2012 Draws to a Close

Two human heads poked out of the sand in the distance. At least they looked like human heads – I was still over a hundred yards away, and I couldn't make out any fine details. As I drew closer, though, I realized that I was walking up to the heads of two humans about five feet apart – presumably men, owing to the short hairstyles and the deep voices that I heard coming from them. I was approaching them from the rear, and could not see their faces. They had no idea that I was there. I was about to call out to them and ask them if they needed some help in getting out of their predicament before the tide came back in, but held my tongue when I heard their conversation.

“Eating like a caveman is what you need – my dietary therapist has me on a paleo-diet,” said the one to the right. “I only eat things that are in accord with the diets of neanderthals and cro-magnons. Raw meat. Nuts. Fruits. Then I run after buses as though I were chasing woolly mammoths.”

“You're an idiot” contended the one to the left. “What you should be doing is concentrating on avoiding gluten. My crystal- and reiki-practitioner has me eating seventeen small gluten-free meals each day, followed by rubbing my each of my chakras with a rose quartz crystal. EACH of my chakras.”

“RAWWWWWWRRRR!!” cried the one to the right, craning his head back against the sand as far as he could. “That is a paleo-roar, and it releases my aggression so that it doesn't ball up in my small intestine and cause a blockage. I do that four times a day. Then I kill a small, furry mammal and eat it raw while squatting next to a fire while wearing a loin cloth. A Lycra loin cloth. One must make some concessions to modern conveniences, you know.”

“Gloo-pee-lee ommmm...” chanted the one to the left, swinging his head in a slight circle. “Gloo-pee-lee ommmm...”

“Idiot,” said the one to the right.

The tide was coming in, but the two didn't seem to care too much. I cleared my throat.

“Leave us the hell alone,” they said in unison. “We are discussing dietary habits.”

I pulled out my hip flask and took a long swallow of gin. I shoved the flask back into my hip pocket and started walking up the hill to the shore road. I could hear the tide coming in, and the sound of the two men arguing about complete proteins.

Happy fracking New Year. You'll never get it.

Lost in Tulsa?

It is not fiction, is it?  Go...go look.  There, over the Arkansas River.  I think I dropped it...

Go learn what it means.

True Love Outside of Pucker's Retro-Emporium

 “They was more'n a 'ting dat' you all would wanna' save, dey was.” Hoplite Harry (long of tooth and short of brain) held up the tinny-tinny lunchbox. Rattled its contents and smiled, he did.

“Puttit down, shineboy!” cried out Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole. “Puttit down, 'cause you break it you buy it. That what the sign say, shineboy.”

“Don't calls me no shineboy, Bessie. I don't calls you no shinegirl, you know.”

“Jess puttit down, OK?”

Hoplite Harry shuffles down row after row of Hogan's Heroes lunchboxes and Schlitz beer pitchers and art-deco marital aids. Places a long, moist finger on the layer of dust covering the black bakelite telephone and draws the tip across, leaving a darker black mark.

“Can black be blacker den black?”

“Shaddup, now,” says Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole. “You always talkin' nonsense and I can't takes it no more, shineboy.”

“I sez not to calls me shineboy, you damn ole' hairy-mole-lip-witch.” Hoplite Harry says this and then shrinks, pulling his head inside his torso like a turtle.

“You stick your damn head out here dis' minnit!” Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole is livid and turns red in the face. Her mole pulsates, the little hairs doing a dance like few have ever seen.

Hoplite Harry sticks his head up, and draws a forearms across his face, defending against any potential blows. Wise move, it proves to be, as Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole grabs a martini shaker that is in arm's reach, hauls back and lets it fly. The shaker misses Hoplite Harry and strikes a set of small, felt-covered reindeer in a Christmas display. They topple over and fall to the floor. The shaker ricochets and bounces off a Hamm's Beer sign that shows an endlessly looping lake scene complete with canoe and campfire...over and over and over and over. You know the sign. I told you about it before.

