Articles – Page 155 – Philadelphia Stories

Gift

Here, I brought you an orange.

You prefer tangerines?
I like tangerines too
and might have made that choice
had I not thought of your hands
which are better suited for oranges.
I get a solid feeling about your hand
holding an orange.
Tangerine is prettier to say
and limes are like having short hair
and lemons remind me umbrellas
are for sun as well as rain
and I’m sorry I didn’t think
of tangerines which are like wearing
clear bells around your ankles
I know that now
but oranges are cool too
because they make you feel
like going back to clay
even if it’s parched and cracked
in a thousand places
the way your hand is creased
cradling one more deliriously
misguided gift from me. Sharon Black is the librarian at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in The Jacaranda Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mudfish 11, Rhino 2001 and 2004, and others.

After a Shift at the Catch of the Day

End of night’s work,
I walk the boards,
descend to beach.
Take off my shoes,
stretch my toes,
think of fall.

I slip my hand
into the pocket
of my waitress skirt,
black nylon, slick as eel skin,
for the pack of Kools
my last table left behind
with the dirty plates,
emptied Heinekens,
paltry tip.

I kneel in cool sand,
late, black August night,
slender curve of moon,
sound of waves,
and light a cigarette,
for the first time.

The mint stabs
like winter air to the lungs,
but the red ember
seems to me
like a ring on my finger,
or the period
at the end of the last sentence
of a long story. Nancy Hickman grew up on a farm in southern Delaware, came to Philadelphia for college, and has been here ever since. She’s worked as a teacher, book store manager, hospice case manager, and grief counselor. Presently, she is a parish secretary and teaches English to non-native speakers. She writes when she can.

Fathers and Sons

You don’t know I’m watching you,
watching those hands made rough by bending iron in shops;
watching hands so easily clenched into fists
gently strum the strings of
an out of tune guitar.

You’re sitting on the patio
pencil stub tucked behind your ear,
sheet music scattered across a wrought iron table;
six cans of Bud
serving as inspiration and paperweights.

I know what it feels like
to watch someone else’s dream
when I recognize the same part
of the same song
you’ve been trying to write for years.

If I stay you’ll wave me over
and ask me if you ever told me
about that song you wrote;
the one that sounded like a hit some other guy had.

I’ll nod like I always do
but I’ll hear the one about the guy
who knows he blew his chance
to be somebody
but who still wants
to be somebody anyway.

You’ll punch me in the arm,
then ask me how the girls
are treating me
before telling me
they used to treat you better.

I’ll say I don’t want to arm wrestle
But you’ll talk me into it.
As that vein in your neck bulges
And your bloodshot eyes plead,
I’ll have to decide
if I’m going to let you win.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.

Night Sweats

You’re twelve and you can’t remember
the last time you slept through the night.
If their raging voices don’t wake you
the tension beneath their smoldering silence will.

Tonight your dad claims he’ll shoot your mom
but she says he hasn’t got
the balls or a gun.

He says it’s only a matter of time.

So you creep over to your bedroom door
and you shove a chair up against it
and hope they won’t decide
to make you their common enemy.

But their voices reach you anyway.
He screams that when he gets that gun
He’s going to shoot her here, here,
here, here, here

Here and finally here!
And from somewhere deep under the covers
you laugh because the asshole
never stopped to reload

But the joke’s on you
When the clock strikes another hour
And you’re awake, dreaming yet again
About leaving one way or another.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.

Postmark

Green storm of light
I see when I look out of my cubicle—
it’s 9 am here
in the wake of you.

The intersection at 38th & I recall (Market)
busy with breeze, standing
after an ovation aimed at
no one in particular.

My mornings, I want to tell you,
begin with the deep breath
of forgetting
and I hold it in until I begin typing

nonsense / mirage (com ‘ere) / thought
weighs, they weigh
more than both of us,
but who am I

to say the sun doesn’t
gasp when it flinches / strikes
your skin— it could be roped off by yellow tape
and say what

we’ve said:
no, go around
go around

(I know this happens to me)

There is a wind that follows me
home. An intersection huddling
among broken tail lights, windshield
specks of blue.

