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[img_assist|nid=4773|title=Cornfield Indiana by Vincent Natale © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=132]Twenty years ago I was famous.  Not so famous that my torrid affairs with young starlets were covered by national magazines, and being thirteen at the time, that wasn’t really much of a problem.  I was famous enough that strangers followed me around the Montgomery Mall when I went shopping.  Famous enough that even now, a lifetime away, I can still Google “BJ Schaffer” and find web pages ranging from IMDB to Wikipedia that relate to acting jobs I did before I was old enough to drive.  It is a surreal thought that, a hundred years from now, all of this information will exist in some massive computerized database, and there will be no mention of anything I’ve accomplished since.  I could cure cancer, win a Pulitzer, run for President, and someone, somewhere, would shrug and say, "Yeah, but didn’t he used to be on TV?"

I have no one to blame but myself.  When I was nine, I suddenly decided that I wanted to be an actor, and my parents were crazy enough to listen to me.  We were directed for advice to the only person in my hometown with any professional acting experience.  Bill Hickey had appeared in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” as an extra for about half a second, and was therefore qualified in our eyes.  He told me to learn to sing, dance and act.  If I got good enough at any of those three, the rest would fall into place.  
Strangely enough, Bill was right. 

I haven’t thought much about this stuff  for  nearly twenty years, but by my recollection I won two major dance competitions, which secured me a meeting with Cathy Parker Management.  She began getting me auditions, and in short order, I’d appeared in over twenty national television commercials, performed in two major productions at the Walnut Street Theater, done a skit on Saturday Night Live, and worked as a regular cast member on the Nickelodeon series “Don’t Just Sit There.”   

My mom recently visited the Walnut Street Theater, and was shocked to see my photograph is still hanging in the lobby.  I guess the cleaning person never got the memo advising them to take it down. 

By the time I was twelve, my name appeared in the Horsham Township “Who’s Who” Directory.  It was a red booklet with the names of all of the important people in that small Pennsylvania town where I grew up.  It was the same town where my dad had been born and raised, and where he served as a police officer.  My grandfather and uncle lived there, too.  Small towns have a strange way of reacting to celebrity.  It’s slightly infectious.  At ten years old, I was given carte blanche to cease attending school with any kind of regularity.  The superintendant and I were on a first name basis.  It didn’t matter what tests I missed, what school programs I did not get involved in, what educational foundation I lacked.  They wanted me to perform at the talent show, which I did, dancing in a green and silver “space man” outfit designed by my mother.  They wanted me to be in the school play.  To this day, I can recite the lines of Prince Chulalongkorn, from “The King and I.”  When you are an ascending star, just beginning to acquire the smell of that alluring narcotic "fame," it’s impossible for people to not want to attach themselves to you.

It was routine for me to go to school for a few short hours, then leave to be driven to New York City.  I’d spend an hour in Manhattan auditioning, then return home.  I did this several times a week, for about three years, until I finally began living in Manhattan.  I remember my father looking at my first paycheck for “Don’t Just Sit There” in wonder.  My weekly pay was roughly $1,800.  My old man looked at me and said, “Jesus, B., you make more money than I do as a cop.” 

I spent every night learning lines, or practicing scenes for auditions.  We constantly plotted which career move needed to be made next.  The beat did not slow down on weekends.  These were devoted to dance, voice and acting classes.  To this day, I sometimes dream of riding in an empty car for endless stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike.  The road goes on and on and I never arrive where I am going.

By 1988, at fourteen, I was burned out.  You can only spend so many hours on the Turnpike, eating rest-stop cuisine.  You can only spend so many nights in motel rooms.  You can only go for so long before the reality of adolescence sets in.  When your laurels rest on being the Boy Next Door, it’s all downhill once your skin starts breaking out, your voice squeaks when you talk, and your body begins to change.  Plus, there’s always another, cuter wannabe waiting in the wings.  After four years of semi-celebrity, I just wanted to be a normal kid.  That’s the sign they hang on you when you are a child-actor.  “He’s such a normal kid,” they say.  Bullshit.  Normal kids play baseball.  Normal kids get used to turning in homework assignments.  Normal kids have friends.  Real friends.  Not phony show business friends.  

[img_assist|nid=4776|title=Springtime Swirls by Allison Levin © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=175|height=198]Of course, when you remove someone from their natural habitat during the most fundamental years of their life, you can imagine it’s not the easiest thing for them to simply get back into the swing of things.  When I returned to my hometown in the middle of 9th Grade, I found myself a complete outcast.  People had developed deep friendships, forming groups based on shared interests, which I could not hope to penetrate.  Students took tests that they’d had years to prepare for, even if it was by simply learning the discipline of doing their homework.  I had none of those things.  At that point, I could not even join a sports team, because, at the age I should have been trying out for varsity, I’d hadn’t kicked a ball or swung a bat since Little League.

By the time my peers began to consider which college to attend, I’d become so used to answering the question, "When are you going to go back to acting?" that I really expected to make a big return to show business.  But the harsh reality is that contacts dry up fast in that world.  Also, it costs a lot of money to go back and forth to New York City, especially when you have no income and have to begin worrying about paying rent, buying food, gas, etc.  Unfortunately, at that point in my life, I had nothing else.  By the age of eighteen, I had to seriously consider the fact that I was a Has-Been.

Nothing fills me with dread as much as the shows on VH-1 about former Child Stars who became drug addicts, or are still plugging away, desperately seeking to recapture that glimmer of fame.  Eddie Munster is an old man.  He still goes to conventions dressed up in his old costume, hawking autographed photos.  Scott Schwartz, the kid who stuck his tongue to the flag pole in A Christmas Story and starred with Richard Pryor in The Toy, started doing porno.  Even the more legitimate, mainstream performers like Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan.  I look at what these poor kids have become, and I have to think that maybe, just maybe, if the people around them had waited to thrust them into the very adult world of the performing arts, they’d have a better foundation on which to build a decent life.  Maybe not such a famous life, but a good, decent, normal existence.   

These days I cringe when I hear friends talk about signing their kids up with a modeling agency.  You know, the one where you pay thousands of dollars to have a "portfolio" made, and the agency promises to start sending your kids on "auditions."  I always react badly when people suggest my kids have what it takes to "get involved with show business."  Don’t I know that my son has the personality and looks to be on a sitcom and become America’s Boy Next Door?  Of course he does.  Don’t I see that my daughter is beautiful enough to sell oodles of Pampers or Gerber’s baby food?  Of course she is.  But that will never happen. 

[img_assist|nid=4775|title=Blossom by Vincent Natale © 2009|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=130|height=221]Children should be children.  They should play, learn, get scraped up and brushed off, lose big games, win bigger ones, dance with a sweetheart, lose him or her to someone else, get a better one later, have big sleepover parties, and grow up without the pressures of having a career, or the expectations of an entire small town to be successful.

         BJ Schaffer is dead. 

         He was just a commodity.  A face in a photograph, a television personality, a small blip on the bright, vast universe of Entertainment.  You can know everything there is to know about him on the handful of web pages that still mention him, or bear his likeness. 

Me?  I’m a guy who worked at a gas station to make ends meet while I went to the Police Academy.  I scrubbed toilets, worked landscaping and mopped laboratories late at night.  At 34 years old, I’m a police detective who makes his living putting bad people in dark places.  I’m a father to two children, and I can tell you that their love and admiration means more than the vacant adulation of the masses on any level.  It’s been a long, curving road toward the man that I am now, and to be honest, I sometimes struggle with how to tell people that I used to be on television.  It’s an embarrassing subject.  My life is not a famous one, and unless you’ve been where I’ve been, you might not understand why I’m glad for that.    Bernard J. Schaffer is a police detective in the Philadelphia Suburban Region. He is a lifelong resident of Montgomery County. His previous work has appeared in "American Police Beat Magazine," "Comic Zone," and "The Enemy Blog." 

[img_assist|nid=847|title=Curious Eye by Gary Koenitzer © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=144]


I hate my job. As evening supervisor of a one-hundred bed nursing home, I oversee the work of one other nurse and ten nurses’ aides. The corporate manager, Scott, wants me to complete more paperwork during my shift. I explain that I often help feed, shower, and medicate the home’s residents. Scott tells me the facility is adequately staffed according to state protocols, and suggests I discipline employees in writing who fail to complete assignments. Whenever I do this, the employees shoot hot glares at me as they whisk by my desk at the second floor nurses’ station. I please no one, and feel caught between worlds.  


I want to bridge the chasm between me and the staff I supervise
nightly. Together, we decide to bring food to work and throw a
party on Halloween. I don a witch hat, tight black dress, fishnet
stockings, blood-red lipstick and high heels. Will is a licensed
practical nurse who works on the third floor. Will is Spanish;
with his slight frame and dark wavy hair, he reminds me of a bullfighter.
Tonight he wears a jumpsuit with polka dots, a red rubber nose,
a curly multi-colored wig, and huge black shoes. 


