Suburban Misfits

  This time, I think I'll kill him.  It's cheaper than picking up lot, stock and barrel again, and even moving wouldn't help. He'd follow me like a disease or a dirty little secret.  Murder is the only answer.  We're talking about my daughter's future here, as well as my peace of mind.  And I do love my daughter.  We wouldn't have pulled up stakes in Little Falls and moved here if I didn't.  I saw everything unfolding before me, only back then I didn't quite understand it all, and why she had changed from a warm and obedient 15-year-old girl into a high and mighty little bitch making demands on me, wearing outrageous clothing and positively libidinous cosmetics. She was turning into a hippie right before my eyes, and would have if I hadn't put my foot down and told her, "No!"  And then she acts as if I'm the criminal.  "I'm sick and tired of people telling me how to life my life," she said, followed the kind of languag...

Caught again. I hate it when vice principal Coleman gets that look in his eyes. It is like he waits for me to screw up and takes bloody pleasure in taking me to task. This is the fifth time he’s caught me cutting this month, and it’s not yet the 15th of the month. I have to eat crap every time. I know the only way to get away with cutting class is to not show up for the first period, and get marked out as absent for the day. But then, I got to worry about the call home from the office checking to see if I’m really ill. One day after school for a cut. Three days for faking an illness. It’s just not fair. To make matters worse, my best friend, Dave, just found out he’s failed for another year. And he’s as moody as an old toad, sulking in the outer office as I get my punishment. If I was him I would have quite after failing the second time. But for some reason, he keeps coming back. But I have my own problems. If only I could avoid that phone call home I could cut all I wanted and not wor...

  Dave rushes into Lou’s Café and screams: “Robots from outer space have kidnapped Susie.” This draws a nod or two, but mostly yawns. I’m interested only because of all the outlandish tales that Dave has come up with over the years this was the most outlandish. Minx and his clutch of high school thugs also pay attention, if only to howl with mocking laughter. I feel sorry for Dave. I know he’s been seeing too many sci fi flicks on Million Dollar Movie lately, and has let his imagination go crazy, mixing these futurist nightmares with his usual obsession: Susie Brett. He can’t get her out of his head, and over the last few years has landed him in a huge amount of trouble, especially this year in junior high where she claims he has been stalking her. Which is probably true. I would laugh the way Minx does except I know every time Dave gets in trouble, I get dragged into it. Already, I envision Dave insisting I go up to Garret Mountain with him to rescue Sue from certain death. This i...

  I sit in the dingiest booth in the dingiest diner God ever put on this dingy earth and I think of you. People are all laughing around me, even the losers, the greasy-headed geeks and the almost winos who come here night after night for lack of better company. Since I’m not laughing because I know I’m in deep shit and don’t have a clue as to how to get out of it. The worst part is that I already know you’re laughing, too, giving that titillating laugh you have as part of foreplay before sex. I’m in jeans and you’re in some slinky dress; you’re seat at some table dignified enough to have linen table clothing and napkins, not paper place mats printed with brain-teasing puzzles I can never figure out. You get cloth napkins with a gold monograph, not paper napkins gold only because the clumsy waitress spilled my coffee when she put down my cup of coffee. People where you are have sophisticated laughs, chuckling over some powerful scene in a play they just attended, or some swank film ...

Hey, Baby! It’s me that’s knocking. You don’t have to open up. I just came here to talk this time. You don’t have to be uptight. I never meant to cause you no trouble. I must have been out of my head. I know you got a restraining order on me and that I’ll go back to jail if the cop’s catch me here. But I needed to come. I needed to wish you a good life without me. I know you hate me. Half the population of LA County hates me. So I’m used to it. Me hurting you, that’s different. I don’t feel at all good about that. I just needed to tell you that, so you understand where I’m coming from. No, it ain’t love. It’s something else, something I don’t know how to put into words. I would have to rip open my chest to show you what it is. But you know me. You know I can’t expose myself to nobody like that. I already hurt too much to let anybody get a gander of what’s inside of me to use it against me. Yet I wanted you to know. That’s the only reason I cam. Now I’d better get out of here before I s...

              She slipped into the club like oozing oil, no jerks, no jumps, no stumbles, just the slight vibration of her unrestrained breasts beneath her white silk blouse.             You couldn't forget a woman like that on a good day, but my last remembrance brought only sharp jabs as I recalled her in the kitchen of a mutual musician friend in the late 1970s.             She was so cool then, and I was so shy, that when she picked me out for seduction, I didn't believe it, thinking it the kind of mock dorky kids in high school used to suffer.             You just don't think women like her will look at you that way and mean it, her slick fingers moving up along the inside lip of her open blouse, her gaze so caught on me I nearly melted.             Someone said she worked as a model -- though she hung around the band too much fo...