Then I step diagonally
across the sunlight
into a more perfect
kind of damage. Scott Glassman lives in South Jersey and works in the medical education field. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iowa Review, Sentence, and others. He also curates the INVERSE Reading Series in Philly.

The Tangle Between

[img_assist|nid=896|title=Morgan, Charles Hosier © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=302] The theory that my life thus far has been a compilation of bad decisions occurs to me as I am darting down 10th Street, in pursuit of my boyfriend who is not actually my boyfriend but in fact a complete stranger who, like me, takes the 7:19 train into Philadelphia every morning. He looks to be all of nineteen years old and I am twenty-eight and therefore far too old to be trailing this boy through the streets of Chinatown , skulking half a block behind him and wondering if that is his girlfriend he is talking to on his cell phone.

I began stalking him three days ago, out of a combination of boredom and intrigue.

Day One: The most attractive male specimen ever to ride SEPTA boards the train with me at Woodbourne Station. Being at that tender age of not quite having grown into his looks, he cannot yet be classified as “hot.” He is on the cusp of hotness, a future hottie in possession of hotness not yet realized, and all that pent-up potential is so much sexier than actual hotness. He’s got that dark hair/blue eyes combination that I fell in love with when I was five and watched Christopher Reeve play Superman. Every expression that crosses his face passes for penetrating even though chances are he’s either pondering tits and ass or money or how to use money to get tits and ass.

I decide on Day One that I want to have his babies.

Day Two: Upon seeing him two days in a row, I realize this kid is a train-riding regular and therefore worth looking into. There is no sense in stalking a one-time-train-taker because where does that get you except late for work? So on Day Two I time it so that I can exit the train directly behind him, which allows me to be directly behind him on the escalator to street level at Market East, eye level with his perfect about-to-be-hot ass and wishing I had not skipped breakfast so that perhaps the desire to take a mammoth bite out of it would be less overwhelming. Despite my deepest carnal urge to grab him, gag him, and drag him to the nearest bathroom to play Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson, I maintain composure and avert my eyes from the appetizing ass. Which leads me to spot the ID badge on his belt and notice how very baby-faced he looks in his picture, and that is when it crosses my mind that I am probably stalking an intern. I cannot make out his name on the badge, but I am glad of that because I might find out that his name is Seymour and who wants to stalk a guy named Seymour?

On that day, rather than walk towards the exit to 12th Street , which would put me closer to my destination, I follow him to the 10th Street exit. Halfway up the stairs, it occurs to me that this is adolescent and ludicrous behavior; however, it could be argued that when stalking an adolescent, one must resort to said behavior, so I continue my ascent. And then he holds the door to the street and smiles at me with lips so full you could pop them with a pin and I think that I just might actually swoon as he heads right towards 10th Street and I head left to my original destination.

“Good morning, folks, this is the R3 to Center City Philadelphia . We will be making all local stops. Please have all tickets and passes ready. Next stop Langhorne. T-G-I-F. Langhorne next.”

Day Three: The air conditioner in the train is broken and he is sitting in front of me, wiping sweat from his brow. I wish I lived back in the days when women carried handkerchiefs so that I could offer him mine and he would return it to me all full of his sweet, young, not-yet-hot-but-damn-sexy college intern sweat. But I live in the 21 st century, where all I can offer him is a stiff pocket pack dollar store tissue, and what is sexy about that? So he sweats and I pine and at Market East I follow him again and he holds the door again and I am pushing thirty and therefore view any act of chivalry as a potential sign that I will not have to spend my life eating alone while watching “Jeopardy” and phrasing my answers in the form of a question even though no one is there to hear them and I make the right towards 10th Street behind him thinking I don’t know what – that he will smile at me again? That he will turn around and offer me his umbrella because it looks like rain and I don’t have one? That he will ask me if I’d like to have a couple of kids with him? Of course he does none of these things, and when he turns right on Arch Street I am forced to go left because I am already two blocks out of my way and it is 8:15 and I am supposed to be seven blocks away preparing for a meeting by 8:30 and it is hot and humid and the sickening stench of uncooked fish permeates Chinatown and I am sweating and regretting cutting short layers into my wavy hair without considering the implications of early August in Philly. I am sure to arrive at work looking like an ungroomed Chia Pet and not only that, but now, following this kid seems like a poor decision and thus my theory is born.

