him to the edge of that bridge by broadcasting his dorm room sex on the internet are charged with his death. The government has justice in the form of two quaking college students who may stand trial for murder. Meanwhile across our righteous valleys and uniformed urban landscapes organized religions and ultra-right wing politicians are guaranteed the right to rally their followers into deploring gay men and women as sexual deviants who must either be saved from themselves or eradicated from our closing ranks. State and Federal leaders pump money into programs that force grade-schoolers to sit through staged plays where actors teach tolerance but even as these leaders are patting themselves on the back with one hand they are shading their eyes with the other. Our politicians prefer not to notice the growing crowds of fear-riddled thugs they have let gather with placards and baseball bats in the public playgrounds outside the very schools where these passion plays are being performed.

In the caverns and corridors of finance, banks plot and plunder, pulling a nation to the brink of financial collapse. The simple, greedy men and woman of America, having poured their money into the black holes of high finance - using their over-mortgaged houses as ATMs - wake up one dark December morning to find a sheriff come to shoo them from their homes. Our republican and democratic leaders are shocked at what has happened to our people. There are children who are now homeless, grandparents no longer able to afford the medicines to keep them alive, fathers and mothers about to give up on living. Lead by the Pied-Piper of Wall Street, we have spent ourselves unchecked into a deep river of bankruptcy. Waking from his nap, Uncle Sam yawns and rolls up his sleeves. He beats the bullion out of the banks, invests in the investment houses and primes the pump of the prime rate all in order to pump money back into the pockets of his people. Our good, wise uncle knows better than us and what he knows is that he needs us to start spending again, re-mortgaging our houses and buying, buying, buying so that he can go back to sleep and let the banks run the county again. It’s only what our uncle has been telling us all along, freedom certainly isn’t free.

And on and on it goes . . . Prisons are built by state governments to protect us from criminals who otherwise might destroy the inner city with assault weapons that are all but handed to them by the federal government . . . Restaurants are forced by local laws to protect our health with bans on trans fats while food conglomerates are allowed to spend billions to influence farm state politicians and claim that pork is the other white meat . . . Soldiers seeking to ensure the American right to indulge are issued body armor and fortified Humvees out of the front door of the Pentagon even as deals are being made at the back door to sell armor piercing weapons to countries where those same soldiers will soon have to fight. If we’re looking for our government to save us from ourselves, we’ll be looking for a long, long time. If salvation is what we want and saving is what we need, there’s only one place we can look: inside ourselves.

Just because we can speak hate and take more than our share and smoke ourselves to death, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we have the right to indulge in just about every pleasure known to humankind, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Just because we believe that God has breathed liberty and the pursuit of happiness into each of us, doesn’t mean God wants us choking to death on our own freedom. My lord, if we haven’t realize by now that the greatest freedom we have is the freedom to stop ourselves from wanting more than is good for us, no government on earth will ever be able to save us from ourselves.

When Reality Was Upon Her (a short story)

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:33:00 +0000

They called her Mags or Maggie or Mamma or just plain Peg, but hope was the name she’d have chosen if she could. At Saint Leos she was baptized in faith and she liked to believe that a vein of optimism flowed through her, trickling confidence that arrived on the day she was born and that went all the way back through her mother’s wide hips into a family of depression era aunts and immigrant virgin grandmothers who disembarked to settle this certain patch of womanhood. From an early age, Maggie had heard that it was women who held up the children, the home and the family - that when a woman fell all fell around her. So Maggie learned to push her head up high and hard and she used her strength to endeavor to stay afloat in the world, well above its pain. On Tuesdays Maggie shopped at the Foodliner and, even as she waited at the long checkout surrounded by the humble sagginess of people’s faces, the mothers and children clutching food stamps, the rattled carts being pushed by old men who were themselves being pushed by their wives - the overwhelming routine of life all around her - she tried never to let these blunt and disappointed edges of reality enter into the picture of her life.

There was a cat that showed up one day at Maggie’s sun porch door. The cat was a male and Maggie knew that he was sweet on her from the moment he first pushed his way into her knuckles licking at her hand cream. She liked to pretend the cat was a long lost boyfriend – sometimes even her late husband come back to whisper jittery purrs into her pillow. She fed the cat tuna she got on sale and when it rained she let him crawl up under the edge of her skirt and wedge himself between her folded knees while she read whatever the library was recommending that week. The fact is that Maggie didn’t like the rain herself. But she never let on. Not even to the cat. Sometimes at night in bed when it rained she would shove the cat out into the hallway and let the rain get the better of her. It’s not that the rain scared her, more that she seemed to actually drain emotionally as it ran off the roof down her gutters. This was a rare time when the residual emptying out of her confidence was something she could no more stop then she might stop the sky from dropping its water in the first place.

Still, in the morning she would be fine. She’d get a check in call from her daughter Eileen on the West Coast, let the cat back into the room, go down to the kitchen to eat a soft boiled egg with a bowl of instant oatmeal. All that and the wetness on the grass would bring her back to herself. She’d go outside and kneel on the patio blocks, lean into the blades and remember how when she was a child fairies danced within this forest, the beads of rain big enough to fill the buckets from which they drank before smiling up at her and disappearing.

On most Friday nights Maggie ate hamburgers with a group of women at a shabby old place in Hamden called Butchy’s. It was a low rent ritual that Maggie took part in not for the food – of which she ate very little anyway – nor for the aggregate company of her girlfriends who as a group mercilessly tried to cheer each other up, something Maggie felt she needed no part of. Maggie really went because there was something about the restaurant and even Butchy himself that pulled her in, though she couldn’t have told you exactly what that was. Butchy was a short, fat, perhaps once nice-looking Greek man who had the blistering veined cheeks of man who spent his days sweating the grease of a kitchen and who wore a different threadbare vest every Friday and Saturday night when he was not in that kitchen. Without realizing it, Butchy had created a place in his image – all well-sat, fabric covered booths and lumpy votive candles flickering through the red netting of round jars. Once when Butchy came over to check on their table before they ordered, Maggie asked him if he could make a Salisbury steak. Butchy told her that he wouldn’t trust his kitchen help to make this for her, but if she came back on one of the nights when he cooked, he’d make it for her himself. Maggie took this as flirting and she smiled politely at Butchy and ordered a cheeseburger. She may not have known what attracted her to Butchy or his place – but confident as she was - she knew this was not it.

It was a week before Christmas now and Maggie’s kids would be coming for the holiday. Secretly, she found she sometimes had to steady herself to be with them these days. She longed for their company, but for some reason they could be like the rain to her– they emptied her out and this had been happening ever since they themselves had emptied out of the house where she and Ed had raised them. It was the third of four times in her life when she felt hope slipping completely from her and she was entirely surprised by what was happening to her – not so much that it was happening but by how much it dug a core of the unexpected out of her. Ed, on the contrary, never even missed a beat. More than that, he’d started to prepare for it as soon as the kids finished college. “You gonna need these old high-school science posters?” No, and he’d throw them out. “Hope you kids don’t mind, but I was thinking I’d sell the third car unless one of you wants to take it wherever you’ll be living next year.” Maggie stood by shivering each time Ed did this and on the night Teddy took the last of his sheet music, his CDs, books and clothes to move in with a divorced woman he’d met at his first job out of college, Maggie found herself driving around alone in the car eating through a box of Whitman’s she bought at the Walgreens. Maggie was not a shiverer. She was not a woman who sat alone in a car eating chocolates. Ed couldn’t figure out who she had become after the kids left and he starting slamming things down to wake her up whenever he saw her mooning around. She must have known that, sooner or later, these kids would no longer be with them. Ed’s voice was as hard as the tumbler he’d bang empty on the Formica table. How could this have come as such a surprise to her? But then Ed died at his work table two years after Teddy left home and that was the fourth and last time in her life that Maggie had let herself be surprised and emptied so completely by life.

On the Friday before her kids were due to arrive for the holidays, Sue - one of the women she dined with - called Maggie to ask if she was going to meet them at Butchy’s or would she like one of them to pick her up. Maggie stretched the cord on the wall phone all the way out to its limit trying to ignore the fact that she badly wanted to go even though she told Sue she couldn’t. “I’ve got the kids coming the day after tomorrow and they’ll be here for all of next week.” Sue wheedled her a little, made a wise crack about the idea that Maggie’s kids should get in the way of Maggie’s good time, but Maggie held firm. She didn’t like to be coaxed into something that she said she didn’t want to do (even if she really wanted to do it) and when she hung up the phone after an abrupt goodbye, she left behind a static whiff of bitterness. There had always been some resentment among Maggie’s friends over the hallowed detachment Maggie could call up at will, and she knew that Sue would be reporting this conversation to the girls at their line of tables in the middle of Butchy’s. Maggie could see each woman picking up on it and adding her own slant as they dribbled their judgment on the subject quietly from the left corner of one’s mouth to right corner of another’s ear.

