The Cookout

(Governor Tom's Note: I wrote this short story in November of 1998. I was in my first semester of USC's creative writing program. This was for the same class for which I wrote "Where Nothing Lives." Only, Professor Saroyan actually liked this one. I just dug out the hard copy with his comments from my files. At the end he wrote, "This is well-done and interesting - full of suggestive colors and details - with a nice rhythm to it." I hope you feel the same.)
__________

He tripped on the sliding door frame and nearly fell onto the burgundy patio that was slowly becoming less and less influenced by the red liquid disk in the west. In one hand he clutched the necks of three beers, his fingers numb against the icy brown glass. With the other he balanced a tray of cheese and crackers. “Here we go, folks!” He set the tray down on the round table where his wife and the couple from next door sat. They each took a beer while he furtively listened to the chicken crackling beneath the grill lid. They still sounded too calm to turn over. The swans curved and bulged across Janice’s T-shirt.

“Thanks, Lucian,” said Janice’s husband Bruce. He raced his fingers through the bit of graying hair on the sides. “What about you?”

“Back in a sec.” Lucian disappeared into the house to the sounds of his growling stomach.

Janice turned to Lucian’s wife Erin, sitting placidly on the other side of the table, legs crossed, bathing in the sun’s scarlet that bestowed her sandy blonde hair with an orange tone to match her tank top. The knee peaked above the table. “So how are things at the store?” Janice asked, shooting a sidelong glance to see if her husband was looking at Erin. His bald pate gleamed while he considered which kind of cheese to pair with his cracker.

Erin kept her eyes focused beyond Bruce and Janice on the bloody disk and the pink-fringed clouds. “Summer’s always a sucky time for the store. It isn’t until fall when things get hectic, ya know? What with the Labor Day sales, and Halloween and Thanksgiving which can also be crazy. And I don’t even want to think about Christmas.” She really didn’t want to think about anything. She had told Lucian she didn’t want to have this fucking barbecue, but he had insisted. Bruce and Janice invited them over for dinner last fall and they had yet to return the favor. Erin had nothing against them. She just didn’t want to do it tonight. For the last few weeks she’d been feeling down but didn’t know why. At first she thought it had been the slow business at the department store, but when there were busy moments, the feeling didn’t abate.

She lowered her eyes so she could see Janice but still maintain the appearance of gazing into the sky. Janice was much more attractive than she was: Higher cheeks, fuller breasts, better toned legs. They weren’t longer, though. Length was the only factor on Erin’s side. Still, Janice had three kids but didn’t physically betray it. Erin looked higher into the sky where the clouds gave up their territory to the darkening blue. “Yeah it’s just been real slow.”

“It’ll get busier,” Bruce said with his mouth full. He took a swig of his beer and scooted closer to his wife. His watch read half past six. Plenty of time before the game started. Bruce checked his watch again and kept his eyes on it a bit longer to make sure his wife noticed him doing so. In the corner of his eye he could see Lucian coming out with a beer and a bowl of something. Was he checking out Janice?

Lucian placed the corn chips and salsa next to the cheese and crackers and was just sitting down with his beer when he noticed the more frequent crackling and spitting inside the grill. A wave of heat and the smell of browning poultry swept over him when he lifted the lid. He used the tongs to turn over the twelve pieces. His stomach grew more indignant. Looking at Janice only made it worse. Thank God Erin had relented to having them over. He was losing Janice’s image in his mind and needed a refresher. When shooting another glance at Janice he observed Erin in the corner of his eye. Her eyes were glued to the sun dipping behind the houses. “All right, folks. Drumsticks. Breasts. And wings. You guys aren’t drumstick freaks like me, right? I don’t have to worry about you, sweetie. Wings!”

“Uh huh.”

“Just show me the titties,” Bruce said with a mouthful of corn chips.

Janice studied Lucian’s impeccably combed black hair. His five o’clock shadow accentuated the squareness of his jaw. His belt buckle had his initials in gold. “Don’t be a pervert, Bruce.”

