HAVANA-
“In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns on the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit… are the highest forms of consciousness.”
-Vladimir Nabokov
LOS ANGELES, CA–
So, I’ve been working pretty hard lately. And by working hard, I mean that I’ve been working really hard, for long hours (12 or so of them every single day) for about the last two years. As a reader of this little article, you might wonder what I’ve been working at for all of these hours, but that’s not important. What is important is that at this point, the only thing that really punctuates my working of really long hours is the drinking of highball glasses of Jim Beam, which helps me work more but alas (according to all of the addiction recovery books I seem to be reading lately) doesn’t really relax me. At least not in the way a good vacation would. A good, sober vacation. And what better place to get away from it all (or at least the burning, wood-fired Tandoori oven that is LA right now) than Palm Springs, California, just two hours away!
At first this seems like a great idea, right? A relaxing desert, a pool, room service… All awesome things. However…
BOULDER, CO-
It was early in the morning. Lori answered the phone and handed it to me. My father’s voice.
“Uche…there’s been a terrible…”
“Uche…you should know…”
A pause as gruesome guesswork played through my mind. I wanted to hear rather than continue imagining, but did I really want to hear? He drew a constricted breath, and it came in a wave before his voice broke.
“Uche, Chika died tonight. Imose died tonight. Little Anya is just barely hanging on…”
Died. Died. Barely hanging on.
My nieces.
Dear DFW:
One year ago today, you put a rope around your neck and willingly jumped.
For me, the void was immense for weeks on end. Due to academic obligations at the time, I was never really able to deal with it properly, which, of course, is kind of odd because I never met you.
But it remained there for a good half year, and I had to come to grips with the fact that you, my favorite writer —and ironically the only one whose writing made me feel like I should never even really try to write because it seemed like you had said it all— were dead.
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND -
Memory can be like a magician’s trick; part sleight of hand, part smoke and mirrors. It’s real but it’s not real. Sometimes you’ll catch a glimpse but you will never actually catch the trick.
So it is with music. There’s a song that I don’t know the name of, but if I hear even two bars of it - it reduces me to a quivering wreck. It was the song that was playing on the radio when I found the lifeless body of my kitten that had been squashed flat by a gas tank. I was about eleven years old when this happened and despite the resulting trauma, I count myself lucky that that the song playing was an obscure electronica piece. I’d have been fucked if it had been something really popular like Spandau Ballet’s ‘True,’ which still gets a lot of airplay even now.
ASTORIA, N.Y.-
We moved on the first of September. Left our 400-square-foot fifth-floor walk-up on East Seventh Street in Manhattan’s East Village—an apartment that cost a staggering $1,800 a month—for a bigger, cheaper, cleaner, safer one-bedroom in Astoria, the part of Queens comprising the westernmost extremity of Long Island, directly across the East River from Yorkville.
We haven’t even been here two weeks. The cable hasn’t been turned on yet. The guy from Time Warner is supposed to come tomorrow—Wednesday, September 12, 2001.
BROOKLYN, NY-
A recent hangover found me still under the covers at 2:00 PM. I called out to my boyfriend Casey, but instead of asking for water or Advil, I asked him to look up details about the murder of Konerak Sinthasomphone, Jeffrey Dahmer’s thirteenth victim.
From under my pillow I’d been half-listening to Casey talk about the death of Ted Kennedy. Casey is young enough that Ted’s incident at Chappaquiddick, in the news once more, was a revelation. He was reading aloud about the crash from my desk across the room, and it got me thinking about the guilt one must feel when responsible for the death of another human. That in turn made me remember that after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught, reports surfaced about a fourteen year-old boy who had briefly escaped him. (more…)
MIAMI BEACH, FL-
Sara and Ben were really good, dependable kids. Lonny and Timothy and Lenore were entirely different. They were dependable only insofar as you could count on them screwing up. By screwing up I do not mean small things. These were kids who regularly required the involvement of the police.
LOS ANGELES, CA-
I run, and I’m pissed that Runner’s World, this Poets & Writers of the running community, this absolutely useless gloss rag which is great to read on the crapper, chose Sarah Palin over me as their “I’m a Runner” of the month. So I didn’t run for VP, but this should count in my favor. I didn’t pretend to know what’s going on in Japan, even though I can practically see it from Long Beach. (more…)
NASHVILLE, TN -
“This is like CHRISTMAS for these guys!” said a random dude in the parking lot of the El Coyote restaurant in Los Angeles on that hot August night in 2006. It was the 37th anniversary of the infamous Charles Manson/Helter Skelter murders in the hills high above L.A., and this guy was trying to explain to a handful of tourists why a large group of us had met up at that particular Mexican restaurant to commemorate the event. The El Coyote was the restaurant in which Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Voytek Frykowski had all eaten their last meal together on August 8, 1969 before returning to 10050 Cielo Drive to meet their gruesome fate later that night at the hands of Manson family members.