There is a note from my boss on my chair stating that the meeting has been pushed back to lunchtime. This should be good news, as I really have not prepared for it, but the truth is that I will spend the next three and a half hours not preparing for it while I shop online for a digital camera to take pictures of my cat and become aware that I have become a cliché—the sad, single girl with the cat. I start up my computer. An instant message pops up on my screen almost immediately:

EdB28: you’re late

Ed sits in the next cubicle. He chooses to point out the obvious over the instant messenger rather than walk the half a step to my desk because two months ago we got drunk at a happy hour and slept together and two weeks ago after I left a toothbrush at his apartment. He called me to tell me things were getting too serious, which I later found out meant that he could not bring the young intern in advertising back to his apartment with my toothbrush there and that Ed B. had become another bad decision, so we now restrict our correspondence to electronic media whenever possible in the interest of office civility.

MauraK2605: no shit

I sometimes have difficulty with civility.

EdB28: jeanne was looking for you…

MauraK2605: again, no shit. she left a note on my chair

EdB28: did you finish the manual for the EZWorks stuff?

I glance at the pile of pulverized trees on my desk with the title page reading, EZWorks User Manual. As a technical writer, I kill forests so that someone can purchase a digital camera online.

MauraK2605: it’s done

EdB28: any bugs i should know about?

As an engineer, Ed fixes glitches that may occur when people try to purchase digital cameras online.

MauraK2605: no. any interns i should know about?

EdB28: what happened to office courtesy?

MauraK2605: i don’t have time for this. gotta grab a smoke before jeanne finds me and asks me to make eighty changes to this manual before lunch

EdB28: you really should quit…

MauraK2605: and miss the joy of getting to come here everyday?

EdB28: i meant smoking

MauraK2605: i know what you meant. i was being ironic.

EdB28: did i leave my morrissey cd at your apartment?

MauraK2605 has signed off.

His CD is on my the speaker in my living room, but I have no intention of returning it. Relationships are only as good as the stuff left behind in your apartment.

***

“All right, folks, we’re goin’ home. All tickets and passes. We gonna speed this thing up. I feel like I’m in the movie Terminal.”

I am the only one on the train who laughs at this. Sometimes I wonder if anyone is ever paying attention. I start a gratitude journal to pass the time. Oprah swears by this, and I am fairly certain she does not spend her evenings with Alex Trebek, so I figure what the hell? Write down three things every day for which you are thankful. How difficult can it be?

8/5: 1. The Train Hottie

2. Casual Fridays

3. Cigarettes

***

Home is an apartment in Newtown Borough with a quaint exterior and an interior of eggshell white walls, unpaid bills, and an unblinking answering machine.

My mother is saying, over linguine and steamed clams, that I should seriously consider repainting.

I am saying, over lemon meringue pie and tea, that I received the invitation to my father’s wedding in the mail yesterday.

My mother is saying, as the tea grows cold at her elbow, that I should seriously consider repotting my African violet.

I am saying that I will take care of the dishes.

My mother is saying, as she hurries out the door, that no, I don’t need to take off from work to take her to chemo next week. The hospital will send a cab for her. I am thinking, and not saying, that I should add this dinner to the ever-growing list of bad decisions.

I leave the dishes in the sink.

I start a new journal:

Things That Piss Me Off

1. Advertising interns

2. Eggshell white walls

3. Talking and saying nothing

I go to bed with a glass of wine and dream of the boy on the train. In the dream, he calls me on the phone and sings Jack Johnson songs.

***

Weeks pass. Our relationship is at a standstill of stalking and door-holding. In my head, we meet for lunch in Love Park .