“Crap-O! Whatchoo doin'?” shouts the hairy-navelled Pucker. Pucker runs his antique store with an iron fist. “Getda' helloutta' my store!”

Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole turns away from Hoplite Harry and makes for the door with fast little orthopedic shoes. Hoplite Harry wets himself and follows quickly behind, mumbling and mumbling.

“Dats' de' lasstime! An' stayout!” Pucker fumes, sits, smokes. Pucker spits, coughs, sips.

30^th Street is busy and Hoplite Harry looks down at a wet patch on his faded jeans. Bessie-with-the-hairy-mole looks at him and shakes her head.

“I'll go buy us a sody-pop next door,” she tells him. “We'll pour half down your front so no one knows, and den' we drink de' rest.”

Fake it 'Til You Make it

Prinny (you remember him, I am sure) always had a dream. It was one of those typical dreams such as most people have – the dreams of being a jet fighter-pilot, or learning how to yodel, or managing to excel at barrel-jumping (more on that at a later date, I assure you). Prinny wanted to play the timpani. The kettle drums.

When you think about it long enough, you come to realize that almost all of us want to play the timpani at one time or another in our life, but very few of us ever turn that dream into reality. It would be a sad commentary on human drive and energy if it were not for the fact that so few of us are born with the physical capacity to play the timpani – only one in ten thousand are born with the malleo-wrist organ that is needed to play the kettle-drums. The malleo-wrist organ is a small organ located in the lower arm that enables an individual to play the timpani. The malleo-wrist organ looks like a small piece of putty and is shaped like a three-dimensional representation of the state of Idaho.

Prinny had a malleo-wrist organ, but he was not the sharpest scalpel on the coroner's tray, if you know what I mean (and I have every reason to believe that you do). He had wanted to play the timpani all his life, and he knew himself to be in possession of the necessary anatomy. All he lacked was the equipment. That is what set him on the path to ruin.

Living in Prinny's hometown was one Mr. Clayton Jugboy, a virtuoso timpanist (who had a particularly large and supple malleo-wrist organ, by the way). He lived in a double-wide trailer on the outskirts of Weaverton, and played first kettle with the Weaverton Symphony Orchestra. Prinny would sit outside of Jugboy's trailer in the evenings and listen to him practice the timpani into the wee hours. Prinny would imitate what he knew Jugboy's arms must be doing, wildly swinging his imaginary mallets and feeling his malleo-wrist organs pulse and swell with delight (and lots of lymph fluid, as well).

It was in the autumn of a most tragic year that Prinny took matters into his own hands and set his heart on a dark course of action. Late one night when Jugboy was fast asleep after a performance, Prinny crept up to the double-wide and jimmied the lock on the door. He quietly slipped inside and felt around in the darkness until his hands made contact with what he had come seeking. As quietly as he could he hauled it outside, being careful not to make a sound.

The next day the Weaverton papers and radio stations were abuzz with news of the theft, but the mystery of who had done such a thing was settled early in the afternoon when Prinny appeared on Main Street with the stolen property.

There he was, in broad daylight, imitating the swinging of timpani mallets, striking invisible kettle drums with invisible, imaginary mallets. He was clothed in Mr. Clayton Jugboy's tuxedo, however, and to all the world he looked like a virtuoso timpanist. As the police hauled him away, one of the officers was heard to mutter quietly under his breath, “not the sharpest scalpel on the coroner's tray.”

So I guess you could say that everyone has dreams. Some just go about achieving them in different ways. And some just jump right into living the dream before they know what's hitting them.

You all be careful now, OK?

Sympathy for the Cruller

The devil looked a lot like the old man who owned the cigar shop back home, except I knew that it wasn't him, as old Mr. Sullivan had been dead for at least a decade or two. Old Scratch here, on the other hand, was most definitely alive, and was sitting right next to me and enjoying a nice cup of coffee and a cruller.

“So, how are you today?” he asked between bites of cruller.

I shared with him my dissatisfaction with things – a whole bunch of things. The economy, the Yankees getting knocked out of the playoffs by the Tigers two years in a row, and my growing sense of uselessness in life.