Maggie didn’t linger on any of it though, using most of that night to get ready for the arrival of her kids, the cat following her from room to room as she stripped beds and stacked her great aunt’s plates into the dishwasher. Alone in the house, picturing how it would look in six days after three adults and two children had piled their needs into each room she was cleaning for them, Maggie was elated as much from the purpose of the activities as by the chance she would have to put the house back into order after they left. By 9 p.m. she was done but not a bit tired. Not a bit tired and nothing left to do. She tried to read but the house was too clean and she couldn’t sit still; even the cat seemed on edge, preferring not to sit with her but to guard the kitchen from something he felt was living in the dishwasher, pouncing to the base of the machine every time it bumped and stuttered into its next cycle.

At 9:30 Maggie put on her coat and got into the car, the cat now asleep on the warm tile floor in front of the steaming dishwasher. She had taken her book and her purse and her glasses and she thought she’d find a quiet coffee shop where she might try to read. This was something she did every once is a great while after Ed died, preferring to leave the quiet of her house for the noise that could surround her anonymity on its way to becoming another kind of silence for her. She never thought much of women who were afraid to sit alone in cafes or restaurant – for Maggie being comfortable enough to be alone with yourself was a sign of real strength, the kind of peace with your existence that showed you accepted that you were really on your own no matter how the movies or glamour magazines pushed you to believe otherwise. Sometimes in these places she would be able to read and sometimes she would just sit pretending to read, feeling the thrill of being free of everything that held her to life. But either way she was always grateful for the odd times when her twitchiness at home pushed her to stray into a place where no one knew her.

And this was why, contrary to what she might have done otherwise, she avoided Butchy’s and who she might bump into there, preferring to go to one of the younger cafés that dotted Chapel Street and where no one knew her. The street was well lit, relatively safe and with a little luck she could park across from one of these places and wouldn’t have to walk more than 30 feet to get in or out. So there was the Atticus Book store café, the Cellar Grill and even the Starbucks that had replaced the ancient luncheonette she had gone into as a teenage girl. All of which she could choose from. And any would do. But tonight it was the Atticus Café that had empty tables she could see from the street and a space for her car where she could park right outside the front door.

It didn’t take long, however, for her to regret the table she’d chosen when she got inside. It looked like a good table, not too far from the counter to get faster service, but off by itself away from the stacks of mixed new and used books where students lingered for hours sitting on the floor reading through what they could not afford to buy. But once Maggie sat for a while she realized that the couple nearest her at the counter – they couldn’t have been more than 18 or 19 – were holding up two sides of a heated love triangle. She could hear the boy pleading softly for reason and see that the girl was completely staggered by the surrealistic picture of another girl that had been painted for her. Maggie just knew it was the first time this had ever happened to the girl. And how did Maggie know? She knew because when the girl got up, leaving the boy with a pile of green napkins that had been stained with her mascara along with all the rest that had run from her nose and eyes, the boy looked at Maggie briefly, and in that second he became Maggie’s first real love.

The boy was beautiful – just as Maggie’s Sam had been beautiful. The dark tips of his lashes drooped languidly, and from the angle of his shoulders to his shiny eyes he oozed the confusion and stupidity of a young man feeling the power of having two women love him and he thinking he could love them both in return. When the boy dropped his head away from Maggie’s gaze to look into his pockets for the bills to attach to this failed date, Maggie fell into a dark place where the front passenger door of a ‘42 Buick stood open while the motor idled as she decided whether she would scream and pound her fists into Sam’s face or summon the grace to simply tilt her nose toward the night sky and follow it onward toward home. It had been a magic spring and summer, the war over by many years, high school behind her, her father on his feet again, and the promise of Sam slowly entering her one smile at a time. She believed Sam would be the one, as every girl early on believes she has found the one. But then she found out - through the cursive figure of some other female’s handwriting sticking out one of Sam’s books - that she was not the only one for Sam. And it took her down. Hard. When it happened she remembered what her uncles and older cousins used to say about some of the men that died beside them in the Philippines and the Argonne - “they never saw it coming.” These relatives stated this as if it were a blessing, owing to all the other men who had seen it coming, who had suffered the organic hell of knowing that the life in their exploded bodies was about to cease to be. Maggie too never saw it coming but it was not a blessing for her. Sam’s infidelity was a bullet that hit Maggie when she least expected it, but once it hit she’d had to live on to watch it gut her of her confidence. Maggie did walk home that night, her hope emptying into the dirt along with her tears and snot, just as this girl at the counter had left her hope behind on that napkin. How, god, could he who was so beautiful and so kind and so warm inside me do this to me? But Sam did and that was the second time in Maggie’s life when reality had truly prevailed.

Maggie went home that night as quickly as she had arrived at the coffee house. Once home she fell into a deep sleep where she did not dream and she did not wake until morning. She reminded herself that it was a blessing to sleep this deeply – even though she dreamed almost every night - and by the time her children and grandchildren arrived two days later she had loosened herself of the little scene at the coffee house and what it had triggered for her.

The three days leading up to Christmas went rather slowly once Maggie’s children and grandchildren had shown up and had that first meal together where everyone shakes off their ever-happy faces and best behavior. Maggie understood that small children acted up and made noise but during that first dinner Maggie’s grandkids once again surpassed her understanding. Eileen and her husband made flailing gestures to get the kids simmered down, but as usual the couple drank too much and it was Teddy, of all people, who was finally able to get his niece and nephew focused by taking them into the den and having them make up new words for Christmas carols which he played on the upright his dad had dragged home and rebuilt. Teddy told them stories about the burn marks their grandfather had left in the ivory of the keys during those times when he got so distracted with his playing that he would prop his cigarettes filter end down on the wood above the keyboard and the ash would finally tip over to singe yet another place in the piano’s upper register. Hearing Teddy in there with the kids, Maggie still believed that Teddy was going to right himself – that this was on its way to happening any day now.

By the next day Maggie had made a deal with herself that she was not going to judge her kids and grandkids for whom they were presenting themselves to be but for whom she knew them to be. Or at least for whom she believed they could become. This made it easier for Maggie to keep the dinners, and breakfasts and lunches moving along through aggressive, unforgiving appetites, easier to steer them all through the Christmas morning chaos of kids exploding with despair soon after they couldn’t find any more gifts to open and adults no longer able to hide the fact that they wanted to be somewhere else once strong coffee ceased to elevate their moods. By the day after Christmas, when she knew her family would be leaving that evening, Maggie finally found a few minutes to sit alone on the unheated sun porch to consider if all this had truly been worth the trouble for any of them. She concluded that it was the only trouble worth having in life, that of a noisy, somewhat disrespectful family who, nonetheless, decide to be with you no matter what they seemed to be saying otherwise.

Pulling her big sweater around her to get up and walk back through the morning chill of the porch into her house, Maggie had found a way to ground herself in the sweet emptiness that would come with saying goodbye in a few hours. But when Teddy walked onto the porch before she could rise from her chair there was something about his entrance that took away the warm, self pity she had worked herself into. She let herself feel the chill again and she let herself swell with affirmation. Teddy opened the sun porch storm door leading to the back yard and stood across the jamb where he lit a cigarette and tried to blow the smoke out into the gentle December wind which only blew it back toward his mother’s averted face. “You need to quit that habit,” Maggie told him foregoing what might have been a stronger remark. “The doctor said it killed your father.”

“Living killed dad. The doctor was just earning a paycheck.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” is all Maggie said before adjusting her small frame in the love seat. As a boy and now as a man, Teddy was always dissatisfied and always on the run. There was always something better wherever Teddy was not. His mother knew this but she preferred to support him in his wanderings, believing her boy was ultimately on his way to a steadier place that had more promise, a home with a sturdier foundation that could hold his outsized dreams long enough to make them real. Maggie knew why Teddy was on the porch with her before he even came to the point. That’s why she swelled up when he walked out there - she was ready to say yes to Teddy before he even asked the question.
“Mom, I gotta go a little early. I’m supposed to meet a producer in the city.” Maggie nodded and patted the cushion beside her. Teddy threw his cigarette out into the yard and joined her on the love seat.

“I don’t really want to have to ask you this . . . not again . . . but I have a good feeling about this project.”

“Just tell me what you need, Teddy. Your father worked hard and I have it and you know I’m never one to give up on anybody in this house."

Teddy arched his shoulders back into the love seat and closed his eyes.

“Jesus, mom, you don’t even know how much I’m asking for and you’re going to give it to me? I mean I’m grateful, but there are times when I honestly wonder why you don’t give up on me. ”

“Because I choose not too Teddy, that’s why.”