Around nine, the aides begin the evening’s final rounds.
They feed warm Ensure through straws to emaciated residents, and
turn bedridden people with frozen limbs according to the hand-drawn
paper clocks taped to the residents’ doors. The latter task
prevents holes in the residents’ skin caused by too much
pressure in one area. Some residents are taken to the bathroom,
while others have their diapers changed. 


I grab some medical charts and start to document the shift’s
activities. I welcome the chance to rest my legs. My toes, shoved
into a point at the end of my shoes, pulse with pain. 


I am almost ready to sit when Martha, one of the nurses’ aides,
runs out of the room next to the nurses’ station. Martha
is gasping, her stiff black wig askew. Martha is not wearing a
wig for Halloween. She always wears a wig. 


“Mr. Smith…” she sputters, “he ain’t breathin’.” 


I rush to Mr. Smith’s bedside. Mr. Smith has not breathed
in a while. His skin is gray, and he is doing what some in the
medical profession call ”Q”-ing. His jaw is slack and
his tongue hangs to one side, causing his open mouth to resemble
a capital Q. 


As a registered nurse, I cannot legally pronounce Mr. Smith dead.
I need to perform CPR. I direct another aide, Nicole, to call 911
while Martha and I roll the head of the bed down. 


“Martha, get Will,” I tell her when we finish. She
dashes out of the room toward the stairwell. 


I place a green plastic mask over Mr. Q’s, I mean, Mr.
Smith’s, face, and administer rescue breaths. My witch hat
falls next to him on the bed after three puffs. 


Will appears a few minutes later. He has taken longer to descend
the stairs than he normally would in an emergency, probably because
of the floppy shoes. Will pulls up his ruffled sleeves and positions
his palms over Mr. Smith’s chest. His arms harden into a
piston, one that will hopefully pump life back into Mr. Smith via
a series of strong compressions to the heart. 


The rescue squad arrives after a dozen cycles of compressions
and rescue breaths. Two young male paramedics try to maintain their
wooden solemnity, but smiles tug at their lips. We saw them last
week, when one of the female residents kept taking off her clothes.
She hit a couple of us, called us all sluts, and told us she was
kicking us out of our apartments. Nothing in my magic box of medications
helped her. 


The medics load Mr. Smith onto a stretcher. They resume CPR,
squeezing a plastic blue ball over the lipstick-stained mask on
his face. Mr. Smith is wheeled out the back door into a waiting
ambulance. 


The five or six staff members who have gathered, including Will,
Martha, Nicole, and me, indulge in some deep breaths, then retreat
to the lounge to consume our Halloween feast. 


I look at Will. Crumbs stick to his white-painted chin as he
gobbles a chocolate covered donut with orange and yellow sprinkles. 


I start to laugh. 


Will raises his eyebrows, which he has outlined in blue triangles.
The rest of the crew stares at me as if I have just announced that
I had sex with my brother. 


“I was thinking,” I tell them, “that if Mr.
Smith was even sort of there, he was probably really confused.” 


Nicole stops picking through her candy corn in search of brown
tipped pieces and listens to me. 


“He must have thought,” I continue, “there’s
a witch kissing me, and a clown jumping on my chest, and I don’t
know whether I’m in heaven or hell, but this shit’s
fucked up.” 


We start howling, laughing so much that we bend over and choke
on our cookies and cider. The story circulates throughout the facility
for weeks, shifting shape like a ghost each time someone retells
the tale. 


I drive home seeing Mr. Smith’s eyes. The open eyes of
the fresh dead still look a little alive, like a flashlight beam
operating on low batteries. They never seem afraid, only amazed. 


I pull into my driveway. Toilet paper trails cling to the bare
branches of trees, remnants of mischief from the night before. 


Halloween itself is a remnant. Earth-worshipping tribes in northern
Europe once celebrated the harvest festival of Samhain each November
eve. People believed the veil between the realms of the living
and the dead was thinnest at Samhain, when one could see shadows
invisible by the light of day. 


I turn off my ignition and savor the warm darkness. I do not
hate my job. I hate the way I am expected to perform it. I do not
want to punch holes in forms and organize them while watching others
struggle to assist the human beings entrusted to our care. I hold
our moment of shared joy at the nursing home tonight in the hands
of my mind like a captured butterfly. I release hope into the purple
chill of the night before entering my house. 

Judilyn Brown is a lifelong resident of Northeast Philadelphia. She works full time as a nurse at The Philadelphia Women’s Center. Judilyn likes to read, write, and spend time at play with her husband and son.

[img_assist|nid=833|title=Limes & Lemons by Todd Marrone © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=206]Our wedding was in a graveyard in November darkness. I had recently turned eighteen, old enough to make hash of my life and do it legally, and my fiancée, Kemp, was forty-two. I wore light makeup and under a raincoat, my best dress of striped wool. My hair was long and straight, and my Mary-Jane style shoes were better suited to a little girl. I felt numb and disconnected, as if I were about to sign up after stumbling into in a meeting of bomb-assembling anarchists. I was also a little disappointed. It would have been festive to show off my dress, but the night was too chilly to take the raincoat off.

A brick wall surrounded the graveyard of Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia’s Old City; it was the nearest thing we had to a park, given where Kemp and I were living in the city. I was worried that someone who belonged to the church would boot us off the property, even though Kemp said they’d told him we could do anything on the premises, as long as it was legal and took place outside the church.

The absence of light at the wedding was due to a miscalculation. We’d scheduled the ceremony for five p.m. We didn’t realize—but how could my physics-trained fiancé not have realized?—that light fails early once autumn cold begins to shrivel the sycamore leaves.

I don’t remember what Kemp wore that night, but he was a man who considered his coiffure. He bleached his dark hair brassy blond on the optimistic—but faulty—premise that if his hair were similar in color to his scalp, he could pass himself off as not-balding. The stringy combover rarely stayed put, but he had an appealing, little-boy grin and nice, agate-colored eyes. He was endlessly authoritative when relating my own passion, visual art, to his interest in science. He encouraged me even as he dictated the kind of painting I did. You’re an artist now, he said. Why wait till you’re twenty-one to call yourself one? From him I learned terms like sexual revolution and Renaissance man. Years later, I found out from a former student of Kemp’s that in the early days of our relationship, he pinned my panties to the wall of his apartment.

Nobody gave me away at the wedding. My father stayed away, but my mother showed up with an elderly friend for moral support. The aisle I walked down was the worn brick path on which Kemp and I met the Ethical Culture minister. Mr. Smith was not exactly a believer, not Episcopalian, nor Quaker, as my family was, but the price he’d quoted to do the ceremony must have been right because Kemp hired him.

[img_assist|nid=834|title=Native by Suzanne Comer © 2008|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]As I stood in the darkness beside the tilted gravestones of long-dead Episcopalians, my mother’s mute presence felt like the still point of tradition from which my adolescence had fled. Perhaps her inscrutable sense of duty drew her; perhaps she felt compelled to witness the unthinkable. Introductions were made, hands shaken. My mother didn’t kiss me, and I looked away to the brick wall, thinking I had dragged her into something cheap. At the head of our tight circle, the minister held his book at an unnatural angle to catch the sallow illumination of a street lamp. He read from Genesis about a man leaving his parents and cleaving unto his wife. But I’m the one who’s leaving, I thought.

The June before our wedding, I had graduated from Germantown Friends, a private school where Kemp had been a science teacher. I was a ‘lifer’ there: K through 12. My great-grandmother, my grandfather, my father’s first cousin, and my mother had all gone there. It was a world in which the staid traditions of Philadelphia Quakerism—Meeting membership by ‘birthright’ or family succession and the quiet tending of old wealth—set the stage for their own eclipse, at least in part, by their liberal embrace of the social revolutions of the 60s and 70s. As a teenager, I was proud to be such a revolutionary, convinced that Kemp was proof of my emancipation. As my great-grandmother had, I attended mandatory weekly meeting for worship in a plain, high-ceilinged room with rows of wooden benches, where faintly rippled, tall glass windows revealed a pensive sky.

Quaker meeting for worship is simple. People steep themselves in relaxed silence, waiting until God’s spirit moves someone to speak. The first time I encountered Kemp was when he stood up in meeting. I don’t remember much of what he said—I believe it had to do with Guernica, Picasso’s tortured painting of the Spanish Civil War—but his mouth revealed the subtle overflow of his heart. Kemp was a predator on the lookout, and I had a vulnerable and sensitive ear. A few days afterward, I described on lined notebook paper how impressed I was by his brief talk. At thirteen, I was reluctant to speak my own name out loud, and I avoided writing it except on school papers. With my face latticed behind untrimmed hair, I gave him my unsigned note at a chance encounter on the stairs of the science building. The next week, one of his students handed me his reply. All I remember is one line: i don’t even know your name. His use of the lowercase “i” impressed me; it seemed poetic and humble; like e.e. cummings. I was in eighth grade. He got fired at the end of my ninth grade year for ‘inappropriate conduct,’ but I never found out whether the school knew our relationship was indeed a sexual one. From my point of view, little changed with his firing; I simply continued seeing him on the sly.