“Oh...don't worry,” he said, “everything is just fine.”

“But how about my job?” I asked, “I feel as though I'm wasting my time. I feel as though I'm wasting my talents and throwing away my dreams...”

“Oh, come on, now,” he said, “you're just fine. You are doing a great job. Just keep doing what you're doing. Here...have a cruller.”

I accepted the cruller that he handed to me, and I was about to bite into it. I paused, though, remembering a friend of mine who had been given a piece of fruit once and lived to regret it. I was starting to hand it back when he interrupted.

“If you don't want it, just give it to someone who does. It's nice and fresh.”

“OK,” I said, wrapping the cruller in a napkin and stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “Thank you, anyway, though.”

“Sure thing,” said the devil. And then in the smallest, tiniest, most quiet voice he whispered two words in his pasty, crumbly, cruller-scented breath.

“Crucify him.”

June-Tune

He just stood there. The dirty milkman just stood in line, doing his little shaky-leg dance (don't you just love the shaky-leg dance?), and rolling his greasy-looking little eyeballs back into his skull. The line was a long one, but he seemed to be patient, aside from the shaky-leg dance, which made him appear antsy (you know how it makes people look antsy, don't you?).

“So you kick them too?” I asked.

“Doesn't everyone?” he said, staring up into his skull.

I thought about this. I couldn't really decide if everybody kicked pigeons when they had free time, or if it was just people like the dirty milkman and his pigeon-kicking compadres. Milkmen have so few joys in life, I reasoned. We might as well let them have this one simple pleasure.

So I strolled away to find the liverwurst I had come seeking. Might you remember the liverwurst sandwiches that your mother used to make for you when you were young? Do you remember the white bread – Wonder Bread, it might have been. No more of that. There was full-fat mayonnaise, of the variety that has been banned in California and New York State because of its fat content and whiteness. Finally there was the liverwurst – plump, pink and salty, smelling like liver sausage should. I had come over to the East Village (no, not THAT East Village – the one in Davenport) to the one place I could still find the illusive, illegal, and tasty liverwurst.

I walked into Gypsy Dan's little shop. The place smelled of incense and onions, and I could barely see Gypsy Dan through the haze. There was some kind of sitar music or some such crap playing lightly in the background. As I approached the counter I saw that it was coming from a hairy, dirty hippie who was seated on the floor, strumming away and smoking a zucchini.

“Any requests, man?” asked the hippie on the floor.

“Do you know 'Okie from Muskogee'?” I asked.

The hippie shook his head.

“How about 'In My Merry Oldsmobile'?”

The hippie ignored me and started playing something that sounded vaguely like the Beatles. Or was it the Rolling Stones? It didn't matter. It all sounds the same, especially when played on a sitar by a dirty, stoned hippie.

Gypsy Dan stood before me at long last, smiling and nodding his head.

“You got it?” I asked.

“Sure as hell,” said Gypsy Dan, handing over a brown paper sack.

I reached out to take it when all hell broke loose. A seven-man tactical squad in black ballistic nylon burst through the door. All we heard was the sound of rustling rip-stop, breaking glass and men shouting “Hut! Hut! Hut!” Gypsy Dan hit the floor with his hands behind his head. The dirty hippie dropped his sitar and threw his hands up in the air. I froze in place with the bag of liverwurst in my outstretched hand and was knocked to the ground by a man with a short-barreled shotgun and night vision equipment. The bag was swept from my hand and my wrists were zip-tied together. I laid there on the floor, face-down and afraid to move. The tactical squad left as quickly as they had burst in, and Gypsy Dan's shop fell perfectly silent.

After a long, long time I heard Gypsy Dan get up off the floor. He came over and cut me free from the zip tie.

“Damn,” he said, “I guess a guy's gotta' be more careful with 'wurst these days.”

I nodded my head and rubbed my wrist.

“I'm gonna' have to go back to hiding the stuff in bags full of meth.”

There is an Old Saying...