From out of an elm tree in the backyard, a bird screeched feverishly into the conversation. It distracted Teddy and he looked away from his mother never realizing that she was not going to stop looking at him until he looked away first. Though it didn’t matter, because even if he had realized it, it would have only told Teddy what he already knew, that his mother really had no idea how much the stern hopefulness she carried inside her had taken out of those she labored to carry it for.

Maggie left the porch immediately after that and she kept marching tight-jawed through to her purse and onward to the check she wrote and tore out for Teddy, pacing time and the breaches of her family to force her way smiling into a gang of sloppy hugs and guilty goodbyes, all the way through the next morning and afternoon and on to the final evening of that week when she found herself sitting amongst a group of crow-eyed girls across a table at Butchy’s.

Hamburgers served and cleared and each woman totaling her portion of the flimsy diner check, Maggie had nearly forgotten about the week that just transpired. Her son was just another spirit she held aloft: her family a group of problems she could solve with the will of God. Maggie had even found the good grace to allow her friends to minister to her that night, pretending not to mind that they thought themselves superior in the advice they forced on her even after she told them again and again that she was just a little quiet tonight and not a bit unhappy. Maggie was pleased with herself for having found this equilibrium after such a long week. And this made it all the more surprising for her when Butchy crossed the dining room toward their table and Maggie slowly felt a growing sense of uneasiness that constricted her throat and heightened her cheekbones into something between a giggle and sob.

By the time Butchy reached the table with his unfortunate face blazing, Maggie was staring back into something she had not looked at for a long, long time. She tried to shift her position to look away from Butchy who was attempting to catch her eye, but having turned this way and that she could not shake the hopeless face which came in at the edges of her memory. There was no longer any doubt for Maggie about what had attracted her to Butchy or to this place where she knew he would likely go crazy with sadness when he finally realized that his world was slowly dying all around him. There was no longer any doubt of what Maggie had really known all along.

The first time reality was upon her, it was Maggie’s father who brought it with him back from the war. He was a short man, who as a young father was as tough as a city street in the old suit vests he always wore over open collared shirts and rolled cuffs. Ruddy in complexion, his cheeks popped with the red roses of a skin condition he’d had ever since he was a boy, but when Maggie the girl kissed him it wasn’t a heated skin rash she felt under her lips but the warmth of God. Before he’d shipped for Italy, Maggie had built her father into a tree of life that sheltered her inside the big shabby home where they lived. As it is for all very young girls with all good fathers, the man was immutable. Where he walked, hope shined for Maggie. But then came the morning two weeks after he had been discharged when Maggie, just 10 years old, found her father weeping at the foot of her bed.

Waking in the shadows of the rainy dawn, Maggie wasn’t sure what she was hearing, so she groped along the beside wall until she came upon her father with his head damp and lolling around the point of his spine. At first Maggie thought he was physically hurt . . . Daddy, did you fall? But he did not answer and would not answer for many weeks and months to come. And with her father’s fall, Maggie was pierced for the first time by the lies her mother and grandmothers and aunts had told her. The light of a rainy day once so beautiful and soft for her now became unbearable; the shelter of her father’s arms, and the home he built with the work of his hands, were now nothing more than wood and skin and bones which could burn and die. During those months, every other human being Maggie ever loved became truly human and weak and the best she could ever do hereafter was to continue to pray hard enough to fool herself into thinking that something else might be true.

Every time for the rest of her life that Maggie kept hope alive for her family when the jaws of misery were snapping around them she had to turn her back on her father to do it. Each time she rose above the desolation of life or the failings she found in yet another man or woman, her father wept alone at the foot of her bed. And in those one, two and three times when Maggie had completely lost her way and let the cold-bloodedness of loss win her over, it was her father that rose from that floor to ultimately remind her that this was a broken and ignorant world in which we lived and it could either drain us of our hope or give us pause to consider that hope was all we had.

Bit by bit, the somewhat artificial voices of old women trying to sound like girls filtered Maggie back into her seat at the table and the night at hand. Butchy had walked away by that point and soon after Maggie had paid her share and she too walked away to get in her car and drive home. Pulling into her garage and pushing the button on the visor to shut the overhead door behind her, there was a moment before she turned off the ignition that Maggie wondered if it might not just be better to leave it running for a while. Just for a little while so she could rest. But the moment passed quickly – as these moments will - and she shut off the car and moved to go inside to pick up where she had left off.

When she opened the door of the breezeway the cat ran out into the garage. He’d heard the ticks of the still warm car and felt that perhaps there was something out there he was missing. Maggie thought for a second about rooting around through the junk in the garage which the cat had run under in order to find him and shoo him back into the house. Then she decided against it and closed the door behind her to leave him out there for a while. Maggie knew that, one way or the other, he would always find his way back in.

When ... (or Baby Tattoos, Sensible-Eaters Anonymous and Middle Class Nomads)

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:33:00 +0000

When …
China becomes the world’s largest economy Americans will no longer be able to afford to adopt Chinese babies. On the bright side, infertile upper middle class Chinese couples will now be wealthy enough to start adopting American babies from Detroit, Los Angeles and Kansas City. Poor little American kids will be groomed by US orphanages who will market these children as a race of “giant” people with the potential to rap in Mandarin. Natural born Chinese kids will still excel in economics and engineering, but Chinese moms and dads with adopted American children will take special pride in their children who – like the Buddha – seem to be able to sit and do nothing at all as they stare into tiny cell phone screens communicating in short IM “proverbs” that impart their wisdom using only words made from punctuation marks and two and three letter acronyms (i.e.: omg).

When …
Every last man and woman in America gives in to peer pressure and gets a tattoo, they will then begin tattooing their children, imprinting them with Sponge Bob Square Pants and Little Mermaid tattoos alongside permanent script that reads “My Parents Took Me To Mexico But All I Got Was this Lousy Tattoo.” These tattoos will be rationalized in the same way that we now rationalize dressing our kids to match us in skinny jeans with diaper flaps and miniature Dolce and Gabbana sun glasses that double as teething rings. No child will be considered complete or socially acceptable without “ink” from a high-end tattoo parlor and on special occasions proud moms and dads will take their children to visit their great grandparents where they will compare great granddad’s tattoo commemorating his lost platoon in Vietnam with little Eric’s tattoo commemorating the cast of MTV’s The Jersey Shore.

When ...
The entire population of the US is overweight from six-meals-a-day of junk food and the high-fructose corn syrup that has been put into everything from frozen vegetables to rescue inhalers, the top three reality shows in the country will be The Biggest Human, So You Think You Can Eat and America’s Got Food. Any remaining thin people in the country will be shamed into going to Sensible-Eaters Anonymous where they will learn how to break their addiction to eating in moderation (”Hi my name is Steven and last night (sob, sniffle) I ate 23 grams of fiber with no trans fat in my organic stir fry”). At the end of these meetings, massively obese old-timers will attempt to hug new comers without crushing them while, instead of coffee and cookies, a buffet of 2700 calorie individual meat-topped, stuffed crust pizzas will be served to help attendees continue to overcome their twin demons of intelligence and good sense … one pie at a time.

When ...
The US tax code and banking system finally eliminates the American Middle class, leaving only the super rich and the very poor, a few remaining middle class nomads will continue to wander the land through high-end malls and housing developments looking for the American Dream. Middle class nomad Fathers will stand next to their daughters and sons pointing through the windows of large houses at the hi-def TVs and stackable washer / driers they used to be able to buy, while rootless Moms will stop wandering just long enough to mime sitting at kitchen tables where their children will pretend to do their homework. At the same time, the nation’s super rich leaders will have convinced the very poor that the American middle class was only a myth perpetuated by the Obama administration and other American Democrats who will by this time have also all become extinct.

When …
National, state and local governments at last convince every US citizen that terrorists are all around us, it will be considered an act of patriotism for US citizens to call 911 whenever they witness an old lady covering her curlers with a head scarf. No college kid walking out of a Middle Eastern restaurant with a falafel will be able to hide from the watchful American eye, and It will be the little things we do that make us heroes (such as lining the bottom of our bird cages with Arabic language newspapers and teaching our dogs to sniff out copies of the Koran at local yard sales). Soon America will have become so vigilant and paranoid that we will even start turning ourselves into detention centers at which point actual terrorists will have no one left to attack and will be forced to leave the country, proving once again that American determination can conquer all.