LOS ANGELES—
Jerry and Mary Neeley used to own the best video store on the east side of L.A. That’s where I met them, and since they closed shop two years ago to sell movie collectibles online, we’ve occasionally met for coffee and talk of, among other topics, true crime. We’ve also kept in touch by e-mail, and last week Mary sent the following message:
As you know, the 40th anniversary of Tate/LaBianca is this August 8th & 9th. (Technically, the 9th & 10th because both parties were killed after midnight.)
I wanted to go to the LaBianca house around 1am on the 10th to see if anyone else shows up. Would you be interested? I don’t want to walk up there alone at 1am.
(more…)
GULF BREEZE, FL -
Since March 2007 my grandparents have lived in an assisted living facility here in Gulf Breeze. My husband and I moved down a year later, in part so I could spend time with them.
My grandmother has fairly severe dementia. On the Global Deterioration Scale, I’d place her at a Level 5/6.
Lately she’s been seeing my parents on the TV. From the way she describes it, it’s as though she’s tuning in on them while a conversation is already in progress. She always expresses astonishment when she tells me about these occurrences. “I didn’t know they could do that!” she exclaims.
“I didn’t either, Nan,” I’ll say.
But the odd thing, of course, is that I do know they can do that; it’s only my grandmother who doesn’t know. It’s like her imagination has independently invented the web cam.
DAEGU, KOREA -
Rodney Munch is the sort of guy you’d normally consider pretty damn lucky, but lucky folks fall, too, and they fall harder than the rest of us.
I once saw Rod being dealt a Royal Flush, only a week after his first game of poker. Another time, I saw him decline to choose heads or tails in a coin toss, only to have the coin land on its side.
PORTLAND, OR-
I’m going to run a bit off the farm on this one here. Allow for the author to journey through the emotional hillside with ya. Give ya a bit of pop culture tourism through the eyes of the 1980’s raised brat-pack wannabe.
It’s been a crazy few days. I’ve been pounding the pavement trying my damdest to problem solve and keep my starving artist self from starving even more and facing the very real possibility of slipping through the cracks and being homeless.
And halfway through that series of pavement pounding challenges I get a text message that John Hughes died.
WASHINGTON, NJ -
Every time I open a new book of fiction, there’s a part of me that hopes for the improbable: to encounter something new, something utterly original. So as you can imagine, I’m let down a lot. But sometimes I get lucky.
It’s been two weeks since I finished reading J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, but here’s this little gem of a book, still sitting on my desk. I don’t know when I’ll return this paperback to its designated shelf, but it won’t be anytime soon, for I keep going back to it, reading one of the 100 anecdotes in this collection at random, smiling and chuckling along the way.
LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN-
On Water
I’ve become pretty water-savvy over the past few years. Who hasn’t? Spring water, sparkling water, water from the quickly disappearing glaciers of Alaska – we’ve all been drinking more bottled water. I know some people who have stopped drinking tap water altogether. They say they don’t like the taste, but I think it’s actually a matter of trust. I drink it, but I probably shouldn’t. When I order tap water in restaurants, it’s slightly embarrassing. Can’t I afford the bottled water? Am I making some kind of statement? (Sometimes when the refrigerator in my kitchen kicks in, the lights in my apartment dim a little, and I feel my eyelids dip to match the encroaching darkness as though they’re struggling to blur the line between what they guard and what they guard against.)
LAS VEGAS, NV -
I moved back to Vegas from Charlotte over a year ago. The reasons? Too many. But one of them was that my mom (my grandmother actually) was battling cancer and I wanted to be by her side. I spent many sad nights on the east coast thinking about what she was going through. It hurt like nothing I ever felt before. I felt like a horrible son.
PARIS-
These arrangements of empty chairs are what’s left of celebration, argument, meditation, sleep and revelation. They huddle together like still animals in the cold. From a chair beneath a plane tree, the round tracks of a cane disappear into the gravel.
The single chairs are absent of their poets, readers and afternoon philosophers.
Those side by side and face to face are absent of their lovers, their chess players, the soon to be married and the just abandoned.
The great groups of circles and strange half-moons have lost their lecturers, their students.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA-
One of the neighbors in the ‘nage’ flips cars—that is, he buys them, spruces them up, then sells them. There are always at least six of them parked on our little street, so sometimes it gets a little crowded. He “ain’t from here,” as country people would say. He hails from somewhere down south–El Salvador or Guatemala, I think. He is well dressed, respectful, and attentive. He can usually be found outside, cell phone in hand. If I or one of the other neighbors seem to be having difficulty negotiating a turn into our driveways, he will hustle over and move one of the cars like an uptown parking lot Johnny.
BEND, OR-
This book-pimping thing has brought both extreme highs and lows during the first month, as Misfits and Other Heroes has made its way into the world. I have cried and eaten one too many donuts, been routed to an Internet porn site when I Googled myself and been told by a local bookstore owner, “We don’t carry books about unicorns,” when I tried to explain how my short stories hover around the genre of magic realism.
