We are floating on a very thin raft, myself included. I am mostly talking about white people I know. Though 300,000 Cubans crossed the border this year. Some on rafts, but mostly on foot. Poverty so extreme a family I became close to insisted I purchase their teenage niece. They cried when I said no. There is no way a functional human intelligence can grapple with the horrors of the twentieth century. The 21st century looks worse. A person smarter than me said There is fire, water, and the atomic bomb. We’ll see. I wept when I saw a photo of my mother riding her bike to school in the small town of her birth.
Category: MISC
Point Clear, 1985
Cold War
We were spies in a foreign land I was a fugitive, running just as fast as I can You were a bird on a bludgeoned wing, busted flat in Dallas Dancing for a diamond ring You asked me if I’d been here before As I regaled you with memories of my melancholy whores You crossed your legs and lit a cigarette Talked about your mama, and said as your eyes got wet I’m tired of fighting in this cold war Nobody wins that’s just daddy’s drunken folklore I’m leaving this town tomorrow you can come if you want In the armpit of Arkansas Where the river split and sang neath the stillborn stars You started bitching we were out of beer As we danced real close and came upon a midnight clear In the morning with the mountain dew And the sun’s cruel eye, the day after Waterloo Lou Reed and that summer in Siam, you took a walk on the wild side Oliver Stone in Vietnam I’m tired of fighting in this cold war Don’t want to die for a country I don’t know no more
20 Years
It was just after six o’clock in Prague when one of my roommates, Barton, a tall, laconic Texan who had been a basketball star in his youth, entered our flat in Vinohrady and said with characteristic stoicism, “Someone blew up the Twin Towers.” He might as well have been talking about the Laundromat changing its weekend hours, judging by his tone.
It was a Tuesday (as you know), and Barton was returning from his afternoon duties teaching business English to a crew of budding capitalists somewhere downtown. I had been home for a few hours after wrapping up my own classes in Malá Strana, at a private language school next to the American Embassy and just a stone’s throw from Prague Castle. My other roommate, Clay, a Texan and a childhood friend of Barton’s, had spent the day at the flat, smoking European cigarettes, debating man’s place in the universe, and devising plans to publish an expatriate newspaper called The Village Idiot (which, sadly, never came to pass).
Barton, having just learned of the attacks via text, was scant on information. There was no television in the flat and no Internet service. Anxious, we fired off a volley of frantic texts and arranged to meet our friend Tom at a pub in Žižkov, where he said a TV could be found.
The pub (I forget its name) was one of those nondescript watering holes in Žižkov that bore all the hallmarks of midwinter Soviet charm: decades-old red tablecloth, bad lighting, old bartender with a grizzled beard. Žižkov, where I lived months later, has always been a working-class stronghold and even carried the sobriquet “Red Žižkov” prior to the Velvet Revolution. It was easy to see why.
Tom was sitting alone at a long table not far from the television when we arrived. We all hugged, took a seat, and for the next few hours, over pint after pint of Gambrinus, watched the scenes of carnage unfold on the screen as a Prague newscaster delivered the rundown in Czech, a language that fell on deaf ears and only added to our sense of disorientation.
The next morning, as I made my way to class, I saw a crowd gathered in front of the American Embassy. Flowers and various condolences were strewn over the ancient cobblestones. Many of my Czech friends extended sympathies that week, but it wasn’t long before you caught a whiff of “America had it coming” by the odd expatriate at the bar, a sentiment that was hard to hear at the time.
Jake Peavy’s Second Act
The pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium can feel like the loneliest place in the world. It’s a feeling Jake Peavy knows in his bones. A Mobile native and one of the most decorated professional athletes to ever come out of the Azalea City, Peavy wasn’t immune to the slings and arrows that come with being a big-league hurler, despite his many accolades. It’s midsummer, and we’re talking with the former pitcher in the mixing room at Dauphin Street Sound, the state-of-the-art studio in downtown Mobile that he and a team of local talent opened back in 2016.
Peavy is waxing about his days in the big leagues and what got him hooked on music in the first place. After winning titles with the Giants and Red Sox, the two-time World Series Champion retired from the game in 2016 after a 15-year professional career, but in his jeans and T-shirt, he still appears to be in fighting shape.