Bruce dipped another chip into the salsa and watched Lucian’s eyes. “I was on the Internet last night, right? You know just browsing and stuff. I wanted to order a couple of the Boss’s CDs, but you know how you just start browsing, right? So I get to this one site that’s talking about how you can see nude pics of these female celebrities. Totally a gimmick. But I went just out of curiosity and wound up on this one page with these, I don’t know, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old girls, like three of them, screwing this one older guy.”

“Really?”

“Oh God.” Janice shot another glance at Lucian’s belt. “Do you have to tell us about your late-night escapades?”

“Don’t act like I didn’t tell you about it.”

“God.”

“I’ll bet you they’ve seen the same thing.”

“Well Erin and I were browsing one night and just out of curiosity decided to check out one of those smut sites. Amazing, the amount of garbage online these days.”

“Funny,” Erin said. “Imagine the parents of kids who stumble onto it so easily.”

“I don’t even want to go into some of the other stuff we found.” Bruce patted his wife on the thigh and brushed the smooth skin with his fingertips. “We’ll leave that unsaid.”

Lucian grabbed the baster and squirted the chicken. “Disgusting. They should ban all that garbage, create a law or something.”

“I hear ya.”

Erin sat up and took a swig of her beer, her leg bobbing up and down. “You know what’s really neat, though?” The sun was almost gone. “I mean I don’t know if it’s neat, but.....I mean it’s just......you can practically look up anything on the Internet these days. I mean everyone can access whatever they want. You can do research. Get a bachelor’s without leaving your desk. Anything.” She knew if she kept talking, it would become obvious she wasn’t into this shindig. She sat back and dropped her gaze to the floorboards, filthy and cracked and fading, tracing them with her eyes until she reached her husband’s black forest legs, toned by his daily pre-dawn jogging. Her own leg stopped bobbing.

“Yeah it’s cool,” Bruce said. “Janice and I have been watching a lot less TV and doing a lot more browsing lately.” He patted her on the inner thigh. “But that won’t deter me from Sunday gameday, right, hon?” He took a sip of his beer and turned to his wife while peripherally watching Lucian looking at his hand. Bruce quickly withdrew it but didn’t know why.

“Honey, I don’t think anything in the world could get in the way of you and your football,” Janice said. Lucian smiled. She smiled back and offered more teeth than he did.

“It’s impossible to pull Lucian away from the TV on Sundays.”

“Not true,” Lucian said. He had a fleeting wish to become Bruce’s hand. “I give up a lot of Sundays to do things with you.”

“I just said sometimes.”

“Bullshit.” He shot another look at Bruce’s hand before grabbing the pieces of chicken off the grill with his hand and dropping them on a large plate.

“Honey.” Erin recrossed her legs and turned back to the sky. All that was left of the disk was its very peak. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms at the approaching chill. All this Internet talk put her in the mood to revisit that site from the other night.

“What’s so funny?” Lucian set the plate in the middle of the table with a thud. “All right, folks, dig in. Whoops let me go get the potato salad and some napkins.” He ran inside.

“Alrighty!” Bruce said. He removed his hand from his wife’s thigh and picked a breast off the plate. “Babe?”

“Just a drumstick.”

“Don’t know if Lucian’ll like that.”

Erin picked off a couple of wings. The sun was out of sight but still pinkened the clouds. In the semi-gloom her plate seemed to smile at her with its purple rose motif. It was a ridiculing smile.

Lucian came back out with the potato salad and a pile of napkins and crammed them on the already crowded table. He plopped down in the chair with a heavy sigh. “Don’t be shy, folks.”

“Yeah-heah, hoss.” Bruce scooped out a pile of potato salad before passing it to his wife.

Lucian picked off two drumsticks while keeping his eyes on Janice, who was taking her time with the potato salad, her deliberate motions accentuating the wet sticky sound of the excess mayo. “Well how about that?” he said. “I finally get to sit down.”

Erin patted him on the knee. He jerked his chair in.

“Here you go, sweetie.” Janice passed the bowl to Erin and glanced at the horseback rider on Lucian’s shirt.