"Never hide a snail in the cookie jar."  My great uncle Cosgrove used to say that before we had him put away.  I never quite understood what he was talking about, but recalling his words have shed some light on the world this week.  The midget cowpokes who follow me around the city streets do not seem quite as intimidating today, and the birds are whistling a merry polonaise.

I suggest, dear reader, that you read some exciting blacksmith-fiction today, and then go out for a walk...keeping your eyes open for midget cowpokes.

I will see you all tomorrow...

May-Tune

As soon as the lady handed me my coffee, I walked out into the crisp air on 14^th Avenue and kicked a pigeon. That always gives me such a lift – almost as much as does the coffee.

“Hey, wall-eye, don't be kickin' no frickin' pigeons, lest you wants to kick me too,” called out a gravelly voice. I turned to look, and saw a dirty man in a old-style milkman's uniform sitting on the curb.

“I beg your pardon, and that of the pigeon's,” I said.

“No...no,” he said, coughing up a lung and spitting forcefully against a mailbox, “I mean you could kick me too.”

I was a little perplexed, as it seemed as though he really wanted me to kick him. It is not every day that a dirty old man in a milkman's uniform asks to be kicked.

“Do I understand correctly? You would like me to kick you?” I asked, opening a fresh pack of cubebs.

“You got it right, carp-sucker, you give me a little kick, and then you give me a little spare change.”

I noticed the sign he was holding. “Will be kicked for money,” it read in two-inch high red letters. He had decorated the edge of the sign with glitter and glued-on tongue depressors. Used tongue depressors, it appeared.

“I didn't mean anything by kicking the pigeon,” I said, feeling a little sheepish (thank God I hadn't kicked a sheep).

“No one ever means anything by it. They just kick. You can do the same to me, and the price is right.” Dirty milkman stared at me with a sunken eye that was dripping a little fluid on his formerly crisp, white uniform. I offered him my hanky to sop it up. “No need, crap-o. I gots me a bleachey-sponge back in my hovel.”

I sat down next to the man in the milkman uniform and offered him a cubeb and a light. He graciously accepted, and we sat there smoking our cubebs and watching the pigeons land. At length a pigeon flew over and sat down next to us.

“You want to give this one a little kick?” asked the dirty milkman.

“Naahh,” I replied, “I think I'll just enjoy my cubeb without any additional avian violence.”

“But you might want to warm up for kickin' me, you liver-lipped fool.”

I thought about this for a moment and realized that it must be a stock response of the dirty milkman's, as my lips were not even close to resembling liver. I knew one fellow back home that used to sit on the balcony of his house in the summers and stare at passing traffic. He had liver lips.

But not me.

“So,” I asked, “do you just sit here and wait for people to kick you and then give you money?”

“No,” said the dirty milkman, “I actively solicit my kickers. A man has to be proactive in this economy, you know.”

“Sure,” I said, inhaling the cubeb smoke deep into my lungs. I vomited twice and then continued interrogating.

“So all you do is entice people to kick people for money?” I asked.

“What?” he asked. “Isn't that enough? You ever been kicked?”

“No,” I confessed, “But it just seems a trifle limiting. Have you ever thought about working for a living?”

“Again,” he said, “have you ever spent an eight to ten hour day getting kicked? Don't tell me it's not work.”

I thought about this, and even though it rubbed me the wrong way, I decided to give him a pass on it. What did I know about getting kicked, anyway? I dropped a ten-spot in his can, gave him a good swift kick, bid him adieu, and then walked away, gliding down the street and humming an old Prussian military tune.

It was not until several days later that I realized that I have been taken. I was shopping for liverwurst across the river in the fashionable East Village of Davenport (otherwise known as the Village of East Davenport), when I spied the dirty milkman standing in line.

He was waiting to kick a pigeon.

Professional

Edgar came over and told me he was a “man of the cloth,” and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I guess I had heard the phrase used to describe clerics of one sort or another – priests, rabbis, pastors, imams, and the like. Edgar sure as hell wasn't one of those, so he had me wondering when he said “man of the cloth.”