“So here’s a picture of me going to Yankee Stadium and getting my butt kicked by the Yankees,” he continues with some animation. Peavy is a passionate storyteller; in fact, it’s clear after spending more than 10 minutes with him that he’s passionate about most anything he does. And while baseball may be a team sport, pitching is a solo act, and music became a way for him to unwind after three hours of hyper-focused intensity that, in the moment, felt like a matter of life and death. “It’s lonely on the mound, and it’s lonely with the press afterwards. It sucks leaving the stadium, getting on the bus, and then getting off the bus. And the last thing you’re going to do when you get to your hotel room is flip on the television and watch the sports channels and highlights.”
When Peavy first got called up in 2002, most of his teammates were 10, 15, 20 years older than him. He couldn’t go out to bars with the team, so he ended up spending a lot of time in his room by himself. It was in this scenario that the St. Paul’s alumnus found a creative outlet through music. Padres third-base coach Tim Flannery liked to pick country tunes in the hotel stairwell after games, and it was Flannery who gave Peavy his first six-string. “I could sit in there, play that guitar and not think about how I got my ass kicked,” he laughs.
Read the full story at Mobile Bay Magazine here.
Wavedogging
Dauphin Island, Alabama. August 21, 2021.
Younger Me As An Older Me
The Legend of Black Dog
I wonder if anyone in Richmond has considered erecting a statue in memory of Black Dog. This near-mythical, dread-locked stray canine roamed the streets of Richmond’s West End neighborhood for nearly fifteen years, some say, eluding animal control the entire time. A woman once claimed he saved her from a mugging, such was his legend. Some Richmonders built dog houses and left food out for him, hoping to adopt and domesticate him (he never let humans get too close), but that is not how outlaws roll.
In the two years I lived in Richmond I saw him three or four times. He would sometimes come out of hiding and walk the perimeter of the park near Mary Munford Elementary in the mid-afternoon, when the kids were being let out of school. I looked for him every day for a year before first clapping eyes on him. When I did finally catch a glimpse, it was as if I had just seen Bigfoot. One afternoon, my toy poodle at the time got loose on a walk and, to my horror, approached him, as if to say, “Hey buddy, wanna play?” He declined the offer, but was cool about it.
His longevity was such that some speculated it was “Son of Black Dog” they were seeing in those later years. But they underestimated the indomitable old lion.
Mark Holmberg, a celebrated Richmond journalist who penned several columns about the stray, said it best when he wrote: “It’s important to remember how much Black Dog reminds us it’s okay to be independent, to be free, to be scruffy, and to be hungry every once and a while.”
Black Dog has been gone for nearly a decade. It’s high time the city of Richmond commemorates his legend.
ACTs of the Apostles
For the past month, I’ve worked as a part-time tutor in south Alabama, helping high-schoolers prepare for the verbal portion of the ACT, the standardized college admissions exam generally preferred by the universities down in Dixie.
As part of the interview process, I was required to take the English section of the test and notch a certain score.
I felt a pang of terror upon hearing the news. It had been 24 years since I walked into Murphy High School one fine spring morning and filled in those tiny ovals with a pair of sharpened No. 2s. I had worked as a writer and editor since 2004, but, under the gun, was I really the prince of punctuation I fancied myself to be?
It was too late to take a practice test, so I decided to “get in the zone.” I sought to achieve this through a form of method-acting, by which I’d recreate a day in the life of my 17-year-old self. That afternoon I ran wind-sprints in cleats and washed my hair afterward with a green, toxic slime known as Pert Plus. I ate ham-steak for dinner with baked potato and washed it down with a Carnation Instant Breakfast while watching an episode of “Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper.”
The next morning, I was ready to go.
I finished the English section of the test with a minute to spare, and completed Reading Comp at the buzzer. I think the ACT gods were smiling on me. The Prose Fiction section of Reading Comp was written by a not-so-well-known Vermont novelist named David Huddle, whose daughter taught me poetry writing at UVa. The Natural Sciences section sported a passage by Oliver Sacks, whom I’d been reading that very week.
After finishing the test, I sat nervously in a small cubicle awaiting the results. I soon found out I’d aced the Reading and missed a few on English. I was ecstatic. I imagined at that moment I had the world by the balls. I had made it. I could go to any college of my choosing. Then I could land any job in the world and marry any girl I wanted. I walked out of the tutoring center like a man on fire. I got in my car and blasted “Rain King” by Counting Crows, fishtailing out of the parking lot as my car shape-shifted into a burgundy-and-cream ’89 Ford Bronco.