At the end of our wedding ceremony, the minister intoned the traditional warning: “If anyone…let him speak now, or forever hold his peace.” Silence crackled like a pause in a military assault. I glanced at the blue silk scarf tucked into the neck of my mother’s coat, wondering if she would yell or perhaps grab the vows from Mr. Smith and tear them up. My eyes slipped down to her no-longer-parallel feet.

No one stirred. No words were spoken. Because nothing appreciably changed, the minister’s words felt like an incantation, the power of which would only be revealed over time: I now pronounce you husband and wife…

The night speeded up. My mother bid me goodbye, sort of, and staggered back to her respectably antiqued house on the arm of her friend. Kemp and I had arranged to meet a few friends in our city apartment. I proceeded to get drunk and fell asleep fully clothed in the bathtub. He woke me in the middle of the night. It was time to clean up.

At the time, I believed that my parents would count me as dead, but as if my heart were swathed in bandages, the conviction brought no feeling. My loyalty to my new husband could have fueled an insurgency. A few weeks after the wedding, I received a set of place mats from my parents. Other than this, we had very little contact.

I was married for years before my commitment disintegrated. Cut off from my family and my privileged life, and perhaps the only one in my graduating class not to go to college, I explored the realm of the spirit. Years of Quaker worship spent in listening silence had cultivated my instinct for the reality of the unseen. Lonely, I responded when televangelists told me that God, the spirit, was also a person whom I could know. I was used to doing outrageous things. Belief wasn’t a huge stretch. The conservative church teaching fueled my zeal to serve my husband, to smile when he cuffed me, and to organize his drawer of unmatched socks, although he claimed I’d interfered with his ‘system.’ Whatever the personal cost, my life had an aura of divine sanction. My church friends didn’t agree; they spoke of give and take, of mutual submission. If one of them criticized Kemp, I sharply defended an alcoholic man whose permission I had to seek to go out to dinner with my brother, now back in town after college. You don’t understand, I argued. You don’t know what he really is.

Consider the loyalty of the Manson Family. Or the seductive influence of those who believe it pleases God to strap a bomb to a mentally challenged man and send him into a marketplace when the whole town is shopping. When there’s enough of an emotional payoff, fanaticism can trump rational morality. The reality is that even if someone does something really, really nasty, there may be a girl who won’t stop loving him.

Kemp, in fact, had not been my first love. An English cousin of my mother’s had visited us when I was six years old. I adored Tony. With his open lap and his gentle teasing, he charmed me. He enticed. He was handsome as a wolf. Early one Saturday morning, I crept up to our third-floor guest room to surprise him; I remember the sensation of flight on the stairs. Tony was happy when I appeared in the bathroom, where he stood in his boxers and undershirt, having just shaved. He closed the door. He imprinted on my body and in my brain things that I was compelled to forget. Afterward, he said: Don’t tell anyone you came up here today. While my parents fussed over breakfast downstairs, I stood in the weird light of my bedroom. What should I do? Pray? No. God was about Now I lay me down to sleep and Be present at our table Lord…He wasn’t concerned with the fallout from events that couldn’t even be named. Tell my parents that Tony had done something bad? But they would believe him and not me. In terror I saw that my mind would snap like a china plate should they turn from me in this way, and I resolved never to think about Tony again.

Adolescence churned up more than the usual burden of confusions. In seventh grade, I considered myself preternaturally grown up, advanced beyond other girls who worried about boy crushes and parties, yet I felt envious to the point of nausea when no one passed me notes in class. Kemp was an escape from middle school drama. He also offered me a chance to revisit the moral and spiritual dilemmas instigated when Tony’s eyes changed from inviting to hard and glittering. In his mesmeric influence, Kemp was not unlike Charles Manson, minus the highly developed people skills.

When we were in high school, my brother challenged my father about the relationship: “Why don’t you put a stop to it?”

“Your mother and I don’t want your sister’s name in the papers,” was his response. The damage Kemp inflicted wasn’t spectacular enough to make the newspaper.

Fortunately, Kemp’s precocious interest in sex with schoolgirls translated into beer-fueled impotence in marriage. I wasn’t really interested in Eros, anyway. I was an alchemist who poured out devotion in an attempt to transmute sleaze into gold. Kemp needed a housekeeper, nursemaid, and receptacle for his rants. In our last few years together, I learned to manage him. When he dissected my flaws with his maddeningly persuasive condemnation, instead of defending myself I developed the instincts of survival in a cage. Nodding. Yes-ing. Pretending to swallow his wisdom. After four quarts of beer, he’d fall asleep, sometimes with his eyes half-open, and I would escape for a walk in the woods. Life was simultaneously boring and chaotic. But thanks to my long-suffering and, ultimately, supportive parents, I went to Tyler School of Art and obtained a degree.

Clarity came to me, over time, bit by bit. The major revolution occurred after nine years of marriage. Kemp’s mother, a serious churchgoer, had gotten me to visit a hand-clapping fundamentalist congregation. It was God on your taste buds as against the cerebral quiet of Quaker meeting. At my progressive school, I’d envied the Black kids for the easy, familial solidarity they shared. Now I met cheerfully zealous people who might not have recognized the names of most of the poets I’d studied in my senior English seminar at Germantown Friends, but they invited me to their houses, hugged expansively, and called me “sister.” And they meant it. One summer, my mother-in-law invited me to a church conference, and Kemp urged me to attend, since he transformed himself into an authority on any topic that caught my interest. He expected me to come home chastened for my sins, and he sent me off with certain verses underlined in my Bible as preparation.

Maybe I was sick of having glasses of beer tossed into bookshelves I had recently cleaned, or maybe my heart was exhausted. I didn’t expect anything from the conference beyond company for my loneliness and the possibility of becoming a better person. But that week, I began to tie the Christian notion of God as father around the fragmented pieces of my inner self. Throughout the last night there, I sat hyper-alert in my quiet dorm room, praying and touching the parts of my body I didn’t like. I repeated over and over, in shock and delight, that God loved me—my mouth that binged on junk food, my breasts, my pallid skin. Something was re-ordering my spiritual DNA. On the long train ride home, I knew things were going to change.

Kemp’s Mansonesque diatribes began to sound bombastic, even silly. He told me that what stood between me and God’s love was the fact that I had just rolled my eyes, revealing that my nature was as stiff-necked as the Israelites wandering in the desert, I didn’t argue or pretend to agree. I started sassing back.

I moved out after he described a dream he’d had, involving me and a knife. I went home to my parents. It was a relief to say, “You were right about him.” Our kisses were unpracticed and stiff, but genuine. I lived with them for a while, waiting for my divorce to finalize and figuring out what to do with my life.

Today, those shadow years lie at the periphery of my thoughts. I am happy and productive. I am married again—this time, to a gentle and loving man. I never saw Kemp or Tony again, but a mental breakdown while pregnant with my first child catapulted me into a war. I had dismissed my past as over and done. I’d been to hell and back, but here, reflected in my husband’s admiring face, were my years of Jubilee. But as I stared at the pattern on the Persian rug in my therapist’s office session after session, my past proved to be tenacious as vermin. As a young mother, while my heart sometimes threatened to explode under the pressure of change, I never lost my gratitude at having been granted a second, ordinary life. There was a time when I believed I’d spend the rest of my life in a grubby apartment, the target of Kemp’s theories that I was the genetic inferior of people who were outgoing and successful. Scary as each hour of my new life could be, I lived it in the light of day.

Today, my children know only that I was married before. That I was young and he was old. That I made a mistake. They know that I have returned to Quakerism from a more conservative place, but they are not aware that the thick walls of fundamentalism once offered refuge for my sanity. Some day, when they’re ready, I’ll tell them this story. But am I the one who hesitates, knowing that their vision of order in the world is colored, however subtly, by their view of me? Once they know, they will think no less of me. They’ll also realize that I used to be pretty strange, the kind of kid that they would choose to avoid. My straightforward parental authority has tangled roots. For now, I’m simply Mom, who volunteers at the school store, someone who would never do anything seriously outrageous or unsafe. I wish I could remain simple forever.

I’ll introduce my story casually, as if pain were not at its heart. “It was only love,” I’ll them. “Granted, that can be complicated.”

Helen Mallon received her MFA degree in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2005. She is completing a novel, Quaker Playboy Leaves Legacy of Confusion (working title). Her poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press is titled Bone China. Her story, “Astral Projection” is in the Best of Philadelphia Stories Anthology 2007. “Biology” won the Editor’s Choice Award in issue #5 of Relief: A Christian Journal.

