Home is Where the Harry Says: Part 1

So we were down to a week. We both have to move out of our current places in a week, probably out on the street under a bridge somewhere. I start to scout out bridges, for which ones look the most luxurious, which ones I might be most likely to meet a nice young lady. Brooklyn Bridge is too cliché, that’s probably where the hipsters live under; Queensboro seems like a better bet for sincere young professionals to live under, the ones who don’t care about impressing people.

Jeff is freaking out because we finally found a place that was nice and the guy said no. He was like, “So where do you guys work?” And Jeff was like, “I work for so-and-so,” and I was like, “I just got here, so you know…”

“Yer unemployed?!” yelled George the landlord, outraged. “This is my home! Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here without a job? Wanting to live in my home? That’s like asking my daughter’s hand in marriage! You don’t ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage with no job! Yeh lowlife! Yeh fuckin’ bum. Yeh cock-fucking-sucker, yer the scum of the earth.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You don’t even wanna marry my daughter. You want to fuck her and not even marry her, yer gonna get the milk without buyin’ the cow, that’s what you think, isn’t it, you goddamn prick, you’re scum.”

“Cow?”

“You think my daughter’s a cow, that’s what yeh think. Yeh perverted motherfucker. A cow for fucking. She’s a teenager¸ you asshole. I should have you fucked up. How do you want to fuck her, you prick?”

“I should go.”

“You want to take my daughter doggy-style, is that what you want? You wanna spin her, don’t you? You wanna make my daughter a spinner, you spinnin’ son-of-a-bitch. You gonna give her the piledriver, you gonna turn her up on her back and drive her from above, you pile-drivin’ motherfucker?”

We were halfway down the steps, and his words echoed down the hall. “You perv! Tell me how you wanna do my daughter! Is it the Minnesota Bigfoot? Minnesota Bigfootin’ son of a bitch…”

“We’re screwed,” said Jeff on the train.

“We’ll find a place.”

The news was coming down that the subway and buses would be shut down for the weekend in preparation for the hurricane. The weekend had been when we thought we would get to see the most apartments. It seemed time to look at bridges, but first I opened up craigslist on my phone to look at what apartments had just become available.

Routine Visits: 2

From what I hear, everybody hates to go to the dentist. I don't think it's the pain so much as being at somebody's complete mercy. I think dentists have more carte blanche because they never explain what they're doing.

My doctors seem like they're in constant fear of lawsuits for medical malpractice, or being accused of doing something wrong, so they're explaining exactly what they're doing at every possible junction.

"Now I'm going to lightly tap your shoulder, if that is okay. It's called the Shoulder-Tap maneuver, and it's to give you a little bit of human-to-human encouragement, in an expression of esprit-de-corps before I shake your hand with a smile and leave. If that is okay with you. " Et cetera.

The dentist, on the other hand, is a madman of impunity. "Open wide" is pretty much all you get before he or she goes to town with a tray full of implements, either reciting gibberish to the hygienist ("1-9-3 is 4-G with C, cleared to land on runway 2-4 right, full flaps"), or discussing last night's American Idol (with the hygienist). Is American Idol still on? I hope not.

I've never been squeamish about the doctor or the dentist, so with time running out on my health insurance in Illinois, I continued Health Blitz 2011: Wellbeingmageddon! at the nearest dentist's office, in Crystal Lake. As it so happened, I had a couple of cavities.

"Have you been flossing every single day?" asked the dentist, a cute and professional young Asian woman.

"Do people really do that?"

"No. That's why I have a BMW."

Since I only had a week left before my flight out, I told the receptionist to schedule all the fillings as quickly as possible, on two consecutive days. She seemed worried about me.

So I have no problem at all seeing blood, watching surgeries, dissecting dead animals, etc. I'm not saying I'm some sicko who enjoys seeing blood, watching surgeries, and dissecting dead animals, like as hobbies or something, you bastard, I'm just saying it doesn't bother me very much. I prefer, though, not to watch pain be inflicted on myself, so I just look at the wall when I'm having blood taken or skin biopsied or whatever, and then it doesn't bother me either. My philosophy is lie there and think of England, right?

The dentist was having none of this. As I stared at the blinding light of the dentist's chair, she was convinced I wanted narration. I don't know if she was trying to be helpful, if it's a woman thing to want to tell and know exactly what's about to happen to you, or if she was just frustrated at my impassiveness and took it as a personal goal to make me freak out at that point.

"This is gonna hurt," she would say at first, before she would do something. She did it a few times, just as I was drifting off.