  Hank rang me up on my uncle's phone at a half-hour before bed. Grandma already stirred in her bedroom upstairs. Uncle Ed, lost in a haze of cigarette smoke, had settled into re-runs of Bonanza in the room next door. How Hank got my number is still a mystery. He was the weird kid I met the previous day at the head shop downtown when he decided to be my friend. His purple Nehru shirt, yellow bell-bottom pants and open-toed sandals made him look a little like a perverted priest. I wanted no part of him. Unasked-for details had gushed out of him, his love of Dylan and his desire to perform in a Broadway play. Every other sentence contained a mention of Greenwich Village. "I need help," he stuttered over the phone as my uncle coughed in the other room for me to hang up. Scrap paper with phone numbers fluttered at my finger tips on the desk, testifying to the phone business uses. We got other calls only as harbingers of ill news. "I'm in trouble," Hank went on. ...

  At 15 years old, my 1960s Chevy had a mind of its own It went where it wanted and dragged me along. Bosses eyed me oddly when I claimed I had been kidnapped by a car. I bought the car from a gas station when I was it rusting at the curb - a flat-finned four-door from when fins were still in fashion. It was the kind of car that made us go ga-ga as kids. My purchase came when old cars were still considered junk, rather than classics. I barely had bucks enough to support its insatiable appitite for gas. Still it ate better than I did, reveling on high test while I ate Burger King It was a loyal beast - always getting me to where I was going, and back. When long trips were beyond it, the car dragged me to work before giving out in exhaustion, then later, back the exact same distance home. Before it expired entirely, I had cash enough to purchase a compact car and sold the Chevy to a collector. From time to time, I saw it come and go from show to show, and I wondered if it still had i...

  I got scared. But Pauly didn't. Even though he was the one who nearly drank the stuff. He had left his Welch's grape drink out overnight and found "things" growing in the jar in the morning. He said the things looked like roots. I said they looked like tentacles. He blamed modern science for fiddling with nature until things go out of control. I had heard his room was haunted. He liked that idea, too. He decided to keep the drink as a pet. He started to feed it. He put vitamins in the jar at night, then measured the growth in the morning until the stink raised the wrath of his room mate Garrick downstairs who shouted: "Don't you go doing anything unnatural, you hear?" After that, Pauly put a lid on the jar and forgot about it. One night, the top popped and a gray glob oozed out. The stuff might have taken over the table if the quick-witted Pauly hadn't grabbed up the jar and rushed out into the yard with it. We doused it with gas and set it on fire...

  People's expressions change when you tell them you are clothing shopping for a dead man. At first, they think you're joking, then they feel sorry for you. Most clerks I encountered in my quest said they couldn't help me. My uncle, for whom I shopped, wore an unconventionally large size, a category one clerk defined as "big and tall." While a search of the local Yellow Pages produced a handful of stores claiming to carry such sizes, I could not travel as far as some stores required and still deliver the items to the memorial home in time for the wake. Helpful clerks sent me hither and dither, from mall to mall, all in vain. One clerk said K-Mart certainly carried such sizes. The K-Mart clerk directed me to a downtown shop - I discovered had ceased business months earlier. Desperate, I turned to the Secaucus Syms, a conglomerate that had so many racks I thought must have my uncle's size, if not his customary style. The door clerk assured me the store did and s...

      It’s insane around here without you. In 30 years of being married to you, I’ve never felt so apart – or helpless. And you know I’m not a helpless woman. And I’m more than a little tempted to throw the three bums out for hurting you. Of course, I know it wasn’t totally their fault. Moving furniture -- especially a refrigerator that heavy – up and down stairs is dangerous business. But you know as well as I do those three are a careless lot. And if you only knew what they’ve been up to since you left. No, they did not burn down our apartment complex – though I would not put that passed them. Maybe I never noticed how strange they were until after they hurt you and I took a vow to watch them more carefully. God knows what they do behind closed doors in their own apartment. Just the other night I heard the strangest commotion coming from their rooms. I would call it music except it sounded more like someone banging on pots and pans. It went on for hours until I banged o...

  Whew. Not now, a beer first. I can’t talk with my head all tangled up. Yeah, I went over there. Thank you, Joe. That’s a little better. Brew for the soul.  That’s what I always say. Okay, Okay, I’ll tell you in a minute. I’m still a little shaken. Yeah, I’m high. No, I didn’t save you any. And it was damned good stuff, too – like we used to get in the old days. You could smell it even when he rolled it. I thought he had a time machine hidden up in that room of his. And pot’s not the only old thing he’s got up there. I’m telling you. Will you hold on and let me catch my breath. Joe, another one. So what about him? I’m not sure I can tell you anything more about him than we knew before I went up there. No, no, nothing like that. It’s odd. Bizarre. I mean we’ve all wondered about him, even back when we wandered around together in the old neighborhood. He was always on the fringe, hanging out with Hank and Pauly. But hell, he looks like an all right guy on the outside, and he do...