After Erin served herself, she offered the bowl to her husband. “Maybe later,” he said.

Not even the clouds could see the sun now. An abrupt chill hit the patio. They all stopped chewing for a moment, although none of them were aware they had. The darkness and chill increased commensurate with their dwindling conversation. Four indistinct shapes sat around the worn out table, eating and peeking and playing off the shivering.

“So what made you trip?”

Where Nothing Lives

(Governor Tom's Note: This is a short story I wrote my first semester in USC's creative writing program. The file says it was last saved on September 18, 1998. The semester had started on September 2, so this must've been one of the first stories I submitted. My professor was Aram Saroyan, son of William Saroyan, one of California's most noted writers. Aram's not doing too badly himself. He's more avant garde than his father, though, which is why he may never replicate the elder Saroyan's critical and commercial success.

Aram didn't like this piece very much, although he did say it improves as it goes along. The assignment was to write about something we love. I love the desert. Indeed, at the time, before I was sure I'd remain in Southern California after finishing the program, I harbored thoughts [fantasies?] of living in southern Arizona. The first novel I ever wrote, when I was in high school, took place in a fictional southern Arizona town. I'd never been to Arizona at that time, so I suppose I sort of mythologized it in my mind. I did finally manage to check it out during my cross-country drive about a month before I wrote this story.

My love for the desert must not have come through because in his comments Aram said he felt like I'd skirted the assignment.)

__________

Damn, Fletcher thought to himself when someone sat next to him on the commuter train after he’d only been on for one stop. He was hoping he’d get to sit alone during the ride into the city. His half-asleep eyes stared out the smeared window at the six-story law firm opposite the station, which stared back at him with mirror windows. As the train started moving again, he saw the little vulnerable-looking police station with only two squad cars in front. Now he was passing buildings and roads at full speed, mostly offices and fast food restaurants boasting of their existence with a shape or a sign, and eventually lifeless buildings, both brick and metallic, which stared mournfully with hollow eyes as the train passed.

Fletcher turned ahead and stared at the back of the blonde woman’s head. It was short, cut off at her neck, where she reached back with her burgundy talons and scratched around a mole. At the corner of his eye was the woman who’d just sat next to him, a young and bone-thin black woman wearing a long pink dress and smelling like the cherry cough syrup Fletcher’s mom spoon-fed him as a child. Behind the grinding noise of the train’s wheels he could just make out the woman muttering as she read something. He made a slight movement with his neck to see what it was and recognized the two columns of tiny print per page. Her right index finger slid deliberately down each column, one after the other, stroking the Biblical phrases as she read them.

Looking back out the window, he saw the land giving up its domain to the coffee-brown waters of the Delaware, twisting and turning the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Ahead he saw the jungle of buildings that awaited him, a collection of tall, glass, needle-point titans that pierced the daylight just as surely as they blocked it from reaching the pawns who walked around at their square feet.

“Eighth and Market,” the operator said, announcing the first stop in the city before they even reached the tunnel at the other side of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Fletcher got out along with hordes of other passengers. The trek from the train to aboveground meant negotiating corridors that were no less than intestinal. The tiled walls were urine-yellow and the ground was the color of shit, moistened here and there with puddles that never seemed to evaporate. Beneath his buttoned shirt and T-shirt he could feel a thin film of sweat coat his body while he and the other passengers squeezed through the claustrophobic corridors in one constipated motion before finally ejecting themselves into the urban toilet to bathe in the icy polluted air, which their lungs had cried out for, and then cried out again upon receiving it.

At the top of the steps sat a homeless man whose pale, peanut-shaped face was smeared with the residue of long-term urban exposure, and whose white beard was unevenly cut. He was wearing an old Eagles jersey torn on one side of the collar to make room for the plum-sized cyst on his shoulder. One of his eyes was cataracts white. His trembling hand proffered a soiled coffee cup in case anyone had some change from the train they didn’t need.

“Excuse me, ma’am, can you spare any change so I can get some breakfast? God bless you. Excuse me, sir, can you spare any change? Come on, sir, I’m hungry. God bless you. Sir, can you give me some change so I can get a cup of coffee? The Lord loves you, sir.”