When …
When YouTube, Facebook and Twitter become the only form of human communications left in the world, people will no longer have the attention span or skills to acquire information by reading anything longer than 140 characters. The titles on required reading lists will be the only thing that students are actually required to read and the only way to get us to sit still to take in complete ideas will be to entertain us with funny voices and scantily clad teenagers. At the same time, business proposals that involve any consideration by meeting participants will have to be created in the form of short video clips where animated characters draw pie charts and then hit each other in the face with them. No one left alive will remember what it was like to read a novel or a newspaper and publishers will be forced to create a new form of literature called the “eMotiBook” which will reduce great pieces of literature down to a short series of webdings and emoticons. For instance Romeo and Juliet would become: “YLN”while a Tale of Two Cities would look like this: “C/D”. At the same time, the front page of the New York Times would be boiled down to: “ --@pMÿZQüÛ>” and the entire contents of all you just read would - in the end - simply be summed up as follows: “ü?ÿ.”

America Lost and Found

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:49:00 +0000

Somewhere in this country there is a treasure waiting for us and because we are Americans we will find it. It is rusty and it is old. It has hardly ever been used though heartily has it been loved. It is caked with the patina of earth and wind and washed with a temper of sea water and sun and fire. It is stamped with a mark that makes it the first or the last or the best, and it carries a note that tells you why it must be saved. Ours for the searching and the haggling, it has been sleeping in the barns and garages and dusty shops that are strung like wooden beads across our land. We may be in hard times now and we will see hard times again but this treasure is a drop of glue that holds us together and gives us hope. If we can just stumble on what has been hidden behind years of neglect, under piles of leaves and inside cartons of memories - if we can just buy it low and sell it high - then better times might come again.

Open your eyes. Open your eyes and look and you’ll see an army of junk thumpers tromping through garage sales at sunrise; fortune seekers marching through flea markets on rainy afternoons; ‘freegans’ out late sifting through piles of garbage at midnight for that which has cash or life left inside it. If you turn on and tune in you’ll notice whole families salivating in front of high-def screens, scheming as they watch the get-rich-quick antics of American Pickers looking for rare and rusty machines and Pawn Stars cheating desperate gamblers out of the last historical object they own that is worth a car payment or a bag of groceries. There are shrewd little old ladies and enterprising Goth teenagers taking notes on the super charged appraisals they see on Antiques Road Show and men with seats on the stock exchange searching for 40’s era baseball cards and vintage bottle caps on eBay and Craig’s List. Whether it is a down turn in our national fortunes, a need to feel the value of history in our hands, or something more than that, increasingly we have become a people obsessed with the value that can be put on the past. And that means that more and more of us are now on the hunt for our own share of the loot and the history that comes with it.

Me, I joined the hunt a long time ago. I am not poor, nor truly needy, nor ever have I been, but still I plunder and search like a pirate for those things that I can hoard into my own closets or simply admire on the high shelf in my living room - first edition books and classic souvenirs, Japanese china and metal toys, iron tools and art deco kitchen utensils that I might sell in my old age or just hold onto because they secure me in a place and time that is not the place and time I live in now. As a child I walked the streets at dusk on those magic nights before our town collected its bulk trash, pulling out radios I could gut for their speakers and wires and wheeling home boxes of game boards, dice and tokens from which I could salvage an old amusement or piece together a new one. As a man I’ve carried on this addiction from youth to mid-life like an aging junkie looking for a fix among the home owners and peddlers pushing their junk at garage and estate sales. I have risen at 5 a.m. on the first vacation I had in two years to cruise the driveway sales of a beach town and walked away with an antique drill and a one hundred year old leather bound book of poetry worth far beyond the small fan of dollar bills I paid for them. I have slumped at the doorway of an old man’s garage in the sleet of December to find and buy a stainless steel clock made 80 years ago and still humming from the juice of a corroded wall socket. In the last hours of an autumn Sunday afternoon, when misery was upon me with the thought of another work week stretching out in front of me, I have passed a man hauling out the leftovers of his yard sale and - hiding in my car until he disappeared into his house – I have driven away with a trunk full of record albums and old magazines that I gave away to a loved one so that they could find their own pleasure and hope. I have been made happy and whole again with all of these finds, as if the very act of possessing these tokens of the past which I could use or not use, sell, save or simply pass forward, was enough to make me trust that life would go on happily despite all signs to the contrary.

Is this the new American way? You bet it is. In the thousand year old worlds of France and Spain, the ancient cities and towns of China and Germany and Russia, people don’t have to search and haggle for the riches of their past because these artifacts are part of and inside the roads and bridges and buildings and bistros over which they walk and in which they live and work. A man in Paris or a woman in Moscow don’t need to look far and wide for a vintage bicycle, nor do they have to dig into a yard sale to find old china because they ride on and eat off these objects still. In these societies where the past is not easily forgotten, little is cast off and much that has been possessed by your grandparents and parents is possessed by you still. But in America (oh America!) we have made an art of forgetting our past and trashing the things that make us old. Until now. Lately we seem to have been startled awake into realizing that today is no longer a sure thing and tomorrow may never come, but the past will be with us forever. And so our search across lawns and driveways and internet bazaars is growing more intense every day.

And if you believe that I have made this whole thing up for the sake of the poetry, just ask your neighbors; poll your friends and family too. See if they don’t couch a secret and growing desire to find that one old object that will fetch a good price and bring back a curio cabinet full of memories from their childhood or their grandparents or the father they lost a long time ago If they are telling the truth, they will admit that they are searching just like you and I. They will confess that their need to touch and hold these treasures is rising higher and higher - all the way into the bone of the hereafter.

For when we hold in our hand a porcelain bird painted a century ago by a woman in a tenement slum, or a thick obsidian record etched during the depression with the voice of a man singing the blues, or child’s metal bicycle that was fit and finished by Eisenhower era workers who took true American pride in their output, we just somehow know that life will go on without us. This is what all citizens of the world knew eons before America existed and what we American’s just now seem to be understanding for ourselves: our spirits live on in the objects we make long after we are gone. In finding this treasure that is waiting for us among the trash of outbuildings and online auctions and rummage sales at dawn, what we are really looking for is the treasure of everlasting life.

Here’s What Happened ... Here’s What Didn’t

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:12:00 +0000

Here’s what actually happened

She was trembling and a little flushed when she walked into the examining room to take my blood pressure and prep me for the doctor. “I haven’t done this in a while,” she said, pumping up the blood pressure cuff, nervously eyeing a hypodermic needle on a stainless steel tray. “Lately I’ve mostly been working in the back reviewing medical charts.” I twitched a little, actually at a loss for words. This was when I (rather unwisely) remembered how a good joke can sometimes put a person at ease. “Don’t worry,” I said, smirking to force feed the humor. “I’m a doctor. I’ll tell you if you do it wrong.”

The problem was that this turned out not to be so funny - mostly because she didn’t get the joke. In fact she didn’t get it so much that when she let the air out of the blood pressure bag she whispered, “You have excellent blood pressure, doctor.”

By the time I got my mouth opened to try to fix the problem, she was already on her way out the door looking to get away from me as fast as she could, mumbling “Dr. Weis will be right in to see you, Dr. Taddei,” and then closing the door behind her.

And things only got worse when Dr. Weiss showed up. “Hello there,” he said, shaking my hand, “I hear you’re a physician ...”

Now there are two things you can do in a situation like this. You can run out of the room and never go back there again, or you can quickly correct the lie, endure the condescending looks of a man who already feels superior to you because he actually is a doctor (and you’re not) and then you can run out of the room and never go back there again.

Actually, in the moment before I took the second option, I also thought of a third option. It was something that crossed my mind for the two seconds that it took me to come to my senses. Maybe I could just play along. Maybe I could avoid the embarrassment and just tell him that I was a doctor. Other people lived out their fantasies all the time, didn’t they? Other people realized that the time they had left to live was getting shorter and shorter and they escaped by pretending they could start all over again. Why couldn’t I? In fact, who knew where this might lead . . .

Here’s what didn’t happen

“Hello there,” he says, shaking my hand. “I hear you’re a physician.”

“Why yes, I am.” I say. “But I don’t like to make too big of a deal out of it.”

“I know what you mean,” he replies with that look of understanding shared only among those of us who have seen the inside of a human body. “So what can I do for you today, doctor?”

“First of all call me Tony.”

He glances at my chart and then looks up at me with a knowing grin.

“Well, Tony. Judging by this, I think you probably already know what I can do for you.”

“I do? I mean, yes, I do . . . It’s what I think it is . . . Am I right?”

“Yes you are. So, I’m guessing you just need me to write the script . . .”

“Yeah, that’s it. I’m just trying to avoid any ethical issues.”

“No problem. I’m always happy to help a fellow practitioner.”

He writes out the script and hands it to me. He then pauses for a moment before he decides to tell me that a group of the doctors in his practice are going out for drinks after work. “We always like to get to know other professionals in the area. Would you like to join us?”