[img_assist|nid=821|title=Oscar Kahn|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=195]He was not the one disfigured in youth, the one who rose to fame, the one whose story has been told in books and film. He was not the celebrated architect, Louis I. Kahn. He was Lou’s brother, Oscar, a man whose unsung life was unexpectedly cut short, a man I never met but for whom I was named. He was my grandfather, and after all these silent, shadowy years, his faded image is starting to clear.

I never wondered much about my grandfather. The snippets I had collected here and there told me all I needed to know: he was an artist, a composer, an adman who died of a massive heart attack at forty-two. Black and white photos depicted a dapper figure who shared a sweet smile with my mother and looked nothing like the rumpled, impish, white-haired uncle I’d occasionally see at family gatherings.

As far as I was concerned, my grandfather was an opaque ghost
of the past. It was enough to know that his name, like mine,
began with an O. But some ghosts can only remain quiet for so
long. Restless and aching, they break through the veil and seek
a voice, a means of relaying what they couldn’t or didn’t have
time to say.

When my grandmother died at the age of one hundred, she left
behind a packet of fifty or so letters dating from 1942 to 1945,
the year of my grandfather’s death. Most were sent to my
grandmother, Rosella, from Stockton, California, where my grandfather
was starting a new business. A few were addressed to his son,
Alan, a Navy midshipman who was serving in the Pacific theater.
All reveal a man of intelligence, wit and startling passion.
An idealist sobered by the war. A poet who, unlike his brother,
chose family over art.

I began to notice my grandfather’s traits as I traced
his delicate script with my fingers. The scrolling black ink
was as refined as the face in the photographs. Evenly proportioned
though somewhat constrained, each word began and ended with a
soft, looping flourish. The elegant, forward-slanting hand suggested
a delight in the very act of writing combined with a sense of
resignation that also threaded through the content of the letters.

In a letter to Alan, for example, my grandfather tempers his
anxiety with pragmatism:

Your telling me not to worry doesn’t work so well—it
seems that I am constantly thinking about you—where you
are and what you are doing… The fact remains—we
are at War—and you are in it up to the neck, which I hope
you will use to balance a head which in turn will house a brain
clear enough to control a fighting heart—a steady hand—or
pair of hands—and by no means should you let those flat
feet of yours get you into trouble or lead you away from helping
your fellow mate.

[img_assist|nid=822|title=Clockwise from Top left: Oscar and Rosella; Oscar and Rosella’s wedding day; Ona Russell, Oscar’s granddaughter|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=200|height=167]

 

Here, too, is an example of what I came to see
as my grandfather’s
characteristic humor, a purposeful, linguistic playfulness
that no doubt served him well in the advertising business.

The family has always maintained that Oscar invented the commercial
jingle, at least in Stockton where he wrote for Crispy Potato
Chips and Gallo Wines. In any case, he certainly seemed to have
a knack for the genre. When I was a kid, my mother taught me
one of his songs, and I’ve never forgotten it: “You’re
my sweetie, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie-pie, you’re
the apple, apple, apple, apple, apple of my eye, you’re
my funny little honey bunny and that’s why, I’m in
love with you.” The other verses go much the same, and
the poems that pepper his letters are of a similar ilk. To Alan
again he writes: “We’re both going around in circles,
wonderin’ how you are, wishin’ for sure unknown miracles
to bring you from afar.”

No, the poetry is not complex, but my grandfather bore the sensibility
of a poet. Amidst the quotidian concerns he expresses to my grandmother
is the introspection which defines that sensibility:

Here I am again and just a little more on the blue side—or
is it lonesome or what is it? To try and describe how it feels
would be next to worthless. You just can’t find words for
it—it seems to bear down on you and wear you out. I am
empty and it is not for want of food.

And then:

So here I am—enough time on my hands—surrounded
by movies and such—but I find myself—alone—among
a turmoil of people who keep rushing by—Really, I didn’t
think that there could be so many people whom I didn’t
know.

Although some of the passages are downright silly, with stick
figures and other child-like sketches standing in for words,
even these and the countless dashes in the letters suggest his
poetic side, his search for a symbol to best represent the idea
he was attempting to express. Ultimately, his overarching mood
is that of a thinker-poet seeking the ever-elusive meaning of
life.

As I read of his quest, I felt for him, wished I could see into
his soft, brown eyes, reassuringly touch his long tapered hand.
Did he ever feel cheated? Resent that his talent was underappreciated?
Did he feel that his smooth, unscarred face ironically made him
a son less favored? Perhaps. But I have no doubt that my grandfather
found what he was looking for, if only for a short time. Not
in his jingles, poems or drawings, but in his children, and especially
in my grandmother: “And how I miss those kids. I don’t
believe it of me—I didn’t realize how much I would until
now—I’m really human and fatherly at last… My
darling—all the money in the world isn’t worth one
hour of separation—but only after you’ve been away
do you realize it.”

The distance between them seemed to clarify his feelings for
my grandmother in particular, to whom he had been married for
nearly twenty years. Oscar repeatedly expresses his unabashed
passion for her both philosophically and sensually. In one letter,
he writes, “A wife to me is an inspiration to share my
grief and to expound unto her the glory I find in a sunset—the
rapture I see in the outline of a mountain range at dusk—with
its peaks, cloudy with snow.” And in another,

The thrill of sharing the indescribable ecstasy of body with
body, of thought with thought, of soul with soul in a treasured
few moments of physical love—and then the heavenly calm
in each others arms afterwards, knowing the sweetness of each
other till the break of another day and to look forward to another
moment together—my heart or my arms could clutch you, as
near as my hands, my finger tips-touch you.

Some of the letters are so personal, so intimate, that I felt
a bit of a voyeur, not to mention envious of the attention my
grandfather showered upon his wife. I have always considered
myself a hopeless romantic, entranced as I am with 1940s melodramas
and brooding love songs. Maybe, I thought, I have finally glimpsed
the source. The genetic code runs deep.

But my grandfather’s epiphany about the importance of
my grandmother also seemed tied to his prescience about an early
demise: “The only thing that is certain is death,” he
writes, omitting the part about taxes. “But fate—Darling—you
figure it out—the way things begin—the way they develop—the
way they materialize—all like a pattern set and meant to
be—regardless of what we do—what we want or what
we feel is right—It just happens.”

And then, too, my grandfather repeatedly talked of his life
in narrative terms, possibly a way of distancing himself from
his intuition that the end was near:

Loneliness is a word I’ll never know to its fullest meaning
with our story—our story lives with me—every moment
it’s like a friendly hand touching my shoulder.
…You do love me darling, don’t you—? Never stop telling me—over
and over again until—

Until their story ended when Oscar died one New Year’s
Eve in my grandmother’s arms.

It ended, but my grandfather will not been forgotten. For wedged
among the letters was a telegram with a brief, strange, commanding
plea: “Remember my story.” And so I have.
His brother built soaring edifices, but my grandfather built
a family. His brother is known far and wide, but now I know Oscar.
And knowing him as I do, I feel much as he did when he wrote
to my grandmother all those years ago, telling her what her letters
meant to him:

To take them apart—I can see your writing them word for
word and thought for thought. Each little emotion is set just
like a precious stone in a rich setting—and they come to
me—sparkling.

 

Ona Russell holds a PhD in literature from UC San Diego. She writes and lectures nationally on the topic of Literature and the Law and is a published novelist.Her new historical mystery,The Natural Selection, will be released this spring from Sunstone Press. She lives in Solana Beach, California with her husband and has two grown children. For more information, please visit www.onarussell.com.

[img_assist|nid=684|title=Passin’|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.amazon.com/Passin-Karen-E-Quinones-Miller/dp/0446696056/ref|align=right|width=150|height=221]Conducted by Karen E. Quinones Miller
www.karenequinonesmiller.com

So you’ve poured your heart out on paper, and now you’re ready to get it published. Congratulations! But if you think spending months, or years, on a manuscript is hard, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Get ready for the really hard work. Publishing, and then SELLING your book.

Before you consider self-publishing, I strongly urge you to consider having someone do the publishing. There are two main options – large publishers (Simon & Schuster, Random House, Doubleday, etc.) small presses (Third World Press, Running Press, Camino, etc.). Do you need an agent to get into a mainstream publishing? You don’t need one, but it sure is helpful. How do you get an agent? Ask other published writers for their agent’s information. Go to bookstores and read the acknowledgement pages of books in the genre you’re writing. Most thank their agents. Contact those agents. Go to literary events where literary agents and editors are featured. And there’s also a book printed every year by Jeff Herman called “A Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents.” Buy it, or check it out in your local library. They all have it. And don’t forget the Internet. There are countless websites which have a list of literary agents.