I begin to wear heels every day to make my legs look better, firmer, or something, despite the negative repercussions this has on my feet. I wear lipstick. I begin to grow my hair out. I wear my glasses to look intellectual. He looks intellectual. He probably reads the same books as I do, probably would go with me to see independent films at the Ritz or the County. I wear my contacts to look more attractive. He is probably shallow. Probably wears brand names and has a girlfriend who is six feet tall and weighs ninety-eight pounds. He is tall. He is broad-shouldered. He could hold me at night and make me disappear. He could stroke my hair with his large, lovely, white- collar hands and I could sleep so soundly that to awaken would be like emerging from a coma and I could learn how to live life all over again.

One morning, the week before Labor Day, he is not on the train. Or the morning after that. Or the morning after that. I decide he has gone back to college. I go back to wearing flat sandals that resemble flip-flops. I stop wearing lipstick. I put my hair in a wet ponytail every morning after my shower. I begin to wear earphones on the train to drown out the sound of middle-aged women with outdated haircuts swapping Cool Whip recipes. I listen to Tori Amos. I still dream of him.

I oversleep.

***

“Maura, could you have those revised pages on my desk right quick ? I need them before you leave tonight .”

My boss is from Missouri and uses expressions like “right quick.” I pretend this does not turn my stomach and make a mental note to add it to my journal of things that piss me off. I pretend not to notice that it is already after 5:00 and I have worked overtime every night this week, despite the fact that I am salaried and receive no compensation aside from arriving home too late to catch “Jeopardy.”

To: maura.kelly@horizon.net

From: kathleen.kirk@horizon.net

Subject: happy hour

M —

you up for it tonight? a bunch of us are going… you need to get out of this funk you’ve been in since Ed.

–K

Kathleen works two rows over in the art department. She is a graphic artist who has been doing this job “just temporarily” for the past two years.

To: kathleen.kirk@horizon.net

From: maura.kelly@horizon.net

Subject: Re: happy hour

why the fuck not? i’m gonna be stuck here for another half an hour anyway thanks to Ms. Right Quick herself… a drink will definitely be in order.

–m

p.s. don’t give ed that much credit. and it’s not a funk — it’s the new me… i’m trying righteous indignation on for size.

***

Over three dollar drafts, I confess to Kathleen that I miss Train Guy. She was the only one who knew about my obsession, partly because she is the only one at work with whom I actually converse beyond the obligatory “how was your weekend,” and partly because she is the least judgmental person I know.

“He gave you something to look forward to,” she says.

I nod. I order another beer. I light another cigarette.

“Maybe you’ll see him again. He takes the same train. You might see him in the grocery store, or at the gym.”

I shake my head.

One hour and one more beer later, my fingertips are feeling tingly while I fumble for cash in my wallet and tell Kathleen to go ahead home and I’ll pick up the tab. I feel like walking to Market East alone.

I have successfully located the money when I feel an arm slip around my waist as someone leans in and whispers, “I like your hair.” Ed. Ed is behind me. Ed is saying, “Come on, Maura, my place is only a few blocks away.” He is trying to be smooth. He is saying I can bring my toothbrush back. He is insisting on walking me to the train station. False chivalry thinly masking the desire to get laid. But I am feeling too tired and inarticulate to find a clever way to tell him to fuck off.

Outside, the traffic lights blur before my eyes as though I am looking through a camera lens that has gone out of focus. Ed is insisting on waiting for the train with me. I wish he wouldn’t. Market East is practically empty and I want to listen to the quiet. Instead, I am listening to Ed saying, “Come on baby, this thing with you and me, it’s all very When Harry Met Sally, and aren’t we better than that?”

I hear my train coming. I say exactly what I am thinking. I say I have no idea what the fuck he is talking about, and I get on the train.

The train is surprisingly crowded for 7 p.m. on a Thursday. All of the bars must have had good drink specials. I manage to find an empty seat where I can lean my head against the window and close my eyes, waiting for the rocking of the train to lull me into an alcohol-induced sleep. I feel someone sit next to me and glance over, praying it is not the man who sat next to me last night and informed me that he was wearing his Phillies underwear to bring them luck against the Marlins.