My brain does one of those little flips, that tickling quick high you get in those moments where you realize you are free to follow any lie, any deception, any poor choice or illegal activity without getting caught and with the potential for personal gain or a life-changing series of events - whether it be sex with a woman who doesn’t know that you have a girlfriend, the theft of a fat wallet you see lying next to a vacant car as you happen by in a parking lot, or the chance to have drinks with a group of men and women who have given their life to medical science because you lied and told them that you have too.

“I’d love to,” I say, looking directly into Dr. Weiss’s eyes. “Where and what time should we meet?”

I hurry home and Google medical specialties, deciding on pediatrics because I have always liked children and because having raised three of my own and spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in pediatricians’ offices I feel I both have a head start on this choice of specialties as well as a right to get some return on my money. I read up on pediatrics for the next three hours, choose Johns Hopkins as my medical school, memorize some rare childhood diseases (See: Krabbe disease, Eisenmenger Syndrome, Osteogenesis Imperfecta . . .) and then I go out to find a medical supply store where I can buy some tongue depressors with cartoon characters on them which I put in my shirt pocket before joining Dr. Weiss and his colleagues for a drink.

Our drinks go better than you might expect and all the doctors in the practice are very impressed with both my education and my compassion for children as well as with my shyness when it comes to talking about my work which I modestly explain is not my style and which only gets them to respect me more. Their only regret, they tell me, is that they can’t hire me since they run a practice that specializes in gastrointestinal problems. I assure them I’m happy where I am and then I rush home, having now decided to apply to an online premed program.

Time seems to speed up now as I finish my premed studies long distance at the University of Bucharest and then apply to a medical school in the Bahamas which I attend by taking a leave of absence from my current job. My wife and children are incredibly supportive and - when I come back from doing my residency at a small hospital in the Philippines (which certifies me to treat patients in the US) – they are so happy that “daddy is doctor” that they forget all about the fact that I’ve deserted them for almost four years. The problem is that by then I’ve already met and married a 20 year old Pilipino girl and when my wife finds out she files for divorce, taking me for half the earnings of my future medical practice.

I see it as just the price one has to pay for a career in medicine.

Anyway, years go by and I am practicing pediatrics in a small office I run with a former CIA Black Op (who also did his pediatric residency in the Philippines and with whom I bonded after I found out that he too felt compelled to change his life, although for different reasons than me which he would have liked to talk about except that if he did he would have had to kill me and bury my body at sea) when, oddly enough, Dr. Weiss walks into my examining room with his eight year old daughter, Becky.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Dr. Taddei,” says Dr. Weiss with a genuine grin of delight.

For a moment, I think of once again reminding him to ‘call me Tony,’ but then I decide that I’d rather not, given that I now actually am a doctor.

“It’s been quite a few years. My partners and I wondered what happened to you.”

“Well I keep a low profile. My work treating sick children is satisfaction enough.”

It’s then that Dr. Weiss introduces me to his daughter. “Dr. Taddei, this is Becky. Becky, say hi to Dr. Taddei.”

She shyly says hello and her father prompts her again. “Tell Dr. Taddei what you want to be when you grow up.”

Without taking her eyes off her father, Becky says, “I want to be a doctor like you.”

“Well Dr. Taddei is also a doctor. Maybe you’d like to take care of children like he does.”

“Maybe,” she mumbles.

“That would be wonderful,” I say. “There are lots of children who would love to have you as their doctor when you grow up.”

Dr. Weiss smiles at me with what I can only see as wistful, professional pride. Here we are, just a couple of men of science, passing the torch to the next generation.

“Yeah,” Becky blurts out. “But my daddy doesn’t want to be a doctor, anymore. He complains to my mommy all the time. He says that, if he could, he’d just walk away . . . He eve says that sometimes when he’s taking care of sick people, he’s really thinking about what would happen to him if he just left them in the examining room to go off and become a writer.”

_______

“Everything is created twice, first in the mind of the creator and then in reality.” Steven Covey

The Counter Man

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:51:00 +0000

I love the way her head falls when she has been drinking vodka and the paperback she imagines she is reading falls from her hand and the ash from her cigarette flakes down onto the inside of her boozy tank top just under her naked cleavage, burning a tiny lace of holes in a place not too far from her heart. I love that she has sunk this low into the bottle and that I am in there with her. I love that her family has abandoned her – her precious grown children who cannot fathom the way she has thrown away her life; her two ex husbands, the first a good man with common sense, too good and with too much sense for the tragedy that is her, and the second a prick who should, if there is a God, die in misery. I love that I am all that is left for her – because, let’s face it, I am no prize myself, just a sober drunk and a miserable bottom feeder who began big but was laid low and is now barely hanging on to a hourly job with no guarantees that any of this will last without him fucking it up. I love that I am just one step far enough behind her to be able to make sure she does not catch fire and burn up like a gin-soaked rag. I love that her life has taken these brutal and cursed turns, brought upon her by her fate alone. I love it because she needs me. God help me, I love it because I am the only one left who still loves her.

She was beautiful – I don’t want you to ever forget that. Everyone else has. But don’t you forget it, you judgmental bastards walking by her outside the strip mall, seeing her sitting on the ground against the flowering bushes, her mascara streaked head lolling back into a crown of honeysuckle (Yes, I know you’ve seen her). If I lifted her today, right now, from the sidewalk, took her home and washed her face and hair, gave her coffee and dried her inside and out, you might just see enough of what I mean to get the point. I’ve seen pictures of her at 19 with a baby in her arms and a fire backlighting her on Christmas Eve, and no Madonna and Child that Raphael could have painted would have ever filled in the frame the way she did. Where she started and how she started is a long, long way from where she has landed now.

She told me her story during those three weeks we worked together on the graveyard shift at the deli counter of the 24/7 Safeway. By the time I met her she had legs like soda straws and her blouse and apron swam on her, but she was wide awake during the night and could stay sober enough not to take off her fingers with the slicer, so I let her work with me and by the end, by the time they fired her, I had heard it all and gotten deep, deep inside her where I am to this day. There was very little left that I did not know about her after those three weeks, even if I didn’t care to know it, and to say that I started to love her for her past, her present and even (or mostly) for her lack of any real future, is to say that I had been waiting a long, long time for her or someone like her to show up and surround me with her need.

The story she told me is not your story. Then again, her story is not as far from yours as you might want to think. A tweak in fate here, a tiny twist in your genetic code there, and you’d be the one with the high-strung temperament chasing you all the way from a husband working his way up as a union mechanic, from two sweetheart daughters who you kept washed and ribboned and your Saturday job at the Cut and Curl, to that night when your inability to forgive your parents, your husband or yourself finally overcame you in shifting tectonics of anxiety and you drank and drank and drank until you started to pound yourself in the face with your own fists again and again - your wailing children and unshaven husband watching as the police and EMS technicians carried you through the drizzling night into the yawn of an idling ambulance. Don’t forget that it’s only an accident of family history and the rules of chance that kept you from marrying again after your first husband divorced you and you lost your children. And it’s simply you planning and god not laughing at your plans that helped you avoid a second husband who gave you a job in his insurance company where you and he drank away the cash flow and he beat you and then left you alone in an empty, over-mortgaged house after he took every table, plate and chair (not to mention the car, the motorcycle and the barbecue grill) to go set up house with a much younger drunk than you. When you see her with me and I’ve got her under her arms, rolling her out of some bar in which I found her, remember that, but for the grace of your birth, it’s you whose shoulders are caving into my chest, whose short, shambling hair is plastered by the sweat of other drunks against the protruding bones of your eye sockets as I lower you into my car. It’s merely the cosmic dust of happenstance that keeps you out of a bed with me in my tenement apartment, sleeping off your liquor at night.

The world is full of us, of you and me. And any of us could be her. Although, I have to admit that, in the end, she is who she is – there’s no getting around that. I have taken her and sat her skinny ass down in one of those smoke-stained retro chairs that we set up in stale church halls where the drunks and abusers and reformed addicts sit and confess our sins and inject each other with the power to go on another day without having to shoot ourselves with a needle or needle ourselves with temptation. And she will bounce from that meeting into the sunlight or the moonlight, promising me the sun and the moon, and when I kiss her goodbye and go off to the shift I have to work to keep us in clean clothes and edible food she will deceive me and find a place to quietly sit and pretend to read her cheap paperback (a final tilt at civilization) and smoke her cigarettes down to the filters and drink her way into another life – a life where she has grandchildren who come running into her arms when she calls, and a handsome, graying husband trimming the grass of a big backyard and where she dreams she is free to enjoy the fruits of all the clean and sober work she has done.