Now if you’re going to go the mainstream publishing route, make sure you’re ready. DON’T contact an agent or editor until your manuscript is finished. When it is, you have to write a query letter and a synopsis and send it out with a cover letter. If the agent/editor is interested, they’ll contact you and ask for the first three chapters, or maybe even your entire manuscript. Then, hopefully, you’re on your way.

 

But if you decide to self-publish there are quite a number of steps you’ll have to take, and you should start readying yourself months before your desired publishing date.

First thing you should do when your manuscript is finished is get it edited. And I mean really edited. Get a professional editor to go over your book for structure, continuity, and character and storyline development. Your best friend, Laura, may have may have a Masters Degree in English, but it DOESN’T make her qualified to edit a book. Editors look for continuity, structure, character development and clarity, not just misspellings and bad grammar. Don’t skip this step, even the most experienced writers will benefit from good editing. I personally recommend Andrea Mullins, my former editor at Simon & Schuster who started freelance editing in 2001. Her email address is: Mandrea211@yahoo.com She’s good, fast, reasonable, and very supportive of self-published authors. I also recommend Marcela Landres, another S&S former editor. Her email addy is marcelalandres@yahoo.com Both of these editors are a bit pricey, but I think Andrea’s fees might be a little less expensive. On very, very, very rare occasions I also edit . . . remember, though, only very rarely. When I do agree to edit (and I do so only very rarely!) I charge between $2.25 and $2.75 per double-spaced page.

After your manuscript is edited, get it copyedited, or proof-read. That’s where someone reads the manuscript for typos, grammar, etc. I recommend you go through the process a minimum of twice, but three times would be even better. The most common complaint about self-published books is poor copyediting.

While your manuscript is being copyedited, get your ISBN. The cost is $250.00 for ten sets of numbers (their minimum) and you can obtain it online at www.bowkers.com You HAVE to have an ISBN if you want your book listed in Books In Print (and you really MUST get your book listed in Books In Print) and if you want it sold at bookstores, and I assume you all do. Which brings me to another issue . . . set your price for the book. You’ll need it when you go to get your EAN Barcode. The cost is nominal, usually under $30.00. I recommend using Bar Code Graphics, at 1540 Broadway in New York City. Their number is (800) 932-7801

Then get your cover illustrator. Very important, because once you have your ISBN and your cover done, you can start getting your promotional materials together.

Okay, now your manuscript is edited and copyedited. So now you have to have it typeset. You can do it yourself if you’re computer proficient, or you can pay for the service. I did mine using Microsoft Word.

Only after your manuscript is typeset can you really start shopping around for book printers, because it’s not until then that you have a hard and fast page count for your book. DON’T settle on the first printer you call. Prices vary wildly in the industry. Don’t put yourself in a position in which time becomes an urgent factor in choosing a printer. You’ll pay dearly for that mistake! Your printer should be able to get your book back to you in four to five weeks, but allow yourself six to seven weeks to be sure. Oh, and be sure when you shop for printing prices, that you get an estimate from them for delivery. Personally, I recommend two printers. Webcom in Canada . . . their web address is www.webcomlink.com and Hignell Printing also in Canada . Hignell can be found online at http://www.hignell.mb.ca/

Okay, while your book is at the printer, you should start getting your promotional material together. PUT TOGETHER AN IMPRESSIVE PRESS KIT. This will be the media and bookstores first introduction to your book. At minimum, your press kit should consist of a press release, a flyer with your book cover, an excerpt from the book, a synopsis, your bio, and your picture (5×7). If you have other promotional materials, such as bookmarks or post cards, include them also.

Then start your promotional machine running! Get a list of bookstores nationwide and send out your press kit. Go to local bookstores, personally, and introduce yourself to the managers, and see if you can set up book signing. Be shameless and thick-skinned. You’ll get a lot of rejections, but you’ll also get some acceptances.

You should also be trying to line up book distributors. Okay, for those who don’t know, book distributors are the ones who get our books out nationally, but they do so at a high cost. Ingram, the country’s biggest book distributor charges 60 percent of your cover price. Ouch! You weren’t expecting that? Even if you were to send the book out yourself nationally, you’d still have to give the bookstores 40 percent.

Book Distributors:

 Ingram Book Company
One Ingram Blvd.
La Vergne , TN 37086
(615) 213-5000
www.ingrambook.com
Actually, Ingram is only accepting titles from publishers with 10 titles or more at the moment. They will try and pawn you off to one of the smaller companies, and that’s cool – but only if you don’t have to sign an exclusivity contract!

Baker and Taylor Books
1120 Route 22 East
Bridgewater , NJ 08807
(908) 541-7000
www.baker-taylor.com

Koen Book Distributors, Inc.
10 Twosome Drive
Box 600 Moorestown , NJ 08057
www.koen.com

Culture Plus Book Distributors
(specializes in African-American books)
291 Livingston Street
Brooklyn , NY 11217
(718) 222-9307

A & B Distributors
(specializes in African-American books)
1000 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn , NY 11238
(718) 783-7808

Amazon
Amazon Advantage Program
www.amazon.com

Barnes and Noble Online
www.bn.com

Also, while your book at the printer, go to Kinkos and make up some book galleys, because when you send your press kit to the media, you’re hoping for book reviews, right? You don’t want to wait until your book is printed, because media wants to do reviews BEFORE the publishing date.

 

Now . . . you should have your books back from the printer, and you’re ready to get out there and get noticed, and sell a whole lot of books! Good luck!

Karen E. Quinones Miller’s latest novel is Passin’

A veteran’s story

I was sure you would live to be 90. You didn’t smoke or have a chronic  disease. You waltzed around the kitchen table, tried Viagra, played cards, and nurtured your African violets. You began a publishing empire called the "Brown Envelopes" filled with jokes, war stories, and Reader’s Digest clips. You collected, copied and mailed  the Brown Envelopes every month to 50 friends, acquaintances and Army buddies. You listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and barked at the anti-Republican news on TV. I disagreed with your politics ; never argued with your patriotism. You counted your pennies but never skimped on good shoes, good food and good whiskey, certain these were the formula for a long life. *** "The room where we go in the summer." I see gratitude in your gray eyes when I realize what you mean: the porch. From beneath a plaid flannel blanket in January you remember warmer days. Days spent listening to Glenn Miller cassette tapes and sipping scotch from your command post – the rattan rocker on the porch where you dictated that the squirrels stay away from the birds and the stray cats scare away the squirrels. I try to fill in the blanks of your memory and keep you safe while you wander the house at night looking for your identity. Still at home, around the time you forgot how to dial the phone and use the toaster, you disappeared into your room. When you came out you carried your Sixth Field Artillery jacket and told me you wanted to be buried in it. *** A giddy resident floats by in a wedding dress, awaiting her groom. Another totes an empty suitcase, circling the halls in search of an exit. I looked at all the nursing homes near your home and this was reputed to be the best for Alzheimer’s patients. The walls hold 1940s movie posters and the televisions play Lawrence Welk. The closets are full of accessories for an octogenarian costume party – sequins, spats and suspenders that help the residents dress to regress. Smiling staff play along with whomever and wherever residents believe they are. You would like this place, but there are no rooms available, and no time to put your name on a waiting list. *** "Boy am I glad to see you . Let’s get the hell out of here." I don’t know if you recognize me as your daughter, but my face is familiar in a sea of strangers. It’s your first week in the nursing home that was my second choice. You’re seated at a table full of women. Even here you are an officer and a gentleman, instructing the ladies how to color in the lines of the coloring books you were given for activity hour. I push your wheelchair up and down the hall 20 times. When I stop at your new room, you insist you don’t belong there. So we keep walking. Your face lights up when a tall man shuffles by. "He’s one of our men," you beam. You remind one resident, Alice, of her husband. Soon you two become inseparable. When you go to the hospital with pneumonia, I ask the head nurse what we should tell Alice. The nurse advises me not to say anything because Alice is emotionally fragile. We don’t mention you to Alice. In a few weeks, Alice is 19 again and never met you. *** A study of World War II veterans  found that moderate to severe head injury increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Another study found this risk increased if the head injury resulted in loss of consciousness. You never talked about being injured. For years you told stories only about your assignment in the Fijis, making it sound like a tropical country club where you drank under the stars until you fell out of your hammock. When I took your Army jacket from your closet, I discovered your Bronze Star and Purple Heart stuffed in crumpled wax paper. Your generation is being lost to a disease that will raid my generation as well. For now, though, all I can do is whisper the words a weary soldier deserves to hear at the end of his long march. "At ease, lieutenant."

Gloria Barone Rosanio is the corporate communications director for CIGNA Corporation, headquartered in Philadelphia. Before joining CIGNA, Gloria was a lifestyle writer and editor for various newspapers from New Jersey to Massachusetts. Gloria also spent three years as a political speechwriter for the New Jersey Senate. She lives in Medford, New Jersey , with her husband, Jim, and daughter, Kaitlyn, and is working on a children’s book and a biography of her hairdresser.