Edgar sold hope from a old, beat-up Volkswagen bus, but business was slow and he pretty much had to rely on the charity of those more fortunate. He talked about driving off to some place where the market would be better, but he never got around to it. He would ply his wares and talk a good game, but never really do what he hoped to do. We all deal with a little bit of that in our own lives, I suppose – even those who are real successful, they sometimes never get around to some of the things they want to do. Go ahead, just try to tell me you don't know what I'm saying. You know damned well what I'm talking about.

“I'm a man of the cloth,” he told me on that evil, wet Thursday morning. He grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and shook me. He looked me in the eyes. His were all bloodshot and looked like they were covered over with an unhealthy layer of pus or slime or something. He looked ill. But sure as can be, he shook me and told me “I'm a man of the cloth.”

Now, I wasn't too sure how to respond, so I just looked at him and said “that's great, Edgar.” He giggled when he heard that, and I heard him make a little noise in his trousers. Sometimes he would get like that when he was excited.

I think he was mistaken. He wasn't really a man of the cloth, and I think he was just using that term loosely. He would stand before God, sure, just like the rest of us, and he would intercede on mankind's behalf. He never knew how to keep quiet, though, like I always suspected a real man of the cloth would. I never met a real, honest-to-goodness man of the cloth, but if I did, I was sure that he would be quiet. Not mousey; just quiet. I was sure that he would keep kind of still and silent and wait upon that all-holy voice of the Almighty to rumble through the skies and through his heart. I wouldn't expect him to just go shooting his mouth off all the time and going about the business of always telling you what he thinks about every damned thing that pops into his mind. Every damned thing.

At least, that's what I guessed a man of the cloth might be like, and Edgar wasn't that. You know the type?

So when we found Edgar hanging by his neck off the Government Bridge, I finally got the idea. There he was on another evil Thursday morning that wasn't nearly as wet, but every bit as evil, I suppose. His face was all blue, and his eyes were all kind of buggedy-outty. He was hanging so gently, so quietly, with the toes of his shoes just barely getting wet in the river. It was a sheet he was hanging by, it appeared. A long, white bed sheet. Real soft-looking.

A man of the cloth, after all.

An Update

Hello, dear and gentle readers.  I hope I am not incorrect in assuming that you have guessed the reason for my sporadic posting of fresh, short fiction.  You might think that I have been on safari in deepest, darkest Iowa, or that I have been running whiskey and trying to avoid the revenuers.  You would be wrong on either account.

I am just about to put the final chapter together for the novel I am working on, and it has been taking almost every free moment that I have.  Well, the free sober moments that I have, anyway.

Hopefully the tiny excerpts from this fresh work have been enjoyable; I promise more short fiction in the near future.  As soon as Michael Nitrous tells me how he got back to the roller-rink...

A Glope-Step in the Desert

(An excerpt from the forthcoming Yerba Maté- a Novel.  What fun.)

 “I just want to be who I really am,” Michael Nitrous said aloud, giving voice to his thoughts of just a moment before. It was hot, he was alone, he was in what looked like a desert, and he was carrying a backpack. His clothes were completely different than what he had just been wearing. Pasteybottom Joe and Jerry Grogan were nowhere in sight. There was no grove of trees. No yerba mate and no bombilla.

He was in a desert, it certainly seemed. He had never been in a desert before, although he had seen pictures of them, and he had seen the movie “Raising Arizona,” so he pretty much knew all there was to know about desert culture. This was a good thing. Unbeknownst to Michael Nitrous, he was at that very moment in the state known as “Arizona,” and he was walking away from a large city known as “Tucson” toward a place called “Mount Lemmon.” All of this would be lost on Nitrous, however, and the details wouldn't really make all that much difference. He was in a different aspect of existence.

A quick word about the plant known as the “cactus” would be appropriate at this point. The cactus is known as a “succulent,” and while most people think that this has something to do with the water-retention ability of the cactus, it is actually due to the wonderfully rich and decadent taste that the cactus has. Cactus makes a succulent little dish. If he had been thinking about it, Nitrous might have drawn the connection between the plants around him and the nopalitos tiernos that he had eaten with Jerry Grogan at el Taco Muchacho just a few hours ago. It seemed like days, or weeks. It seemed like it never happened. Cactus makes a succulent dish, though. Mmmmm. Can't you just taste it?