You see, a woman has to dream and someone has to love her for it and that someone is me. Why, you ask - because no matter what you think, there is a person inside that woman. And who’s to say that her life and the way she lives and the way that she will die is not what God intended for her or any of us all along. I had another life planned but the righteousness I had about that life was beaten out of me a long time ago, about the time I drank away a thriving business I built with my talents for telling a story and making a good buck, about the time I had to let go of what it was I though God had planned for all of us righteous and arrogant fools. So I see it differently now.

I see a world where the drunks will inherit the earth. I flip it all on its head - the way fate flipped her on her head and me on mind - as I tend to my flock of one. In the place that she and I live it is you with the estates and the two and three cars garages and the jobs so big you can barely contain your heads inside them; you who the world looks down on as we addicts and losers cluck our tongues and shake our heads at the edges of your driveways and gated communities. You are the ones who stoop in shame as you overspend on your children’s college educations and your summer houses. It is you who God admonishes when you use others as an excuse for your inability to be as down low and wasted and close to the edge as we are. In this world God giggles as he blesses the dammed and the down-trodden and he leaves the rest of you to beg for his forgiveness. I dare you to tell me that this might not just be the way God wanted us to see the world from the moment he hung his only son on a cross between a beggar and a thief.

So step up now and give me your order. We’re all in this together – whether it’s you snoring, drunk and peaceful, in the bed next to me when I go home tonight or whether it is she – there is no difference or distance between us. A pound of food that will feed you is a pound of food that will feed all of us. And I love the way your face twinkles just a little when you take the package from my hands as much as I love the way she will someday die in my arms, human and forgiven.

Despicable Acts and Desperate Measures

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:56:00 +0000

“(AP) – July 16, 2010 - JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri abortion clinics will face new mandates to offer women ultrasound images and heartbeats of their fetuses as a result of legislation allowed to become law Wednesday by Gov. Jay Nixon . . . The new law will require consultation in person instead of over the phone and mandate that women receive a description of the "anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child."

From the Desk of . . .

Senator Alvin Blackmore

Republican - Missouri

Re: Budget Saving Measures

I am tickled pink to report the phenomenal success of the right-to-life law that has recently been passed in my home district of Jefferson City, Missouri. In fact, so many poor, destitute and single pregnant women in Jefferson City have now surprisingly chosen to have their babies rather than be made to listen to the heartbeats and a detailed description of their unborn fetuses (along with a gruesome account of the termination procedure which local officials “recommend” that doctors whisper in the expectant woman’s ear) that it has actually given me cause to think of how we might use this same strategy to shrink the enormous budget deficit brought on by our godless democratic colleagues as they break faith with the American people by spending government money to care for the sick and feed and house the poor even as hard-working Republican citizens go to church and pay our salaries.

I say this - if forcing a socially deprived, desperate woman to listen to a heartbeat or the description of an ultrasound will cause her to keep her baby, imagine how we might use this same psychology to cut billions of hard-earned dollars from our federal deficit.

To wit, I propose that we immediately consider the following legislation:

The Blackmore Expired Food Amendment – This amendment to the food stamp program would make it mandatory that anyone applying for food stamps first starve their children and/or themselves for a period of two weeks before being allowed to register for the program. After that, they would be allowed to apply for a one month trial period upon which they would receive an allotment of food stamps that could only be used to buy foods that have passed their expiration date (preferably eggs, milk and cheeses that are more than three months old). While this measure may seem harsh, only the truly destitute and hungry will likely stay with the program long enough to make them eligible for the “Food Stamp Elite Access Program,” entitling them to pay 80 cents for one dollar’s worth of food stamps and saving the government hundreds of billions in this program alone.

The Blackmore Medieval Medicine Measure – Millions of illegal aliens, drug addicts and just plain lazy unemployed individuals are sucking money from federal health programs by entering government funded hospitals and treatment facilities simply because they won’t pull themselves together or because they insist on working long hours in poor conditions at sub-minimum wage jobs. Imagine the surprise of these folks when they find out that – in order to receive federal health care – they will have to allow doctors to examine and treat them using techniques that date back to the 15th and 16th century. For instance, if a drug addict were to apply for government sponsored rehab - under this new federal program he would be confined to a rat infested cell with the criminally insane where a priest cloaked in a black hood would perform an exorcism on him while forcing hot wax down his throat. Or let’s say an undocumented alien were to walk into a government clinic with a badly mangled arm caused by operating heavy machinery in an illegal sweatshop; he or she would be anesthetized by placing a leather helmet on his head and then being hit repeatedly with a wooden mallet prior to having the arm amputated with a rusty sickle. While this bill may further the accusations that we Republicans are cruel and heartless, we will not, nor should we deny care to anyone truly in need. If those in need don’t want to have leeches placed on them to treat their asthma that’s simply their choice (and the federal government’s gain).

The Blackmore Boondoggle Bill – Who among us likes to work? Not me, that’s for sure. Well if this psychology motivates all of us why not use it on those who are seeking federal unemployment benefits. You want to collect an unemployment check? No problem. We’ll give it to you and you won’t even need to qualify or answer a single question. All you have to do to get the money is agree to take a trip at the government’s expense to a remote, undisclosed Island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia. Your unemployment checks will be forwarded to a PO office box in Moscow and you can pick them up anytime you feel you’ve taken enough from other Americans who have to work for a living. Once again, lest we Republicans be thought of as heartless, the American people will be encouraged to think of this as a working vacation where all they need to do to earn their money is to relax on sheets of black ice surrounded by hungry polar bears. Remember we are compassionate conservatives and it’s the least we can do for those who are stressed out by not being able to find a job, not to mention what this will do for currently employed American’s who will have their hours cut and have to work much less as unemployment rolls drop by 85% in the first year alone.

The Blackmore ‘Share’ Housing Act – Remember the days when your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and even a boarder or two lived with you and your family in your tenement apartment? Well, neither do I, but I’m sure that millions of Americans do fondly remember these quaint depression era stories and are probably longing for the good old days. This act would bring them back while also allowing us to continue helping our failing banks and domestic car companies with bailout money that would preserve executive salaries. We are not asking people to come to us to seek housing, but if they have to why not further the concept of America as a melting pot and allow people of all races, creeds and social backgrounds to live together in single family federal apartment units. No more than four families of six people each would have to share a single unit and we would ensure that the apartments were ethnically integrated without bias toward religion or national origins. For instance, those of Pakistani and Indian origin as well as Christian, Muslim and Jewish families would live together in one big happy cooperative apartment. And in the true spirit of America no one would be turned away from the program or evicted, even if tensions rise (as they sometimes do in big happy families).

Note, at present the above are just for your consideration and are in need of funding for further study. Funding we may be able to acquire as budgets are freed up when the recently passed Blackmore Send Your Child to Work Act takes effect and millions of children saved by our right to life legislation reach their fifth birthday and are forced to go to work in order for their parents to qualify for federal subsidies.

I eagerly await your comments.

Sincerely,

Alvin Blackmore

The Crazy Days of Summer

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:10:00 +0000

Riverside Hospital
Behavioral Health Center
Weekly Admission Report
Monday, July 5 – Sunday, July 11, 2010

Patient #RH70510m1
53 Year old male, Nicholas Z. presented with neurotic tendencies arising from an inability to water his lawn due to drought restrictions. Patient reports having spent over $35,000 on lawn care and a computerized sprinkler system and was admitted by his wife after she found him laying face down weeping onto the grass. Mr. Z told doctors he hoped his tears would help his dying Kentucky Blue Grass and High Fescue Mix. Sedatives have been prescribed and Patient is now noticeably calmer although medication was adjusted after Patient began running back and forth behind the nurse’s station in an attempt to adjust imaginary sprinkler heads. Patient told nurses that, “The grass needs to be green ... green god dam it ... green I tell you ...” but was ultimately restrained by orderlies pretending to be illegal immigrants who had come to cut the Patient’s lawn and adjust his sprinkler system.

Patient #RH70510m2
42 year old mother, Dianna S admitted herself at 9 a.m. on Monday saying she believed that her 12 year old daughter had been trying to kill her by repeating the words “I’m bored” thousands of times over the three week period since the girl’s school year ended. Apparently the Patient was able to remain calm for the better part of the first three weeks of her daughter’s summer vacation but finally snapped earlier this week when she threatened to send her daughter to “a farm, where they make children work all summer picking cotton under the hot sun in their bare feet alongside wagons pulled by farting goats.” Patient told the admitting psychiatrist that she wouldn’t have really sent her daughter to a farm but “would it have killed her to read a book or go outside or help me with a little house work?” The daughter was also interviewed by the hospital social worker who decided to end the session when the girl would only respond to her questions with the phrase “I’m bored.”