Instead, I come face to face with my non-boyfriend, in all his dark-haired, blue- eyed, white-collar glory. I blink as if trying to clear away an apparition that cannot be real, and he smiles. I realize he is real. I realize I am staring. I fumble in my purse for a piece of gum, a mint, anything to cover the traces of beer and cigarettes. I mentally add starting smoking again after my mom was diagnosed to my list of bad decisions.

[img_assist|nid=897|title=Self Portrait , Summer K. Edward © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=150]My Marlboro Lights fall out of my purse and onto the seat between us. Before I can grab them, he says, “Those things’ll kill ya.” A cliché. I momentarily hate him. He’s trying to be smooth. As I start to mentally un-have his babies, he asks, “Mind if I bum one?”

Irony. I love him again. I think we’ll have two boys and a girl, in that order.

“You smoke?” I can’t imagine it can be true. He has the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. He could be a toothpaste commercial.

“Only after a day like today. The trouble with going on vacation is coming back.”

Vacation. Not back to college. On vacation. My mind is digesting this when he asks if I’m okay. I stammer that I’m fine and start to hand him a cigarette. I ask him, “Should I card you to make sure you’re old enough to smoke this?”

He laughs. “Yeah, I get that a lot. But I’m old enough to pollute my lungs without legal backlash.”

I must look incredulous because he shifts his weight towards me and pulls his wallet out of his back pocket. The scent of him hangs between us in the heavy, stagnant air of the train – a mixture of some cologne splashed on hours ago and that musky smell of summer in the city that clings to everything in its path.

He hands me his driver’s license. He is, in fact, twenty-five. He lives six blocks from me. I say his name out loud. “Benjamin.”

“Ben,” he says, extending his hand.

“Maura,” I say, shaking it, acutely aware that my palms are sweating and surprised to find that his are too.

“That’s different. It’s pretty.” He is smiling again. I feel uncomfortable. I avert my eyes, look at him, avert my eyes. He is still smiling. I am wishing I had fixed my hair. I self-consciously tuck the strands of it that have fallen out of the ponytail behind my ears. His hair looks different than in the morning, when it is wet from the shower and slicked back. Now it is unkempt, dark curls clinging to the top of his faintly lined forehead. He is not an intern. He is not nineteen. My hair is dark, too. Our kids would have dark hair . . .

He is talking about work. About working late. He is putting the cigarette I have given him into his shirt pocket. I ask him what he does.

“I’m an actuary.”

“My mom wanted me to be an actuary. For the job security. But I thought it would be too boring.” I realize too late how insulting this sounds, but he doesn’t react. He is studying me, his eyes dancing over me like someone looking at a strange piece of art, curious and undecided, looking for some meaning hiding below the surface.

“I’m sorry,” I start —

“No, it’s okay. It is boring.” His smile is easy; he is not just being polite. “What do you do?”

“I’m a technical writer. I write computer software manuals.”

“Do you like it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s boring.” He nods. There is a slow silence. I half smile and start to turn back towards the window, unsure what to say to him, unsure why he is talking to me.

“What do you really want to do?”

I think about this for a few moments. I hear the conductor say that Elkins Park will be the next stop. I start to laugh, thinking of the conductor a few weeks ago who made the joke about being trapped in the movie Terminal.

Ben asks me what I’m laughing about and now I’m thinking this is it. This is one of those moments that proves that life is not a cheesy Meg Ryan movie, because it is impossible to tell a virtual stranger whose children you imagine you’d like to have why you just started laughing for no reason without sounding like an imbecile, and this will surely be the end of our conversation. But I am trapped in it now. I am not fast enough on my feet to think of something he will actually find funny. So I tell him the story. And he laughs. He throws his head back and laughs and I feel his hand on my knee.

“That’s so random,” he says.

I nod. I don’t know what else to do. I feel his hand still on my knee. I feel the blood pounding in my ears. I feel like I am going to wake up any second and find that I have overslept again.

“So, Maura. You never answered my question. What is it you really want to do?”

I want to tell him that what I really want to do is take him back to my empty apartment and explore every inch of him, melt into him and feel alive, feel exhilarated, feel anything, for the first time in longer than I can remember. Instead I tell him about college.