Eye For An Eye
Eye For An Eye
A Short Story
by Caine O’Rear
Charlie Craddock stood on his wharf and looked out over Barnacle Bay with two good eyes. It was the morning of his seventieth birthday. The day was clear and he could see schools of mullet in the water. He threw his casting net and caught several on the first cast but decided to release them back in the bay. Honor thy fish, he thought. His wife Tammy never had a taste for mullet anyway (“a trash fish,” she snobbishly would say) and he sure as hell wasn’t frying or smoking anything on his birthday. Today was a day for fishing.
Charlie didn’t mind that he was 70. Still it wasn’t cause for celebration. He wasn’t always sure he’d live that long. He’d smoked nearly a pack a day since the age of 16, cutting back to four or five a day two years ago after suffering two heart attacks in the span of six months. He flatlined at one point during heart surgery and liked to joke that his family told the doctors not to revive him. Charlie wasn’t exactly active and was never one for exercise. Ever since his last high school football game playing noseguard during senior year he hadn’t so much as jogged. The walk to the wharf from the house had become burdensome in recent years, so he used a golf cart for transportation. He’d light up a Pall Mall during the trip as Tammy no longer allowed smoking on the patio even going so far as to post a no smoking sign on the side of the house.
Charlie’s little brother Big John was arriving that afternoon from North Carolina. Tammy was driving to Albacore in Charlie’s Lincoln to pick him up from the airport. She couldn’t take her Ford Fiesta because Big John weighed 400 pounds and couldn’t fit in an economy car.
Charlie thought of Big John as a pain in the ass. Ever since they were little kids growing up in Chicory County Big John had been a pain in the ass. To Charlie at least. Big John always got car sick on trips and shit his bed a few times a year. The two brothers quarreled a lot as kids. Perhaps it was Charlie’s doing. When Big John was six Charlie took a pebble and blinded his brother with a sling shot during a game of war at their grandaddy’s farm on Old Dike Road. Charlie got a whipping every day for two weeks as punishment. On some days Daddy whipped him with a stick, other days it was the belt. His daddy spanked the boys with the palm of his hand when they were real little, but after a certain point, the bare-handed spankings made Charlie laugh. That really pissed daddy off. So there was no laughing with the belt. Not by a long shot. Charlie screamed bloody murder during those whippings. Especially when the belt would lash the back of his thigh. Mercifully, daddy never hit him with the buckle. That would have been cruel and unusual, something mama never would have allowed. Big John watched the series of whippings from his bed with his one good eye, solemn and stoic like a prison guard observing an execution. Daddy had done his job all right, but in his mind justice had not been served.
For the entire next year Big John wore a patch over his eye and earned the nickname Pirate John at school. The paper even did a story on him. He became Big John when he fattened up around age 10 and got a glass eye. His pirate days were over.
****
Big John and Tammy arrived at the house around 2 p.m. Charlie had eaten a box of Fig Newtons for lunch and was eager to get on the water once Big John arrived. The day was still clear.
When he saw the Lincoln pull in the driveway he drove the golf cart back to the house.
“Well, we made it,” Tammy said as she got out of the car. She was wearing a floral top that matched her pants. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic in Albacore. Don’t see how folks live there.”
Charlie pulled the golf cart up next to the car. He got out and helped Big John out. Big John breathed heavily as he struggled to pull himself out of the fine American automobile that Charlie had purchased with cash money.
“Gimme a hand, will you old brother?” Big John wheezed.
Charlie grabbed the upper part of Big John’s left arm. There was so much loose skin it was easy to maintain a grip. He got him situated in the golf cart.
“Tammy, you can take his suitcase in now or I”ll get it out later. We need to get out on the water.”
“You boys and your fishing,” Tammy said. “I’ll start getting stuff ready for the party tonight.”
“Thank you, baby doll, I love you,” Charlie said.
****
It was 3 p.m. by the time they reached the artificial fishing reef in Barnacle Bay. Charlie had brought along some frozen shrimp and cut-up cigar minnow for bait.
The two brothers hadn’t talked much on the way out. The motor on Charlie’s boat was loud and Big John didn’t hear well. Now that they were anchored on the reef Big John could hear.
“How’s the fishing been this year?” Big John asked him.
“I been fishing this bay for forty years,” Charlie said. “And I still know the spots.”
“How you been feeling? Your health holding out okay?”
“Never felt better in my life,” Charlie said. “Tammy don’t complain if you know what I mean.”