The cactus is covered with spines, of a sort. You might call them needles. You can call them whatever you might want to, but in any case they are sharp, spiny little devils. My brother-in-law sells these beastly plants out of a little shop that he runs. They are not all grown from little babies, either. Some are plants that he buys and re-sells (at a profit, of course – this is America). I have always thought it would be the strangest thing to be able to tell people that my brother-in-law is a used cactus salesman. Michael Nitrous would have thought it to be the strangest thing, as well.

The cactus is a very prehistoric plant, and was brought to this planet by extra-dimensional travelers from an extra-dimensional planet called Mookie – a lovely desert planet not terribly far (in existential terms) from Bezelda. No one was around on the planet earth to see the first cactus planted in the Sonoran desert.

“What do you think?” asked the first extra-dimensional traveler as he put the cactus into the dry, sandy soil.

“Move it a little to the left,” replied the second.

After that began the virtual salad days for the cactus. They were the only game in town, aside from a scabby little Joshua tree here and there and maybe some aloe vera, whose value would not be discovered for thousands of years yet.

That is probably enough of the quick word about the plant known as the “cactus.”

Nitrous felt good. His legs felt springy and the warm desert sun and the dry desert air on his skin was something he had never felt before. He wondered for just a moment what was inside of his backpack, but in but a moment he realized that he already knew. In fact, he could perfectly recall the pack's contents as though he had packed it himself. Which he had, of course. He just couldn't remember having done so in this particular aspect of existence.

He continued up the highway, wondering exactly what piece of geography he was climbing (it was something called “Mount Lemmon,” as previously noted, but Nitrous had no idea that was the case, and it would not have made a bit if difference if he had). He was walking along, kicking at a little piece of asphalt here, a little stone there, when suddenly he took what is known in some aspects of existence as a glope-step.

The glope-step is a step that stops midway and allows a pause for reflection from the person taking the step. To the outside observer of the glope-step, nothing looks the least bit different. The person taking the glope-step looks as though they are just walking right along. To the person taking the glope-step, however, everything is different. The world stops. Time stops. Forward motion temporarily ceases.

I would tell you to go and try it for yourself, but I can't. You never quite know when you are going to take a glope-step, and they come on rather without warning. Incidentally, it was rare for a extra-dimensional traveler or one who is experiencing an alternate aspect of existence to at the same time experience a glope-step. Michael Nitrous was one of those rare, fortunate few, though.

His left foot went up in the air (fitting, as it is the weaker of his two legs, and he was only at the beginning of something great and good), and it paused within the layers of two of his aspects of existence.  

The Sum of Which is Twelve

Standing before the dirty creamer-merchant was a desk made out of something that looked like human flesh. Now, I have told you about creamer-merchants before – I know I have – but you must understand this: there is a great difference between creamer-merchants and dirty creamer-merchants, and never the twain shall meet.

The dirty creamer-merchant folded his hands, and then flexed them, extending his soiled fingers like tentacles. He placed a single soiled finger on the desk and found that indeed, it did feel like human flesh. He bent down and put his mouth near the desk's surface. He leaned in a bit and lightly brushed his lips against the flesh-like substance. He rubbed his lips back and forth and then opened his mouth ever so slightly, extended his tongue, and touched it to the fleshy desk. He grew bold and placed the full surface of his tongue upon it and lapped at it several times. It was salty, and he noticed that it even had small hairs protruding from its surface.

The strangest desk he had ever seen. Or tasted.

It was an otherwise normal desk, he would have to say. It appeared to have normal drawers and even a green blotter with leather corners. He opened the top desk drawer ever so slowly, and found the interior to be bright red mucous membrane, much like the inside of a person's cheek or even more private regions. The dirty creamer-merchant tried to force certain thoughts from his head, and was only slightly successful.