Almost no one answered. Fletcher muttered a “No thank you” under his breath. He speed-walked the three blocks to the gift shop at which he worked, cutting through a park and trying not to pay attention to the overweight elderly man doing jumping jacks by the fountain, shouting out an incomprehensible number with each jump.

Fletcher’s supervisor, a late thirties woman named Pam, was stocking one of the shelves with ribbons and gift wrap when he walked in. Her pasty pale cheeks carried a rouge hint, and her bleached blonde hair was tied back in a bun. She was dressed in her usual Friday clothes: Dark blue jeans and gray sweatshirt, a stark contrast to her usual work garb, a long dress, often decorated with a floral motif. A rich cinnamon smell permeated the shop, which could only mean they’d just gotten a new shipment of potpourri. They sold several different scents of potpourri that always seemed to compete with each other to overwhelm you.

“Hiya, Fletcher.”

“Pam.”

“Could you please help that lady? Thanks.”

The woman at the counter was dressed for work, a cream blouse, black slacks and a long trench coat. She stared stoically through her circular sunglasses as he hurried around the counter to take her purchase. “Hi good morning,” he said before zapping the gift wrap and bow. “Two eighty.”

“Pardon?”

“Two eighty, ma’am.”

“The sign said five percent off.”

“That’s for the clearance row, ma’am.”

“The what?”

“The clearance row. That’s where the sign is.” He nodded at the sign behind her. She didn’t bother turning around.

“Never mind,” she said, leaving the items on the counter and walking out.

Pam strolled over, her tongue curling a piece of mint gum over on itself, the smell of which temporarily blocked out the cinnamon. “So how did classes go this week?”

Fletcher shrugged.

She popped a couple bubbles between her teeth. “Andy and I took the kids to the Flyers game last night.” She picked a lash out of her eye with her pinky.

Fletcher peaked down at his watch. “Awesome.”

“Flyers lost. Andy’s like, ‘I’m never coming again. They fucking suck.’ I mean he gets so serious.”

“I have friends like that.”

“Yeeeeah,” she said, curling a strand of hair around her finger. “And so after the game I says to him I says, ‘Ya know this is always your idea. If it makes you so mad, why do you torture yourself?’” She twirled more hair and laughed. One of her black-purple nails tapped the dirty, scratched glass counter top.

Fletcher thought about that woman. Her attire had suggested she made a decent living. Did her shortness at the lack of discount mean she was really that stingy or was it symptomatic of something else in her life, something that had nothing to do with the price of gift wrap?

“Oh let me get back to doin’ this. I’ll tell yas about it later.” Pam walked back to the boxes.

Fletcher waited until she was back into her rhythm of unpacking before letting out a huge breath of air. It was one of the rare moments during the work day when he could breathe. Most of the time he couldn’t, not when the elderly woman came in to return the opened bag of vanilla potpourri because she had decided her dachshund didn’t like the smell. The woman’s orange hair was enveloped in a net, her peach lipstick was pealing, and her body looked so frail that Fletcher dare not breathe for fear of knocking her over. And he wasn’t able to breathe when a balding man whose glasses magnified his eyes by a factor of ten marched in and lambasted Fletcher with his nicotine-shredded voice because, the man said, he’d only been visiting Philadelphia for a day so far and already hated it for the lack of street signs. Nor could Fletcher let out a fraction of a breath when two fortysomething women on their way home from work stopped by to get birthday cards before nearly clawing at Fletcher’s throat after hearing that the cards were thirty-five scents more than if they’d just gotten them at the drug store. And between every barrage of customers Pam’s voice box became his ear’s companion. Her tongue must always be on a high, he thought. Did it ever rest? When she went to sleep, would her tongue still form words, using the darkness as a chat mate?