Patient #RH70710w1
22 year old male, Charles P - recently graduated with a degree in history from Petersburg College - admitted after his parents found him feeding his Burger Barn uniform into a wood chipper. Doctors have determined that the Patient is suffering from “Latent Reality Syndrome” characterized by the Patient’s inability to face the fact that his college diploma isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and that he has to now get a real job. Parents also told the attending psychiatrist that their son spends long stretches searching his dresser for drugs that may have been left over from high school and attempting to contact his fraternity brothers “so they can start a band or get drunk or pick up girls or something.” Patient’s mother also reports that Mr. P has been attempting to crawl into bed at night with his parents “just like he used to do when he was a very little boy and was scared because he thought there was a monster in his closet.”

Patient #RH710810t1
17 year old female, Cindy T admitted to emergency room with burns on her thighs, buttocks and back after paramedics had to pry her from the seat of her 1987 Dodge coup which had been sitting in one hundred degree heat at the edge of her parent’s driveway. Patient had been wearing nothing but flip flops and a two piece bathing suit which the admitting physician reported “wouldn’t have had enough material to make a couple of eye patches for a midget.” Miss T was treated for her burns and released from emergency care but then admitted to the Behavioral Health Center when she could not be restrained from removing her bathing suit to take cell phone pictures of her burns which she then planned on posting to Facebook so her boyfriend “wouldn’t forget about her when she while she was gone.” Attending psychiatrist diagnosed Patient with nervous exhaustion brought on by heat stroke and an obsession with having to get to the beach to prevent “all those little summer sluts from getting their dirty hands on” her boyfriend.

Patient #RH70910sa1
35 year old male, Marty N was brought in by ambulance from his job as a salesman and admitted after hallucinating that he was the last man on earth who was still working. Apparently Mr. N had been unable to make his monthly quota after repeatedly receiving automatic email replies and voice mail messages telling him that the person he was trying to reach was on summer vacation. Attending Psychiatrist reports that Patient spent the first three hours in the observation ward incessantly turning his pockets inside out and mumbling, “I’m sorry, Gary, I’m really, really, really sorry, but I just don’t think there’s anyone left anywhere to sell anything to.” Attempts were made to contact the Patient’s boss, Gary K, however automatic email and voice mail replies informed hospital staff that Mr. K would be away on vacation for the remainder of the month of July.

Weekly Summary
This week’s patients are all making good progress and no serious complications have arisen. Behavior Health Unit administrative and medical staff are all performing satisfactorily. Doctors, Nurses and administrative staff all report that patient load levels are acceptable and that they are all “just happy to still be working in an air conditioned building in July.” New programs being tested to lessen seasonal summer stress for staff include: “take your liquor to work day” where doctors and nurses bring in tequila, margarita mix and crushed ice on Friday’s and then drink heavily while watching patients act out the neurosis, fantasy or hallucination of their choosing; and “Summer Sanity Sundays” where medical and admin staff gather in the hospital chapel and pray desperately that that the summer won’t get to them in the same way it’s gotten to the people who they’ve had to admit the previous week.

The Author Imagines the Future of a Relationship Begun in an Airport Bar

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:40:00 +0000

[As seen and overheard in San Francisco’s McCarren Airport on June 11, 2010]

Given how much they are hiding from each other it is inevitable that they will fall in love. She smartly sits on the stool beside him, camouflaged behind a cheap travel necklace which has been layered on an artificially inflated décolletage that is itself pushing down on a lightly spanked tummy and a stale lungful of smoke from the cigarettes we catch a whiff of as she walks by. Once seated, she promptly disturbs the inner edge of his personal space with the calculated crossing of her waxed calves. For his part he appears smitten with the tits and the legs, but would never let on that he hates the way she does not initially look at him even though he too is good looking and even though he knows that she knows she could bend him over his stool and make him slap his own ass in exchange for her phone number. The two of them are fools and liars, in the same way all the rest of us are fools and liars, but when she giggles softly after he opens up and tells her that he doesn’t think there’s an airport bar left in North America with which he’s not intimately familiar, they both seem to realize that something will happen between them at this bar that will be just as thrilling and lovely in the present as it will be mind-numbing and slightly sorrowful in the future.

Now, it is important to note here at the top that it will be her chuffing giggle which, within a year of their wedding vows, will cause him to semi-seriously consider slapping her. They will be setting the table in the custom built house they bought with their combined PR agency and stockbroker incomes and he will drop a massive porcelain serving plate on his foot. She will ask him if he is alright and when he says he is not but that he’s used to bearing his pain quietly she will giggle just a bit too sarcastically (again hiding something) in that nasally, deviated septum way of hers. It is then that he will realize how this giggle and the ten thousand times he has heard it have built up in him until he sees fire whenever he hears this broken down racket. He will quickly get over it after she reaches down and picks up the plate, stroking his foot lightly for a moment before she rises to kiss him on the cheek. But this will be a turning point in their relationship, pre kids and post infatuation, when they both realize that neither of them is completely stacked up to what they supposed the other would be.

He orders her a glass of wine and the conversation turns to sports. This is a safety move and a way toward the possibility of more serious exploration in the moments to come. You can see that she has learned that a) guys like sports, that b) she likes guys, and that c) she needed to learn to like sports too - or at least to know enough to pretend - in order to hold a man’s attention after flirtation and following sex. He bites, and when she talks about the Knicks and the Yankees and the Giants as her Knicks and her Yankees and her Giants, you can almost see him crossing most of the other women he’s been dating off his list. The Celtics are playing the Lakers on the TV suspended over the top shelf liquors and when the home team scores she boos demonstrably. That cinches it. He decides that she has now earned some other talk besides sports, and he asks where she‘s from. Well, funny you should ask, she says, because I live out here, but I’m headed to the east coast where I was born and where my older sister is getting married next weekend. Wow, he says, what a coincidence, I was born back east too, and now I commute between our offices on the east and west coast, and are you in your sister’s wedding party? Well, yeah - we never really got along when we were kids, but now I’m actually her maid of honor.

Ironic as it may seem, her older sister will be a big problem for them, especially after their second child is born. It’s true that the girls never did get along when they were kids and, contrary to what our girl at the bar would like us to believe, they still don’t get along now. Anyway, the older sister also never liked this guy at the bar, ever since her younger sister called him spur of the moment the day after their serendipitous meeting and asked him to be her date at the wedding the following Saturday. So when, after 7 years of marriage and in the tenth year of their relationship, this couple at the bar had their second child, the older sister was flaming hot with jealousy (having never been able to have her own kids) and overflowing with anger at the distance her younger sister had put between them. This somehow led to deeper fights between our couple at the bar, awful fights in full view of their newborn and their 3 year old, as the older sister conspired to turn her parents against them. Strangely enough, however, this couple was stronger then we might have imagined and they endured if only halfheartedly and only after a future bout of infidelity and a trial separation (which we will get to later). And the older sister? Well she never really will come around; although years later she will come down with breast cancer which will once and for all end the anger she feels for her little sister.

Within the background hubbub, you can see the both of them trying to stay tuned for the announcements of their respective flights even though they are drawing more and more intimate attention from each other with each moment that goes by. They are into future plans by this time – an idea she has to work for a year in Rome or Paris where pretty English speaking PR agents with American accents are paid handsomely; another idea he has to start a brokerage firm on the sea coast of South Carolina where property is still cheap and good face-to-face financial advice is as scarce as snow – and yet you can just tell that neither of them can help but seriously play with the idea of each other’s face on the pillow next to them in the here and now. By the time the traveler with the Willy Loman suitcase and the hair-hat toupee tilts off his stool to the left of them you notice by the way they are talking that they are feeling good and alone in this crowded bar, indeed that they are the only ones in the whole airport. So, when business cards are exchanged in order that neither can get too far from the other, one can sense that there is already a mutual jealously over potential other lovers who might be waiting at the end of a jetway somewhere down the line.

For twenty years this jealousy will simmer until it finally rises into a full head of steam for her when he cracks up over a woman he meets on his daily commute, starting the affair by having sex with her in a bathroom on the train. Their youngest child will be in sixth grade by this time and the other a freshman in high school, and she will kick him out of the house never expecting to be living with him again. She starts smoking once more during this time of their separation and to her surprise she loses the weight she’s been trying to work off for the last fifteen years. She contemplates going back into PR and likes the fact that she no longer has to babysit his overbearing superior cautiousness. What is most unexpected is that she has actually begun to think how good life might be on her own (if only she didn’t still get so lonely at night). And then one day she drops the kids off with him at the apartment he is renting and she sees how he is living. The piles of uneaten food, the shirts he doesn’t wash in favor of just buying new ones, the total lack of regard for his surroundings and the obvious fact that no woman has set foot into this place in months breaks her heart – a heart she should have suspected would be broken in every possible way from the minute she laid eyes on him in that airport bar. Oddly, however, it is the thought of the two of them sitting in that bar way back when that eventually gets her to allow him back into the house, albeit with conditions on his freedom that would have made a dumber man run for his life.