He bent down over the open drawer and once again extended his tongue to touch the red, moist interior. It was warm and inviting. “Come inside,” it called to him. He withdrew his tongue and stood upright.

He had noticed the teeth.

On that Tuesday like so many others the dirty creamer-merchant stepped away from the desk made out of something that looked like human flesh. He stepped far, far away and lifted leg after churning leg to the beat of a safety drum. A dry and pale safety drum.

I have said it again. I will say it again. Go learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.   

Penne for Everyone in 300 Words.

I looked at the man across the room from me. He was sitting alone in a booth, eating pasta.

Dirty, a little messed up. His hair was tousled, and he had a light beard growing on his chin and cheeks. He couldn't have been more than thirty years old, but he probably could have passed for fifty on just the right day.

He was eating pasta, as I said. Really eating pasta. I mean really getting into the eating of pasta. I could hear him across the room. I heard the pasta going in, I heard the pasta going down, and I heard his level of satisfaction with the pasta (which seemed to be quite high).

“I'm glad you're getting my money's worth out of that penne,” I said under my breath.

As though he had heard it, he looked at me between forks full of penne. Our eyes met. He nodded at me. I nodded back. He turned his attention back to his pasta. The waitress came by with the bill. I pulled out my credit card and thought I would try it one more time. “But I didn't order any penne,” I said, glancing at the guestcheck.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, “rules are rules.”

“Yeah,” I said, “whatever.”

I waited for the waitress to return my credit card and got up to leave. I strolled past the man eating the penne. What could it hurt?

“Enjoy your pasta,” I said to him. He kept his head down and just kept eating. I was a stranger to him.

He did not know me.

No contract.

“I much preferred it when we used to eat together. I always enjoyed buying you lunch.” With that, I walked out the door.

But rules are rules.

June of '73

I looked down into that small hole out in the back yard. It was a hole that I had begun digging the day before. I had dug it with the small garden shovel that my mother called a trowel, and that spent most of its time hanging from a nail in the shed.

I remember digging the hole when I heard my dad talking about a gas shortage and something about the Chinese. I said to my cousin that I might try to dig all the way to China, as I was intrigued after my dad had been talking about it. My cousin assured me that it would not work, as he and a friend had tried doing the exact same thing last week and they had no luck. “You end up in India,” my cousin said, “and they don't speak any English there.”

I got myself ready for the dig and for the trip, nonetheless. I packed a small bag with some necessary items, including some adhesive bandages, the flashlight that I took from a drawer in my mother's sewing room, and a couple of pixie sticks. I figured that the pure cherry-flavored sugar would keep me well fueled for the journey and might also make good trade items for bartering with the Chinese or the Indians – pixie sticks were probably legal tender anywhere you might go.

There were a couple of things that I didn't put in my bag that I could have but decided against. I did not take a firearm, although I considered packing the rubber band gun that my brother had made for me out of a wooden ruler. I did not take with me any of my G.I. Joes, although I thought they might have been good company. I did not take any of the pencil drawings that I had made while watching The Flip Wilson Show, nor the not-even-close-to-scale model that I had made of the World Trade Center (which had opened that very spring!) that I thought might be a nice peace offering to the Chinese. I understood little about geopolitical affairs, you see.

And so I stood there on the edge of the small hole that I had begun the day before, and the spirit of adventure percolated just below the surface of my heart. My sweaty little grip on the garden trowel tightened.

“Tommy! Come and get cleaned up! It's time for dinner!” Mom was leaning out the back door, calling to me.

I could smell the casserole. Even out here in the back yard, on the very edge of my journey through the earth, I could smell my mother's casserole coming out of the oven.

A little later, over dinner, my dad said that Secretariat had won the triple crown. I had no idea what that meant. “So, Tomaszu, what did you find out in the yard today?” he asked. He always called me that when he was having a really good day. I didn't appreciate it until I was nearly 30. I didn't miss it until I was 42.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied.

“You know what they say,” he said, smiling at me, “if you dig deep enough, you might get all the way to China.”