[img_assist|nid=652|title=Bunny Envy, Marlise M. Tkaczuk © 2007|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=192|height=200]1. When I insisted that fixing my glasses with a welding torch was a bad idea, my grandfather asked if I’d ever read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The book, he said, was about an optometrist who’d made a fortune selling frames.

Deployed to Europe in the waning days of World War II, my grandfather spent his days in the service pushing a broom through Germany. I didn’t read Slaughterhouse-Five when he told me to, so I never thought to ask if my grandfather had passed through Dresden. If he had, he might have run into Kurt Vonnegut—or scouted out the slaughterhouse where the author and the first stirrings of his unstuck-in-time protagonist Billy Pilgrim weathered Germany’s worst bombing while the city burned.
More than likely, my grandfather never actually met Kurt Vonnegut.
But then again, maybe he did and never knew it.

If I’d read the book like he told me to, I would have at least known to ask.

2. It wasn’t until four years later that I finally got around to reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and even then it was only because a girl told me I might like it. Her name was Theresa Jones, and she got most of her books from a dumpster behind a bookstore. Except for their missing covers, the books were all in great condition, but poor sales had condemned them to an early death. The least Theresa could do was rescue the cult favorites and share them with the as-yet uninitiated.

Hence my first reading of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Hence my falling in love with language.

Hence my decision to major in English.

Hence eight years of graduate school.

Theresa’s coverless copy of Welcome to the Monkey House still bears a warning that reads: “If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that it is stolen property. Neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.” So as she was welcoming me to the monkey house, Theresa was also robbing Kurt Vonnegut of his pocket change. If you doubt the gravity of this crime, consider this: had Theresa not gotten me hooked on Vonnegut, I never would have gone to graduate school, and the world would have one less over-educated yet largely unemployable doctor of the English language to worry about.

Maybe this is the real reason behind the prohibition against “stripped books.”

Maybe “stripped books” lead to harder drugs like “curiosity” and “critical thinking.”

And we all know where “curiosity” and “critical thinking” lead:
Straight to “higher education.”

Theresa might just as well have invited me into an abandoned house to shoot heroin with her—reading Vonnegut was that good. And in addition to mugging him, Theresa had also seen Vonnegut give a reading, after which someone asked for an autograph.

“No thanks!” Vonnegut said before quietly slipping away.

3. Since my fascination with Vonnegut had led me to major in English, I had no choice but to move in with my parents after graduation. By chance, a local writer named Jim Wronoski lived in their neighborhood. What impressed me most about Jim was that he’d met Kurt Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, and had given her a copy of his book, Knaves in Boyland. Not long after that, Jim received an email stating that Vonnegut had read the book and found it “very funny.”

At about the same time, I did the only thing I really could do with my English degree and enrolled in graduate school where I met two more people who had come within spitting distance of Vonnegut. The first was my officemate, Jeff Hibbert, who, like Theresa Jones, once saw Vonnegut evade an autograph hound with a simple “No thanks!” before quietly slipping away. The second was a former babysitter for Vonnegut’s youngest child. To earn money many years earlier, she’d gone to work for a service that provided babysitters for Manhattan’s elite, among whom was a woman named Jill who lived in a brownstone near Gramercy Park. When my friend arrived at the brownstone, Jill handed over her daughter and said that she and Kurt didn’t expect to be gone for too long. Then Kurt came down from his bedroom dressed for a night on the town, and the couple left my friend alone with their child.

4. So one of my friends had made Vonnegut laugh, and another had been entrusted with the well-being of Vonnegut’s youngest child. In addition to this, Theresa Jones had mugged Vonnegut for his pocket change, and my grandfather had (arguably) served with Vonnegut during World War II. And, of course, Jeff Hibbert had, like Theresa before him, witnessed a near-miss between Vonnegut and an autograph hound.

Clearly a pattern was emerging.

Clearly everyone in the world had met Kurt Vonnegut.

Everyone, that is, except for me—an impression that was reinforced one day while I was subbing at the school where my wife, Kerri, teaches. Since it was common knowledge that I was a graduate student and therefore a) had plenty of time on my hands and b) would do anything for a buck, I became the go-to guy for any of Kerri’s coworkers who happened to either fall ill or go on vacation. This was how I met a young high school student who happened to run into Vonnegut on not one but two separate occasions.

The student was visiting Smith College when her tour guide asked if she wanted to meet my favorite author. Upon accepting the invitation, the student was led to Vonnegut’s office where she shook hands with the man and said that she was a big fan of his work. Apparently this impressed the author, because when they met at a train station late the next day, he said hello to her.

“Wow,” I said when she told me the story. “What was he like?”

“Oh, you know,” the girl said. “About what you’d expect.”

I nodded my head and said I knew exactly what she meant.

But it was a lie. I had no idea what she meant. At the same time, though, I knew I couldn’t let on. Otherwise the girl would know my secret—that I was the only person in the world who’d never met Kurt Vonnegut.

5. The last straw came when I filled in for a science teacher named Priscilla Ryan. When she asked me to fill in for her, Priscilla mentioned that she was taking the day off to help her daughter shop for a wedding dress. What she failed to mention, however, was that her daughter was marrying Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite nephew. In fact, I had to learn this information second-hand when Kerri came home from work months later and informed me that while I was out walking my dog, Vonnegut was sitting in a chapel just blocks from my house watching his nephew tie the knot. Which meant that Priscilla Ryan didn’t simply meet the man or care for his child or make him laugh, but that she and Kurt Vonnegut were family.

6. So I’ve stopped telling people that Vonnegut is my favorite author—mainly because I’m tired of everyone telling me about how they’ve seen him or met him or made him laugh, or how they’ve given their daughters away to his nephews in marriage.

Okay! I want to scream. I get the point!

Everyone knows Kurt Vonnegut but me!

But I’m okay with that. Because not too long ago, Kerri and I took a train out to New York to see a production of King Lear. And during the intermission, I spotted a tall, thin man with wiry hair and a mustache standing alone in the lobby.

It couldn’t be, I thought, but every glance I stole in his direction confirmed my suspicions. This had to be the man who turned me on to reading, the author responsible for my love of language, the very reason I ended up in graduate school. So I made my way across the floor and tried to sound casual as I asked the tall, skinny man if I might be so bold as to say he looked exactly like Kurt Vonnegut.

“No thanks!” the man said—and quietly lost himself in the crowd. Marc Schuster has two works of nonfiction coming out in 2007. His monograph on Don DeLillo will be published by Cambria Press, and his study of the long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who (co-authored with Tom Powers) will be available from McFarland & Company. “Everyone Knows Kurt Vonnegut but Me” was first heard on WXPN’s “Live at the Writers House” in November of 2006.

[img_assist|nid=655|title=Spinning Lights  by Shea Mockler © 2007|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=111]The spring I turn fourteen I notice Steve. He is tall with slanted eyes and long black hair. I love him instantly.



Summer dawns, humid and sweet. Steve invites me to get a little drunk under the trees. The two of us drink wine from red plastic tumblers. When we kiss he tastes like cinnamon gum.why does he taste like gum when he’s been drinking wine? I spend years chasing that moment.



I want to drink like Grandpa Stosh who gulps beer on the couch while watching baseball. He shows my sister and me pictures of the bomber planes with sexy women painted on them. He flew these planes in World War II. These are the only times he talks to us.



My father is an alcoholic. He stopped drinking when I was five years old, yet maintained a phantom connection to explosive rage that cut the family’s collective soul like shards of glass. In my kindergarten school picture I smile and expose the gap where my front teeth are missing. The memories of sleeping in strange houses with my mother and sister have submerged and filled in with cement. I crack them open later for comparison purposes only. I will never be the kind of drunk who throws a baby in her carriage down the stairs.



I drink in my classmates’ basements. The slush of amber into a shot glass or the pop of a cork promises grace instead of awkwardness, easy wit instead of shyness, and inclusion instead of standing on the fringes. Often I pass out or vomit on the cheap shag carpet.



Other evenings I stumble home. I lie to my parents as I grab the kitchen table for balance. The next weekend usually finds me looking out my bedroom window crying.



In my senior year, I ride the trolley across town every day after school. My friend Kathy’s boyfriend Paul lives in a house without electricity. We dump a bucket of water into the bowl to flush the toilet. I have sex with men as old as twenty-five. A scream fills every empty space inside of me.



As I grow older, the scream sleeping at the bottom of my soul threatens to roll forward. I tap into a flood of different poisons. My protectors flee when I crush them under the weight of chaos. I become a target for predators seeking to feast on the wounded.



I convince myself I have choices. In truth, the drugs manufacture the only choices. The addiction thrives. I bleed from the grip.



I think I am going to die one night. I do not want to wake up. Nurses stick spikes in my wrists. I feel crucified. One of them asks me why I do this to myself. I cannot answer. My way of living entombs the truth in layers of denial.