When her plane is called it’s not completely clear to him (although it is clear to us) when and if they will ever see each other again. On the other hand, anyone with a brain can see that she is already sure how this will play out (starting, presumably, with the phone call she’ll make to him the next morning and moving on to the weekend wedding she will seduce him into). She’s never been shy and - having met him tonight - she isn’t going to start by being shy now. She slowly (and you might even say a little achingly) draws herself from the swivel stool, dipping a bit to reach behind her for the telescoping arm of her rolling suitcase. When she straightens up he is also standing to say goodbye and their faces are closer than they have been this entire time. You just know that each would really like to kiss the other – cheeks, lips, ears, anywhere above the shoulders where there is flesh – and when they both stop talking for a moment and she smiles directly into his brown eyes, it’s almost as if their heads have become living bone magnetized by the promise of love. It happens fast and sudden, his lips leading the way as if on rails toward the inside edge of her cheek, a centimeter or two from the pointy corner of her mouth where he kisses her in a way that amounts to more than the thirty minutes they have spent here. It’s hard to tell from this angle, but when she breaks the attraction and pulls away, it looks as if she might have winked at him. If it did happen, it wouldn’t be hard to think of this batting eye as the first stitch set in a seam that will get longer and tighter in the hours, weeks and months to come. She walks away and the last thing he sees before she rounds the corner to her boarding area is the floor edge of her suitcase where the hard little wheels have to be reminding him that what goes around will come around again and again and again.

His youngest daughter will still be using this same suitcase nearly thirty years later. It’s old but the kid really loves her mother’s vintage bag, though she really couldn’t tell you why. Watching her roll this thing out to the car as he and his wife prepare to take her to college, this man we first discovered at the bar cries for maybe only the third or fourth time in his adult life. He quickly runs to the bathroom and washes and wipes and then washes and wipes again until the trace tracks of tears are gone. But there it is, as it was all along, a sensitive man who ultimately knows how to treat a good woman at a bar and how to come to her when she calls and how to miss her when she’s gone.

One could keep imagining what happens to our couple from the bar after he leaves the bathroom - the car ride to the state school 50 miles way, the unloading, the goodbye and then the return home to a finally empty house where the two of them will once again be as alone as they felt that first night in the bar - but what would be truth and what would be fiction. Take what you can and then add your own life here. You might as well. All happy relationships are alike in the same way and all sad ones as different as you and I, making our own relationships the only ones worth dwelling on.

When his plane is called a few minutes later he doesn’t immediately leave the bar. A new woman has taken the place of the girl who just left even before the seat next to him got cold. There was a line waiting to sit down and so it is inevitable that someone would take her place. What is not inevitable is what he will do next. The new woman, skinnier and more tightly put together, smiles at him when she catches his eye as he reaches across the bar for his check. Does he smile back? Does he offer to buy her a drink? Does he look at the game and then back at her to see if she is at all interested? Does he?

Facebook Healed My Soul

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Taddei) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:46:00 +0000

Your past lives in a room in Santa Clara, California. There every person and place you ever knew resides inside boxes of semiconductors and wires, pulsing among the heat sinks, interfaces and mother boards of ten-thousand single-minded machines waiting to serve this living, breathing, venerable data to anyone you desire and anyone who desires you. For some of you, this room may be in Dublin, Ireland. For me, it might be in Ashburn, Virginia. But for sure, one of these rooms holds a link to our pasts and to the history of just about everyone know. And Facebook is the keeper of the keys to these rooms in these places where our pasts reside.

Now, if you listen the buzzing hive of media, you’ll hear that there are those among us who feel that having Facebook oversee our past and, likewise, be able to connect us through these data centers to people and places long gone from our lives (or for that matter to 400 million other people we never knew or never wanted to know in the first place) is an invasion of our privacy. Still others of us believe that being able to share ourselves with old friends and lovers – to relive old acquaintances and cash in on long banked emotions – gives us a second chance at a life that may not currently be as satisfying as we’d like. But me, I can tell you that having been able to see the people who have emerged from my past through Facebook - to reencounter them today and roam a while in the lives they have lived since I once knew them - has helped me to love my life as I am living it more than I could ever have hoped. I may have been floundering in that mid-life half state where a man questions the choices he has made and looks at much of what he has created as mistakes or dam lies, but let me tell you that seeing who has emerged digitally out of my past and into my present has once and for all shut my cranky mouth and sent me to my knees, prostrate in thanks for the life I have created.

In short, Facebook healed my soul.

Consider the types of men and women who have found me and who might try to find you . . .

There will be that woman whom we dated the sweltering summer between high school and college when the heat from the rotting sky burnt the lake beaches into tar as we snuggled on the shore, baking both of us into a single brick of desire. This woman we remember so fondly for her large breasts and her lean, flexible legs, for her sharp comebacks and her soft tongue, this woman is now divorced with two children who call her names as they raid her purse and an ex husband who can currently only abuse her through the phone when she calls him to beg for the money a judge ordered him to pay. This old flame of ours is swimming in the flotsam of Facebook looking for anyone from the past to cling to (anyone whom she recalls with a tender heart), and that anyone – for the moment – is me (and you).

There will be that sheltered, neighborhood momma’s boy whom our dull-witted gang of street thugs said was a retard and whom Facebook now tells us has become the idiot savant of our home town’s financial district, making himself, his family and many of his supplicants rich. This grown man, whose recent photo still shows the cowlick and forced picture smile he had in grammar school, is “just connecting with old friends” through a mass emailing meant to seize our hearts with regret and shame us into ever doubting him (or his mother, whom still lives with him) in the first place. Will we bite and then chew out the center of our own chests trying to free ourselves from the trap of envy he has set?

And, if these two aren’t enough, there will be another woman who finds us, a real beauty whom we could only look at but who would never let us touch her in grammar school or high school or even at the community college where she seemed to follow us like bait trolling on the end of a fish hook. She’s been married and divorced and married and divorced again and the special comment she put on our Facebook page tells us that we were “always so cute . . .” and asks if we are the same person she thinks we are. Don’t worry, guys, we still won’t be able to get to her through the retinue of admirers bedazzled by her supple high heels, perfect mask of makeup and tight little black dresses. And even if we do get her we won’t have her for long. Yet still we will long for her for a long, long time in the illuminated night of our laptop screens.

Perhaps it will be that superhero, high school jock teammate of ours who will pop up from the past through California or Virginia or Ireland to send us a Facebook message telling us that - now that he’s lost his house and wife and kids from drug and sex and gambling addictions - he’s found Jesus. And, Jesus, he’d really like to see us again but first he has to clear out this little 90 day stretch in the state pen for a couple of parole violations. “After that, would you like to get together?” Well, would we? Huh?

Or maybe finally (for now) it will be someone just like the rest of us who will present themselves smiling on our message boards, someone with a life similar to ours – a man or woman who’s kept their head above water all these years and whose only fault lies in never doing enough for themselves as they nurture their kids and grow old with their spouses. Now that’s someone we could relate to, right? Surely this person, with their sense of civic duty, 2-3 ambitious kids and clean house, is a person whose past we would feel comfortable in. “It looks like you and I share so much,” he or she tells us, “And here’s my cell number because I’d love for you to call me ....”

And call them all we should. And call them all I did. And in seeing them all again I realized one astonishing fact - I realized that if I took these pasts that came tumbling out at me from those servers that Facebook banks on, and I put them in a pile among the pieces of my own life, I would pull my life today out of that heap in less time than it took to click delete.

It’s not that I’ve lost love for these people or that I envy or mock their lives - In fact I love them all the more now for finding me and sharing the pains and joys of this beautiful human existence that we all find ourselves trapped within. It’s just that, whether they have lived well or not, whether their lives are the mirror image of mine or whether they have fallen through the looking glass into a dusky, wonderland of their own, their lives are simply not my life.

Those people from my past could never have created this family I have made in just the way I have made it, they could not have had the same dark nights of the soul that I have had with exactly the same terrors to survive, nor could they have done it all as right or as wrong in precisely the same ways that I have thrived and blundered. And that is something to be proud of, and that is why I would never trade lives or go backwards with any of them. No matter what Facebook leads me to believe by serving this past to me, my life is precious simply because it is mine and mine alone.

After all, our pasts may live in a room in some far off place, but our futures exist only in the lives we live today. And that is enough for any man to Face.