“I majored in creative writing. I fancied myself a poet, I guess. But poetry doesn’t pay the bills, so here I am.”

He has moved his hand away from my knee. I want to tell him to put it back.

“Do you still write?”

“Aside from what I scribble in the margins of notepads to avoid falling asleep in meetings with software engineers, not really, no.”

“Why not?”

I think of all the lies I tell people when they ask me this question. The distractions. The excuses. Work. Family. Friends. Life. I don’t know why I don’t want to lie to him.

“I’m uninspired.”

The lump in my throat takes me by surprise. I quickly turn away from him and stare out the window at the buildings creeping by the train. I can feel that he is still looking at me, his neck craning to see my face. A tear escapes my eye and I feel his thumb on my cheek.

I turn to look at him, my face hot with embarrassment and emotion.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why – it’s so stupid –"

But he is smiling and he leans towards me and lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“I was glad when the seat next to you was empty.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise, I would have had to sit next to that guy up there who once told me that he was wearing Phillies underwear.”

I laugh so hard that I start to cry again. He is saying nothing and letting me cry and I am not sure how it happens but I am vaguely aware that his arm is around me and I am exhausted and falling asleep on his shoulder.

“Ladies and gentleman next station stop will be Woodbourne. Woodbourne next.”

Startled awake and sober, I am horrified. There is a black smudge from my mascara on his white-collar shirt. He has fallen asleep as well. He rubs his eyes. He smiles at me. He brushes a piece of hair from my face. He stretches. I gather my things, not knowing what to say, and follow him off the train when it stops.

We are the only two people on the platform. It is nearly 8:00 . Twilight in the summer. There is a moist chill in the air—that tangle between summer and fall. We walk the length of the platform in silence and reach Woodbourne Road . He puts his hand up to stop the oncoming traffic so that we can cross to the parking lot. So easy. So confident.

He follows me to my car. I throw my bag in the backseat and close the door, turning to face him, trying to find words to explain, trying to think of some clever joke about being off my medication. I am waiting for him to say he has to get home to his girlfriend.

But he shakes his head and interrupts me. “It’s okay. Nice to meet you, Maura. Maybe I ’ll see you around?”

I want to ask him if he makes a habit of letting strange women on trains cry on his shoulder. I want to thank him. I want to tell him not to walk away, to just stay here with me in this surreal microcosm that we seem to have created for ourselves. I want to kiss him .

But I am looking up into his face in the glow of the street lamps , and I am dumbstruck. I am wondering if this is just another bad decision that I didn’t really even consciously make, if now the cosmos is making my bad decisions for me . I am wondering if he can sense my hesitation, if he can sense that at every intersection, I cringe and await impact, and I am staring at him as he is brushing the hair from my eyes again and then he is walking towards his car and I am standing, watching him pull away and wondering if this is a beginning or an end.

Colleen Baranich grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and currently resides in Riverton, NJ. She holds a B.A. in English Writing from Rider University and an M.A. in Speech-Language Pathology from The College of New Jersey. She works as a speech therapist with children throughout Camden County.

My Plan

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.

Regalia

The scepter was in a special bin—actually; just a cardboard box with the lid cut off—located in a dim corner at the rear of the Army-Navy store, near the rack of Big & Tall Camouflage Fashions. The cardboard box had a wooden paint stirrer stapled to it and stapled to the paint stirrer was a hand-written sign: DISCONTINUED DAMAGED ONE OF A KIND.

The scepter looked weird there, thrown in with mismatched waterproof socks, outdated hunter’s sausage, and compasses stuck on SE.

The scepter glittered. Jerome picked it up. It was surprisingly light. He turned it every which way. He didn’t fool himself. The jewels covering the surface of the scepter were luminescent crimson and gold, but they were imitation—ruby and topaz colored glass. Yet Jerome was very much taken by the way they caught the light.

Jerome was not a sophisticated man but—and perhaps this is surprising—he knew a scepter when he saw one. The artifact he now held was a (no doubt) very cheap modern replica of a real scepter, which is basically a gaudily decorative type of stick used throughout the ages by rulers of all kinds as a symbol of royal power. Jerome remembered pictures of the British crown jewels he’d once seen in the encyclopedia at his grandfather’s house.