No, it wasn’t until that night when he got home from work that he could finally start breathing, after he’d wolfed down his dinner at the kitchen island while his father and stepmother ate in front of the television with a World War II documentary blaring, after he darted up into his bedroom and flicked on the halogen lamp that diffused a soft spray of light just enough for him to read by. He turned on Mozart’s Requiem, which he’d borrowed from his father’s collection of over a thousand classical music CDs, and threw himself on the bed. When he leaned back against his two black pillows, he stretched his legs across the comforter, the toes of his sneakers pointing up at the poster of the Dungeons & Dragons skeleton that glared back at him with jade slits. If he could have stretched his legs until his femurs popped out, he would have. He reached down to the floor and scooped up the newest issue of the Arizona highways magazine. Flipping it open to a random page, he was welcomed by a view of black asphalt stretching ahead while being divided by twin amber lines and supported by an article underneath. It wasn’t the road itself he was interested in, but what lay on the other side of it: Absolutely nothing. Fletcher smiled. Just pure, flat, hot, monotonous nothing.

Yes, now he could breathe. Now he could let out–no, expel–the polluted air his lungs had endured all day as he dreamt of taking a whiff of the hot, dry, lifeless air of the desert, the air that allowed nothing to exist except those who were willing not only to live in it, but to bathe in it. The pure desert air didn’t scar the lungs. The desert didn’t have sun-blocking office towers, no trains grinding their way to and from the bowels of the city, and no customers whining because they’d spent a dollar more than they’d budgeted. The desert would forgive none of that.

Fletcher continued turning the pages at a relaxed pace, his grin as lazy as his heavy eyes. The last thing he saw before conking out was a photograph of a desert landscape with a three-limbed cactus dominating the right foreground.

When he awoke, he was inside the photograph, standing at the edge of the road with the cactus on the other side of it. He smiled and shut his eyes, reveling in the heat with which the sun bathed his scalp. The aridness cleansed his lungs. The utter silence massaged his ears. He opened his eyes and began walking across the road, taking his time, at first not noticing the silver snake speeding at him from down the road. He turned just in time to see its rusty tongue shoot out, not with a hiss but with a honk. It brushed a few strands of Fletcher’s hair as he leaped to the other side of the road, the hot gust pushing him as it zipped by. He caught his breath and smiled at the vista. The glowing hot sand stretched unbridled until it collided with the sky halfway to eternity.

“You better watch yourself,” someone said from behind. He spun around. No one was there. Just the cactus, the road, and more sand.

“Hello?”

“I’m the one talking, you idiot.” It sounded like the trench-coated woman who had refused to buy the wrapping paper and bow. The cactus shifted in the sand toward him. At first he thought it was one of those hallucinations the heat inflicted on new arrivals. Had the distance to it just been cut in half? Were its limbs flexing slightly as it spoke? “Just because you came all the way here doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you about this morning. The wrapping paper and bow should have been in the clearance section.”

“Why are you here?” Fletcher asked.

“You think my complaints will just dry up out here? I want my discount.”

“Hiya, hon,” came Pam’s voice from behind him. He turned to see a giant albino scorpion less then twenty yards away. “How did classes go?” He could hear the smacking of her gum in sync with the opening and closing of her pincers.

“Pam, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh I just love lying out in the sun. I’m so pale. Ya know I said the same thing to Andy the other day and he says to me he says, ‘Just go to the desert and your problem’s solved. That’s why Fletcher wants to go there.’ And I says to him I says, ‘Yeeeeeah. Ya know somethin’ you’re right.’” The pincers opened and closed at an ever increasing pace until the gum smacking became uninterrupted and deafening.

“I want my discount, God damn it!” the cactus shrieked.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “This is my dream.” The cactus stopped talking. The scorpion became a sand sculpture. Fletcher tapped it in its belly with his foot. The sand was firm as stone. He lay on the scorpion’s back. The arched stinger’s shade provided a nice respite from the sun. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

Fletcher breathed deep, deliberate breaths. He was home.

His alarm clock dragged him from the dream with its screeching. He grimaced at the red numbers that told him it was six in the morning. He squinted at it in indignation while the beeps continued their assault. The clock obviously didn’t respond to his grimace, but it did seem to tell him to get used to disappointment.