Goddamn. Don't say that. Why would you say that?

Don't medical people understand there's no advantage to knowing something awful is about to be done to you? It would be so much better if check-ups and exams were just done at random, as a surprise, while you're shopping at the grocery store. Like you're reaching for the organic lettuce and someone just ninja-jumps from behind the sprinklers and jabs you in the neck with a needle or sticks a camera up your butt.

Anyway, I wouldn't respond; I wasn't gonna give her the satisfaction.

So then it became, "This is gonna really hurt, this is gonna feel bad."

I smiled politely.

After a while, it was "This is gonna be a bad one! This one is gonna make you suffer!"

I pretended to be asleep.

"You're gonna really feel this one! This is terrible! I'm being incompetent with my dentistry to cause you this pain! You might die!"

I glanced at New Yorker cartoons and softly chuckled. (I carry random New Yorker cartoons in the elastic of my boxers for just such occasions).

"I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna kill you with my dentistry!"

"You take HMO, right?"

Flashing Everybody

So I entered NYC Midnight's Flash Fiction Competition. For each story, each group of competing writers is given: a genre, a location, and an object. They have 2 days to write a story of only 1,000 words or less.

For Round 1 my group was assigned:

GENRE: Romantic Comedy

LOCATION: A hair salon

OBJECT: A box of tissues

Normally, I plan out everything beforehand, but I wrote this one more impulsively and just let it materialize.

Click here to read the story.

New York in Three Words

I have arrived.

Today being my first whole day, I plan on heading downtown to wander and explore this afternoon, having already spent the morning walking around uptown where I'm staying, and getting lost carrying bags of heavy groceries so that I ended up walking like 50 blocks with them. Did you know New York City is uphill? All of it.

Anyhow, these are the words that New York made me think of the first day I was here.

Contoured: Now I'm no country bumpkin. I mean, I am a country bumpkin, hailing from Marengo and all, but I've lived in Chicago for the past two years (real Chicago, not Palatine or Barrington like the rest of you have to say when you're asked what part of Chicago you're from), so I'm used to city. And a lot of New York is just like any other big old block of city: cars, pavement, people, tall buildings, scaffolds, honking. Walking around 168th & Broadway here looks pretty much like walking around Wilson & Broadway back home.

But on the ride from La Guardia to Manhattan on this gray-skied day, I looked out at the skyline and realized it never fucking ended. The New York skyline never fucking ends. The Chicago skyline is a beautiful cluster surrounded by lake and fields. The NYC skyline is like someone taped building-shaped paper cutouts in a circle all around you. The hazel color of the heavens and the vaguely foggy distance amplified the effect, so it looked like the front skyline of skyscrapers had silhouettes projected behind them, and then silhouettes in between, just filling the distance. I almost laughed, thinking this was an optical illusion playing out on me.

But it wasn't. It was New York, on the way in.

Friendly: Believe it or not, fearmongers. Don't get me wrong, I know you have to have a certain kind of toughness (self-sufficiency, independence, imperviousness to insult, ability to work under pressure) to make it here, but the myth of the hateful masses didn't play out for me.

First of all, my plane was about 4 hours late getting in. So the apartment owners' friend who was supposed to give me the keys did not get to meet me at 2:00 as agreed; instead I called her apologetically at about 6:00. Was she upset? Not at all. She was the friendliest, bubbliest person on earth, excited that I had made it and eager to help, and so on. Now to get to her downtown. The driver who was supposed to meet me 4 hours ago, once I called, was busy with other jobs of course, but he hastily called other drivers and set it up with them to come and get me as quickly as he could. I accidentally told that driver the wrong terminal on the phone, so an old man nearby came and tapped me on the shoulder, smiling, to give me the correct terminal name and tell me he didn't want me to be sitting there stuck waiting. That driver then took me into Manhattan on a Saturday night and was willing to get stuck in traffic doing circles while I found the girl who I was supposed to meet, who darted out into the street to give me the keys in the car on the road before the traffic around could shoot us. Because, you know, New Yorkers are so mean and all.

Forgiving: It bodes poorly for my future decent self that I can get away with pretty much being as rude or dismissive as I desire. Where in other places, if I ignore people when they talk to me, push past crowds to get where I'm going, etc, I would get dirty looks, here I feel I have impunity. Now, I've always prided myself on being at least a little gentlemanly, if only because it fits into my quixotic self-delusions, but I have to say it's pretty freeing when an annoying street vendor or someone pretending to need directions so they can ask you for money to feed their drug addiction approaches you and you can just pretend they don't exist and keep on going.