At that moment Big John’s line went taut. “Fish on,” he yelled.
The fish was in the boat within the minute. It was a white trout, which is what Charlie was expecting they’d catch.
“What’s new in North Carolina?” Charlie asked.
“Just people getting old and dying,” Big John said.
By the next hour they’d caught the limit.
It was around this time Big John felt the urge to speak his heart.
“I know we ain’t been close for a while,” Big John said. “I hate that. Lord knows Mama woulda hated the way things turned out. But I wanted to say I forgive you or what happened that day.”
“What happened what day,” Charlie remonstrated.
“With the slingshot,” Big John said. “The day you blinded me. The day you blinded me with the slingshot.”
“Accidents happen,” Charlie said. “I meant nothing by it.”
“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it,” Big John said, “never mind. Sorry I brought it up.”
“We need to head on back,” Charlie said. “My boys will be arriving soon for my birthday dinner.”
****
When they got back, Charlie’s boys, twins named Rod and Todd, had already arrived. Rod had taken off early from Little Caesar’s so he could make the party. Todd hadn’t slept in two days on account of his meth habit. He didn’t work. His mother hated the drugs but knew they cut down on his grocery bill. She always looked on the bright side.
Big John offered to clean the fish on the wharf but Charlie said no and that he would do it. So Big John walked back to the house to clean up. He spoke to both Rod and Todd and fetched a glass of sweet tea from the kitchen. It was so good to see family, he thought.
He thought about showering but remembered that he couldn’t fit in the shower, so he just applied another coat of Speed Stick to his pits.
By the time Big John was well fragranced, Charlie was back in the house.
“Fish cleaned,” he told Tammy, handing her two ziplock bags full of filets. “My work is done.”
“How you want me to do em? Use the crispy fry or the seasoned?”
“You the boss,” Charlie said.
****
An hour later dinner was ready. Big John and Charlie had been on the porch talking and drinking Crown and coke in plastic cups.
“It’s just so smooth going down,” Big John said, “it’s just so smooth.”
A moment later, he added, “It’s just so peaceful out here.”
Charlie wasn’t talking much. He started to think that maybe he was in the wrong when they were out there on the boat. He should have accepted Big John’s forgiveness. He should have said he was sorry for what he had done so long ago. He should have told him … something.
By this time both men were quite drunk. Crown was a fine beverage win lose or draw, Charlie thought. Charlie didn’t want to eat in the dining room so he instructed his woman to bring the fish outside. Rod came out and ate with them, as did Tammy, but Todd said he wasn’t hungry and stayed inside watching Family Guy.
After the meal was finished Charlie made a night cap and then went to bed. Tammy soon followed. Big John stayed out on the patio looking at the stars. How did the aliens live on those things he wondered. Not much later Todd came outside. Rod had left and gone back to Little Caesars. Todd offered Big John some of his meth. He snorted a bump, then another, then another. He kept drinking the Crown. He was feeling good. It was so good to be back with family. He loved his brother Charlie and wanted to rekindle the old days, not the way they were but the way he wished they were. Maybe he could pull a prank on him in good fun. Big John left Todd on the patio and went into the toolshed. He found a liquid solution of weed killer in a white bottle.
“Bingo,” he said out loud.
He took the weed killer inside and walked down the hall. Charlie and Tammy’s room was at the end. He summoned all his powers of concentration in his state of fat drunkenness and slowly opened the door. Charlie was snoring loudly through a mask he wore for sleep apnea. He was out cold. Big John approached the bed, slowly. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle of weed killer and poured it over his brother’s right eye.
Read the rest at Little Old Lady Comedy here.