I learn that my craving indicates a sickness. In order to reverse the direction, I need a power bigger than my problem. I make new connections with people no longer using. I meet a girl named Ellen whose eyes are the color of faded denim. She speaks to me kindly, even when I call her late at night unable to sleep.



We go to play bingo one Friday evening in a smoke-filled hall lit by fluorescent light. I win twenty dollars and treat us both to pizza. Ellen drops me off around eleven. When she hugs me goodbye, the strawberry and tobacco scent of her hair acts as a soul balm. At less than ninety days’ sobriety, my nerve endings are raw and exposed. They irritate easily like deep-sea creatures forced to tolerate sunlight.



The next morning I recall every detail of our time together. I think about the fat man wearing suspenders in the cubicle next to me at the bingo hall— his curses barely audible because he has a cigar stuck to his mouth by dry saliva. I can hear the “thwump” of the pinball machine’s spring shooter smashing into plastic at the pizza shop while the teenage players swear, trying to impress one another. I no longer need to call people and judge by the tone of their voices whether I insulted them or screwed their boyfriends the night before. This realization brings a glow of peace I want to hold forever.



I give birth to a son. I enjoy nuzzling his soft head. When rain soaks the grass, I draw him a crayon garden. I look at him sleeping on the floor with the wet, chewed up corner of his baby blanket against his cheek. He is my youth’s sweetest harvest.



I have been turning the wineglasses at banquets upside down for –more than a decade when the disease reappears in my family like a jilted lover bent on revenge. I visit my mother in the emergency room. She is bloated and red. Soft cuffs hold her hands to protect the tube poking out of her throat. The nurse flips the head of the bed upside down to maintain blood flow to her brain.



[img_assist|nid=656|title=Chinese Flowers  by Erik Streitweiser © 2007|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=210]The doctor arrives. He is at least ten years younger than I am and informs me that my mother’s blood alcohol level measures .5. The condition is incompatible with life. I pray for a chance to talk with her again. When she opens her eyes, I make sure she sees me. I remember almost dying with no one looking at me except strangers.



My mother survives. She continues to heal in another hospital. The wet earth breaks open as dark beauty returns to her face. In photographs taken the year I was born, my mother looks like the young Marlo Thomas.



My mother and father stayed married for twenty-five tumultuous years. The sting of their divorce transformed her occasional highball into a daily coping strategy. After she comes home from treatment, she keeps her promises to babysit and answers her telephone.



One afternoon my teenage niece calls as I fold warm clothes in the bedroom. Her voice is small and hurt. I know she hangs with a tough crowd. The boys can hardly keep their eyes off her. She is a jewel among the slime.



Do something to create another reality, I tell her.



Live.

Victoria Christian is a lifelong resident of Northeast Philadelphia. In addition to writing, she works full time as a registered nurse. Christian would like to thank Alison Hicks, as well as her fellow writers in The Greater Philadelphia Workshop Studio, for their wise guidance and loving support.

[img_assist|nid=631|title=Gerbera Daisy by BJ Burtone © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=101]On a warm Friday morning at the Philadelphia Art Museum, twelve men and women gather to hear a lecture on Mary Cassatt’s painting A Woman and Girl Driving. We’re art apostles, staked out on tiny, collapsible, green vinyl, aluminum stools. Some of the listeners are painters; others, like me, would be hard-pressed to sketch more than a stick figure. In Cassatt’s painting, all that is visible of the horse leading the carriage is its hindquarter—crudely rendered—as if the woman and girl-child in the carriage will leave the painting, pass out of our line of vision on their way to who knows where. But the most compelling aspect of this painting isn’t the light or the color (so many pinks) or even the grim determination on the woman’s face. Rather, it’s a small thing: the little girl’s hand braced on the carriage door. I can’t take my eyes off it. Her grip suggests trepidation. Look up to her closed pale face, her lackluster gaze—no play, no childish delight—focused straight ahead and that hand becomes emblematic, the tone signature of this particular Cassatt.

Although we’ll learn that the little girl is Degas’ niece, that the woman is Cassatt’s sister, Lydia, and she was dying when Cassatt painted her, we don’t need to know these details to sense the urgency or the shadow of death in the painting. The girl’s hand, placed in the forefront, cues the viewer visually and emotionally.

We cloddish writers lacking the talent to paint the personal essay of our dying sister and her friend’s niece on a carriage ride must rely on words to cue our readers.

What makes a good personal essay? The personal essay seems to be the hot new form, but it is one of the oldest forms of writing, like poetry, and—like poetry—it relies on metaphor, rhythm, voice and specific detail. A writer of personal essays should read them actively with a mind and an ear tuned to nuance, shape, variety and style. My students groan when they hear this unalterable dictate, but will a novelist ever be born from a writer who doesn’t read novels? It would be something close to a miracle if a fine personal essay emerged from a writer ignorant of its long tradition. A good place to begin is with Phillip Lopate’s excellent anthology, The Art of The Personal Essay.

That said, the personal essay, often takes as its subject the everyday and the small—a walk in the park, a carriage ride, a morning at the museum—then explores it for meaning and depth. It doesn’t “sweat” as Toni Morrison has said; it doesn’t need to include every single detail of an event or experience in meticulous linear order. It’s insignificant whether I walked or took a taxi to the museum, what I wore, what I ate for breakfast. Instead, the personal essayist chooses details, thoughts, and images judiciously, like Cassatt, to suggest by what it puts in (the little girl’s hand), and what it leaves out (the whole horse), what the body remembers.

The personal essay is intimate and conversational, which is not to be confused with confessional and vulgar. I’ve admitted to you that I can’t draw, that I’m an “apostle of art,” that I attend spotlight lectures at the museum on Friday mornings. I’ve addressed “you” informally, co-opted you into my morning, as though I’ve touched your arm and whispered, “Look at the little girl’s hand.”

Unlike its formal, academic counterpart, the beauty of the personal essay arises from the essayist’s willingness to question his or her experience, to explore the “whys” rather than tell the “hows,” to even go so far as to ask, “Why is the groomsman seated on the back of the carriage, facing away from us?” As Lopate points out, “much of what characterizes true essayists is the ability to draw out a point through example, list, simile, small variation, exaggeration, whatever. The natural order of things—groomsman driving, woman and child seated in back—has been reversed. Though we haven’t experienced the carriage ride, we shiver with recognition: life is full of unwanted reversals. The best personal essays are honest. “The personal essayist must above all be a reliable narrator,” [This is Lopate (not White) from The Art of The Personal Essay]. “We must trust his or her core sincerity.” Essayists set up counter-themes. Any M.F.K. Fisher essay on food is also always about family and emotional hunger.

So you visit a museum. You cannot forget the little girl’s hand in the painting and how it made you feel. Your editor asks you to write an essay about how to write personal essays. Here it is.
Denise Gess (Not Tony ‘N Tina) is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels, Good Deeds (1984) and Red Whiskey Blues (1989) and the co-author of the non-fiction book Firestorm At Peshtigo: A Town, Its People and The Deadliest Fire in American History (2002). Her short fiction has appeared in the North American Review and has been anthologized in The Horizon Reader. She’s working on a collection of essays entitled Bad For Boys from which the title essay will appear in Wild River Review. She is also a member of the Philadelphia Stories editorial board.

[img_assist|nid=902|title=Ink, Joe Blake © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=194]

The polluted breeze blowing off the Frankford Creek smelled like melting tar and felt just as hot. I sat with Bill and Rufus at the end of my block under a shadeless, wilted cherry tree. Almond Street was wedged between two chemical plants, an arsenal, and a funeral home, where everybody who lived on the street expected to end up sooner or later. Chemicals in the air ruined the paint jobs of nearly every house and car on the block. Outsiders claimed the air smelled like rotten eggs. I never noticed it except when we came back after driving someplace else.

While I pounded a baseball into my beat up glove, I watched waves of heat shimmer up from the cracked asphalt street. Behind us, Allied Chemical’s smokestacks belched steam into the sky, where it hovered, occasionally blocking the sun but never shielding us from its heat.

“Hey, you want me to get my magnifying glass so we can fry some ants?” Rufus asked. He was always coming up with stuff like that for us to do. He was short and dumpy with lips so red, it looked like he’d just finished eating a cherry water ice.

“We could go under the fireplug, only,” Bill said, pointing to the legal sprinkler head on the open hydrant about thirty feet from us. It squirted a thin stream of water into the air. When the water landed just right and mixed with the oil and gas stains in the gutter, it hissed and a little rainbow popped up.

“That stupid shower is for little kids,” I said.

The three of us had spent most of our summer together, not because we liked each other so much, but because we couldn’t do any better. Rufus had a sadistic side. He was also a bit of a mama’s boy because his father had died before he was born, and he was scared to death of girls. Bill was horny and not afraid to talk to girls but a face full of zits and a mouth full of wire scared them off. As for me, I hadn’t yet grown into my two front teeth. I wore coke-bottle glasses and was branded a braniac and potential queer because I went to Central High, an all boys’ school for the academically talented.