In Chicago, bums were incredulous when I wouldn't give them money. There was one who hung outside the Dominick's parking lot every day, asking for money, and one time (when I'd lived there for like 2 years and had seen him there) he came up and said, "Hey, I ran out of gas. Can you spare some money for gas?" "Sorry," I said and kept loading groceries into the car. "Come on," he insisted, "I just need some money for gas." He didn't have a car, mind you. I shook my head. "Sorry," I repeated, just trying to get my groceries in the car. "Are you serious?" he sneered. "You're not gonna give me anything?" I ignored him. "Fuck you," he told me, "you're not even from this country." And he walked away.

Now, angry bums I can get used to. But xenophobic angry bums? That's just sad. I actually am a native-born citizen, but come on, why would they be against immigration. It's not like someone's gonna steal their jobs.

ZZZ @ ORD

Currently sitting in the Terminal at O'Hare. God decided to send a thunderstorm through the midwest and northeastern United States for some lulz (no offense intended, I am made in his image and I love me some lulz), so apparently it will be a little while before my winged metal tube can almost miraculously soar through the skies at supersonic speeds, and this minor inconvenience in the middle of this great convenience enrages me.

My plan when I get to New York for the 1st day, because I'm not much of a photographer, and it will be rainy anyway, is to record the day in words: one word per hour, which I will then share here.

When I am done boozing and whoring. So the first few words will probably be "booze" and "whore." As it should be.

Routine Visits

With only this month left with health insurance from Chicago Public Schools (where I was a teacher, not, as everybody claims, a student), I decided to go on a doctor blitz and really health the shit out of myself. Just go to town on my ass with that healthcare.

I started at the general practice, where the family doctor tried very hard to find something wrong with me.

"You're at risk for high blood pressure," she told me. "Do you have a lot of sodium in your food?"

"A little bit, I do like salt on my food, but not a ton."

She strapped the blood pressure balloon-sleeve thing on my arm and inflated it.

"Not on my food, anyway," I said. "I do have a glass of mineral water or soda, and squeeze a lime in it, and then I pour a cup of salt in and drink it."

"On a dare?" she asked, horrified.

"Nightly."

The blood pressure sleeve deinflated and she looked at the results, aghast. "You don't have high blood pressure," she admitted. "But you're at risk - for god's sake don't do the thing you said you do. And you should only eat red meat once or twice a month."

"Why would I eat meat that's red?" I asked her. "Do people do that? Why would you do that?"

"How many alcoholic drinks do you consume?" she continued.

"I don't know, like three. Sometimes four or five."

With a smug expression, she pulled a pamphlet out from the American Medical Association and began to pontificate, "On a daily basis you should limit your alcohol intake to two drinks maximum-"

"Daily?" I asked. "I thought you meant weekly. I have like three or four beers a week."

She looked sad. "You should actually drink more than that, especially wine... Whatever, take the packet."

She turned to her computer and started to enter data.

I started to unbutton my jeans. "Are you going to check me for ball cancer?"

"No," she said, petulant. "Do it yourself."

"Every day?"

"Not every day. Like once every three months. You're just looking for excuses."

I re-buttoned.

"Oh!" she seemed to perk up, and turned around. "Have you had sex with anyone who has AIDS?"

I told her I had not.

"You seem perfectly healthy," she complained, finishing the computer entry.

"I've had this spot on my arm I never got checked out," I said, showing her the small, dark circle by my elbow.

"It looks benign," she said, inspecting it. "I'm 99% sure it's harmless, but I'll go ahead and refer you to the dermatologist just to be 100% sure."

"Could it be cancer?" I asked.

"I hope so."

BBM Conversations: 3

JE: Do you ever get too into what you're saying when you're having sex and accidentally blurt out something logistically inaccurate, like "Yeah! Fuck my pussy!"

JB: No.

JE: Me either

Small-Time Writing

I'm in the Top 25 for my group in the NYC Midnight Micro-Fiction Competition. The challenge was to write a story in 100 characters or less, using the assigned word for your group. Our word was "quick." My qualifying story is:

Scratches on her face again at morning. She bit nails jagged to the quick again, anxious about why.

You can vote me into the next round here [expired].

Flying High Now

I read in the Tribune recently that my alma mater department, the Institute of Aviation at University of Illinois, is closing down. I meet this news as bittersweet, like dark chocolate, or when a girl makes you breakfast but it turns out to be vegan.