Queen of the Double
“Queen Of the Double”
A Short Story by Caine O’Rear
Will Wise inhaled his tenth Budweiser in three swallows, paid his tab, lumbered to the bathroom and pissed, and then walked out to his truck parked in the dirt lot, a Ford 150 from the ’90s, cranking it up and pulling slowly onto Highway 100, the sun burning like a fireball at the bottom of the western sky, an old tune from Sammy Kershaw beaming on the dash, his thoughts running to the night before when he and April fought about a girl she thought Will liked who worked at the body shop, some chick named Camille who was barely 20 and dressed like the county girls did these days, all Daisy Dukes and skimpy pullovers, showing no respect for decorum or decency, April said, an observation Will couldn’t argue with, especially since his dalliance with a girl in their church group last year, a girl April called a fucking slut and one to whom she was distantly related and who she claimed invited the transgression Will had yet to live down, an episode the memory of which sent pangs of horror through his wet brain, then fading in a quicksilver flash with the chorus of the Kershaw tune kicking in, the imagery of the polyester curtains and redwood deck making him grin, the truck humming along at eighty miles an hour past the expanses of cotton on both sides of the highway, blankets of white at their peak before the November picking, the truck now floating across the center line from time to time, a paltry concern for a county boy on a county highway cruising along in his truck on a Friday night, not unlike most Friday nights since he was sixteen, pounding beers in some field or down by the creek or later at his uncle’s place just over in Lillian, where he met April at a party while being totally smashed on Jaeger, smashed enough to take her by the arm and whisk her down to the boathouse where he managed to take her bra off despite having one arm in a cast because he broke it that week in football practice, playing bull in the ring and going hard as all get out, and going hard that night in the boathouse, and falling in love with April, or so he told himself, a girl who had been with him since that night almost ten years ago, and then April getting pregnant at eighteen, walking the floor of the gym in cap and gown with a bump in her belly, more a hiccup than a world class disaster in their little zip code, and seeing in the rearview as he cruised along the carseat for their second child in the back of his cab, a reminder in the flash of the moment that maybe he should ease up on the throttle a bit, the last years of his life moving at a speed beyond his means to control them, and thinking of Camille at the body shop, and not even being tempted to go there but still enjoying the sight of that ass behind the desk up front when he walked in hungover at 10 every morning, a brief titillation before the monotony of fixing timing belts and spark plugs set in, a trade he learned from his father who passed away two years ago, dropping dead of a heart attack while hunting deer in Conecuh County, while only in his late 40s, a loss that Will still hadn’t reckoned with but one he thought about every time he lit up a smoke, his dad a heavy smoker all his life, a fact that surely exacerbated the heart disease that clipped his wings, and with these thoughts Will firing up a smoke, thinking what are you gonna do, the Kershaw song still playing, and Will turning up the music, louder, louder, still louder, and thinking if he ever found April with some Charlie Daniels with a torque wrench, he’d kill the motherfucker.
A Late Day For Regrets
No other work in American literature has haunted me like this one.
It is our Great American Play, I think. It’s truths are eternal, and the shock of recognition is terrifying.
It is a family play, set in 1912 in a house in New London, Connecticut. The story is deeply autobiographical. The characters are facsimiles of O’Neill’s family: the father, James, a once-promising Shakespearean actor who squandered his talent in exchange for an easy buck; the mother, Mary, a morphine junkie wrecked by addiction after the death of a young son; Jamie, the alcoholic and cynical older brother; and Edmund, the wayward, seafaring youngest son with a deep poetic streak, who is the playwright himself, but who takes the name of O’Neill’s real-life dead brother in the play.
O’Neill wrote “Long Day’s Journey” in the early 1940s, in the last decade of his life while in the throes of a severe neurologiocal disorder, after he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize. He never wanted it to be performed. His widow, determined to enshrine his legacy as one of the great American artists after his death, insisted that it be produced on the stage. It was, and it was a smash, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, O’Neill’s fourth.
The play, like much of O’Neill’s work, is about what you’re left with after all illusion has been stripped away. It’s about saying everything you’ve ever wanted to say to your loved ones, but couldn’t. It isn’t always pretty.
As Tony Kushner said in a PBS documentary: “[O’Neill’s idea is that] there are great complexes and abysses of meaning under the surface of life, and our job as artists and people is to dig, and go deep, and to dive, as Melville kept saying, deeper and deeper and deeper, and the more deeply you dive the more you’re at risk of being dismantled and crushed. But that’s what your job is and you don’t flinch from it … O’Neill is our Shakespeare, he sets the standard.”
It’s been said that O’Neill invented American theatre, that he was our first serious playwright. It’s interesting to note that most of the major American writers of his vintage saw their talent flame out as they aged (Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald); O’Neill’s only improved, despite a worsening battle with a Parkinson’s-like disease. That is heroic.
O’Neill died in a Boston hotel along the Charles River in 1953, with his wife Carlotta at his side. “Born in a hotel room,” he told her before passing, “and goddamnit, died in a hotel room.”
#eugeneoneill #longdaysjourneyintonight #tonykushner #americandrama #broadway #jasonrobards #katherinehepburn #sidneylumet @americanexperiencepbs
Caine O'Rear 