By this point of the summer, I was starting to feel superior to my friends. They seemed to accept being nerds. I, on the other hand, had a plan to escape that fate. The first part involved changing my build from thin to Atlas-like. I’d been working out faithfully every day for a good month now, posing for hours in my room, convinced I could actually see my arms growing if I stared hard enough. Once I had a great build, nobody would pick on me. The only thing holding back my progress was, as usual, my parents. My mom wouldn’t let me eat as much meat as I needed to build my muscles to their max. That’s because my dad was on strike and we weren’t, as she put it, made of money.

The key to the second part of my plan was about to show up in five minutes, if my calculations were correct.

“Let’s have a catch,” I said.

Rufus groaned but got up. Bill and I had been working on his arm all summer but he still threw like a girl. He’d double and triple clutch, then heave one twenty feet or so at best. His throws were so soft you could catch them with your bare hand.

It didn’t take long for me to stop throwing to Rufus because I was backing up out of his range with each throw. Soon I was right in front of the Kallman’s house. That was where phase two of my plan was supposed to begin.

Like clockwork, Lorie Kallman came out of her house with her younger sister Tracy and her older cousin Cheryl. They were wearing bikini tops and shorts and carrying lounge chairs, ready to work on their tans.

Part two of my plan was to get Lorie to go out with me. I didn’t like her just because she had a nice tan and a great chest. What I liked most about her was the way she fit in with everybody. She never seemed to be out of place. If I went out with her, some of that would rub off on me too. Everyone wouldn’t think of me as just some nerd anymore.

I tried to get her attention by posing when I threw the ball back so my slightly larger bicep bulged. I held the ball by my ear just as I was about to release it so my bicep had no choice but to curl. Besides, I was getting close enough to overhear what the girls were saying. It seemed Lorie wasn’t satisfied with the tan line on her thighs. She insisted that it was too low. So she proceeded to roll her shorts up in stages, recuffing them each time before saying that they needed to be even higher. When I was sure she couldn’t roll them any higher, she tried to raise them yet again. When I turned to get a better look, Bill hit me in the side of the head with the goddamn baseball. It knocked the right lens out of my heavily taped glasses. I’d been begging my mom for new glasses or, better yet, contact lenses but she said we couldn’t because we didn’t have any benefits while Dad was on strike. The girls giggled and I muttered an F-bomb, which I thought would sound cool. That made them laugh even harder.

Frustrated, I went back under the cherry tree to fix my glasses. Bill kept asking me why I’d turned my head. Rufus said he had a pair of tweezers that were perfect for the job and if they weren’t he knew they were also great for tearing wings off flies. I told them to shut up so I could concentrate but that only made them babble more.

“Which one of the babes is the hottest, only?” Bill asked. He was always adding “only” to the end of his sentences for no apparent reason. It was really starting to bug me.

“If I don’t get my glasses fixed, my ass is going to be on fire. You know, you should have to pay for them if I can’t, Bill. You threw the ball.”

“You weren’t paying attention, only. Besides, they were ruined before that anyway. I’m doing you a favor, only. If they’re broke, your parents will have to get you new ones. I’ve gotten two new pairs already this year.”

“That’s different,” I said. His dad worked for Honeywell and never went on strike.

“It looks like you could use new sneakers too,” Rufus added.

I could feel the heat coming off my face. I peeked at the holes in the bottoms of my PF Flyers. Then I stood up so no one else would see them.

“It doesn’t matter which is the hottest anyway. We have no shot with any of them,” Rufus said.

I was about to tell him that maybe they had no shot but I had a shot, and a pretty good one at that. I decided they’d find out for themselves, soon enough.

“Here comes trouble, only,” Bill said. He pointed at a gang in tank tops and cut off jean shorts. Jay was their leader. He’d become something of a cult hero because he’d served time for robbing graves.

I got my lens back in just as the gang surrounded Kallman’s stoop. They flirted with the girls while tossing a few loud barbs our way. They called Bill pizza face and zit zombie. Rufus was a red-lipped bitch. They threatened to drag me to Pat’s Hardware where they’d duct tape me and my glasses together once and for all.

Then, strangely, there was a lull. We weren’t saying anything on our side of the street and they weren’t saying a word on the other side. Everybody seemed to notice it. Everybody seemed to expect somebody else to break the silence. Then the wind kicked up, stirring wrappers and dust, making everyone hotter and dirtier.

Jay started to cross the street. I thought he was coming over for one of us and apparently so did Rufus, who began climbing the cherry tree until a branch snapped and he fell, which caused full-scale laughter to break out across the street. Jay then veered away from us and towards the fireplug. Seemingly out of nowhere he produced a wrench, and in no time he had the cap off and the water gushing out full blast.

Ray Bruner, a leathery old man who lived directly across the street from the fireplug, leaned out his front door, raised a fist in the air and yelled, “You’re flooding my goddamn basement, you bastards.”

“Fuck you Ray,” Jay yelled. Then he went behind the fireplug, cupped his hands under the stream coming out, and launched a gusher into Ray’s yard, which sent him scurrying back inside.

At first I wanted to take off my shirt and show off my new torso, but then I remembered my farmer’s tan, so I figured I’d just roll up my sleeves to reveal more of my upper arms.

“Geez, you’re shoulders are as white as Space Ghost, only,” Bill remarked.

I couldn’t figure out what to do with my glasses. The water would knock them off my face. If I put them down, the Big Kids might steal them or somebody might step on them. I decided the best thing to do would be to hold them in my hand.

The force of the water pushed me forward when it hit my back. Somebody yelled that one of the girls’ tops had fallen down and I was trying to get a look when I realized my glasses had fallen out of my hand and were being swept up in the current in the gutter. I chased them down the street, barely intercepting them before they went down the sewer.

On my way back, I looked for Lorie. The time I had spent under the plug, and the breeze, made me shiver a bit. I couldn’t see her but I did see a familiar spindly-legged figure in a green bathing suit coming at me— my old man. I wanted to run but there was nowhere to hide.

“I thought I’d join in on the fun,” he said, smacking me on the shoulder. “Come on under. I’ll dunk you like I used to at the Rec,” he said.

“I’ve had enough,” I said, praying that a giant sinkhole would form and swallow me up.

“Suit yourself.” As he walked away, I noticed that he was holding something in his hand. I couldn’t quite make out what it was but I assumed it was a beer, since he had almost never been without one since he’d gone on strike.

I figured I would head home but then Lorie came out of her house wrapped in a beach towel. She looked even colder than I was. She sat on the sidewalk, dangling her feet in the water as it flowed in the gutter.

I stood in the street across from her with my back to the hydrant. I kept saying the word “Now,” in my head; convinced each time I said it that I would say something, anything to Lorie. In the meantime, I could only stare at the orange nail polish on her toes as she patted her feet in and out of the water.

Then she said my name— Joe. I was shocked, thrilled that she noticed me. I didn’t hear anything else she said after that. I watched her orange nails come out of the water and move forward until they stopped right in front of me.

“What’s the matter, Joe? You guys can’t afford the water bill?”

“Hi,” I said, proud I was finally able to respond to her calling my name. The string of “Nows,” in my head ended too.

“Turn around,” she said. She grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around. Her fingers sent tiny electric currents rippling through my body.

Then I saw what she saw and what everybody was watching too. Dad, alone under the hydrant, lathering his underarms with a bar of soap. He was taking a goddamn shower in front of the whole block, including Lorie, for chrissake.

I laughed and shook my head like everybody else. I thought it would make them stop teasing me. You know, laugh along with the criticism and watch it disappear. In real time, it was probably only another minute or two until the cops came and everybody scattered but it felt like hours to me.

Dad stopped to talk to Ray Bruner. He told me to tell mom he‘d be home in a minute.

I ran into the house. My mother was in the kitchen working on dinner. “Not hot dogs again tonight,” I said, looking at the empty wrappers on the counter. Then I heard the front door open, and I ran up to my room.

I tore the stupid covers with the NFL team helmets on them that I’d had since I was seven off my bed and tossed them on the floor. I looked out the window. Dirt and cement yards stretched as far as I could see. In one of them, Lorie smiled and leaned against the gate to her back yard. I was sure she was still laughing at me until I saw Joey Hunter, one of Jay’s gang, reach across that same gate to kiss her. Then she went into her house. Nothing had changed. I hadn’t figured a way out of my house, or away from this neighborhood, or from being a nerd. I fell down on my bed, pulled a pillow over my head, and tried to drown out my mother’s voice as she called me to dinner.

 

Joe Lombo is a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at Rowan. The essay and poems that appear in this issue are the first items he has published. He was born and raised in Northeast Philly and currently resides in Turnersville, New Jersey.