I did, of course, switch majors to English & Creative Writing, which is what I graduated in (a double-threat at the unemployment line). But I came in as a student of the Institute of Aviation, as a wide-eyed 18-year-old back in aught-four, and I spent over 2 years flying planes in their program (poorly). Founded to fill the need for commercial pilots after WWII, the program apparently eventually became an excuse to admit idiots. Their admits, the Trib reports, were known for having the U of I's lowest GPAs, lowest ACT scores, lowest success rates, etc. The powers that be said they were sick of the descent, if you will, the school's reputation was buffeting from being yoked to these students. I raise my cup to them. My plastic red cup.

Anyway, Jeff just sent me our old work from Rhet 243: Creative Nonfiction, and the essay I wrote (five years ago) was about my experience flying (and not flying), and the Institute itself. So I figure now's as good a time as any to take that trip down memory lane, and waggle the wings at the trusty blue and orange Piper Archers, flying one last time from KCMI, into the sunset of posterity. Orange and blue posterity.

Click here to read the story.

The Economies of Scale

So I always pictured this ginormous theoretical trunk that I would be able to check on the plane, which could fit basically everything I wanted to take, or one of those enchanted bags like Hermione had when she was walking around London looking all hot in that one red dress.

Instead I had to go buy real luggage that fits the airlines' actual specifications, and pay for each one to take them too. Fucking Delta. I only picked them because I saw their kick-ass commercial that reminds me of Seabiscuit and makes me think that if only we all flew Delta Airlines, we'd pull ourselves out of this recession by our bootstraps, join hands in understanding brotherhood with life-affirming, hard-working FDR-like kindly nods, and win the Santa Anita after all. Oh, Delta. I can't stay mad at you.

Anyway, my whole moving-away baggage will consist of two 28" uprights and one 22" carry-on, so I've been poring over different configurations to efficiently maximize my packed possessions.

This is what I'm thinking:

Option A
Option B
Option C

BBM Conversations: 2

On a rejection for an online humor submission

JE: Hm, got rejection from McSweeney's, but I consider it a neutral

JB: What is neutral about it

JE: "Hi, Jeshua - This doesn't fail for lack of cleverness (reminds me of a book I wrote actually), but I'm going to pass. We have another video game-related piece in the queue and I don't want this to step on its toes. Appreciate the look, though. Hope you'll try us again sometime. Best, Christopher Monks, Website Editor."

JB: Wow a customized reply

JE: Yeppers, I'm good with it

JB: I heard their standard reply is to call you a fag and to threaten death of your family

JE: I heard they call a death in your family and threaten fags

JB: So yours was positive

JE: Almost loving

JB: Monks wants to suck your cock

JE: It's official.

But Watch How Good I'll Fake It

I made my first submission to an actual place this week - specifically the lit magazine Glimmer Train, whose July competition is "Very Short Fiction" (<3000 words).

Well, it turns out after 4 1/2 revisions, this is the best I can do. I look forward to my First Rejection and may in fact frame it and keep it in my bathroom, for inspiration.

Click here to read the story.

BBM Conversations: 1

On whether artistically unambitious women are depressing

JB: No they're not

JB: They're finding jobs and working

JE: Everyone's doing that

JE: But they're also losing creative hobbies and idealistic conceits

JE: Which most do

JB: Ok

JE: But a few hold onto, and can keep their whole lives

JB: Same for men

JB: Don't be too much of a misogynist now

JE: Yeah most men never cared about art to begin with

JE: Just football and cheap beer and tits

JE: But the few men that do are more likely to keep pursuing it, if only just as persistent hobbyists

JE: Because they feel no pressure to domesticate themselves

JB: Send off

JB: Made up assertions

JE: Men don't feel social pressure to settle down and be ordinary right away the way women do IMO

JB: True but women don't either

JE: If they want to travel and be artsy and live promiscuously or without commitment for a while they are looked upon more kindly than women are

JE: Women are more expected to be "good" and "settle down"

JE: Which makes sense biologically

JE: But is sads

JB: You make it sound like we're still living in pre-1990

JB: I think what you are saying may be true for conventional women but not literary types

JE: Girls still have prime childbearing years before they're 30

JE: Men don't

JE: Biological clocks and social pressure

JB: The creative ones were not subscribing to what you're talking about

JE: No, the women truly dedicated to their creativity do not do this

JB: The ones who are not creating now never really planned to

JE: That is why I posit they are rare

JE: Exactly

JE: On the downside, the true creative women are much more apt to stick their heads in ovens