He remembered

an orb, and

a robe, and

a bracelet, and

spurs, and

a scepter.

Jerome had read that Oliver Cromwell melted down many of the originals of the British crown jewels. But the Royalists made a comeback, and so did the jewels. Jerome had turned the yellowed pages of his grandfather’s encyclopedia, looking at photographs of the gleaming baubles, mesmerized by their otherworldly quality, and by the example, the message of the uncaring waste of such spectacular wealth. Like Cromwell, he’d thought: Have they no shame? But he’d been weirdly excited by the photographs.

The Queen of England’s scepters are three feet long. One is topped with a four-sided head containing exquisite, gilded carvings of St Stephen, asserting the Crown’s (temporal) authority over the church. The other has doves.

The Army-Navy scepter Jerome held in his hands was only—he guessed—about seventeen inches in length, topped with an oblong, three-sided knob, and ornamented with simple Celtic-looking designs. It seemed toy-like; a child seeing it might take it for a magic wand.

Jerome hesitated. An eight-dollar scepter purchase (including tax) would require use of all the funds he’d intended for the purchase of new laces for his hiking boots, as well as the cost of carfare home. In other words, if he bought the scepter he’d have to walk the several-mile distance back to his apartment—in boots with broken laces.

But Jerome decided he would buy the scepter. Granted, it was silly, but there was, to him, something irresistibly appealing about the idea of a non-royal guy using all of his “worldly goods” to purchase a bejeweled artifact. He imagined showing it off to people at work, or better yet, just displaying it casually on a loop descending from his belt so his co-workers would be intrigued and provoked into asking him about it. He’d reply in one of these ways:

This scepter? You never noticed it before?

Or: I spent everything I had on it. Every penny in my possession.

Or, simply: Bow down, peasant.

He wouldn’t mention the eight dollar figure unless pressed.

Alice was a woman Jerome had known. He’d seen her the first time when he was part of a large group of people all going to the movies. She was the sister of a sort-of friend of his. Jerome sat in the row behind Alice and he liked

her neck, the way she showed it when she tilted her head back to laugh, and

the flickering gray-blue light from the film which shone on the top of her hair, and

her profile, when she turned to whisper something to her neighbor, though it blocked his view of the screen.

The next time Jerome saw Alice was when he attended his sort-of friend’s wedding reception, at a neighborhood catering hall. It was dark and hot in the hall and the ceilings were low. Alice wore an emerald dress. She was drunk, and there was something on her mind. When Jerome asked her to dance she cheered up, and laughed in a theatrical way, and took his hand. Once out on the tiny dance floor, she broke away from him and gyrated wildly, lifting her knees too high and flailing her solid body around and paying, it seemed, very little attention to the music, which was romantic and slow. (Jerome had purposely waited for a slow number to come up before his approach.) Embarrassed by his partner’s display, his face hot, Jerome saw people watching, pointing, and laughing—but he stayed with Alice . He marched forward and took her hand again to keep her under control, and that worked for a while, but her hand was slippery and on one unexpected turn she broke free from his grasp and lost a shoe and spun toward the too-small table with the wedding cake on it. Alice fell without putting her hands out; there was a meaty thud. Her body rolled and jarred one of the table legs and the cake shuddered but didn’t fall. Everyone laughed once they saw the cake was all right.

Jerome picked up Alice ’s lost shoe and then he picked up Alice . Her right shoulder strap had detached itself from the back of her dress and, rooted to the front, stood half-erect, an emerald serpent wavering beckoningly in the air between them. As he raised her to her feet, Alice brought her hot-breathed mouth close to his ear and whispered: Where do you live?

She stayed with him all that night and some of the next day. They had sexual intercourse 4½ times.

Jerome called Alice on three different occasions after their night together before it became clear that she didn’t want to see him again, not even to have sex ½ times more, to even things out. Jerome gave up because he didn’t want to be a creep.

The young dark-eyed male clerk who waited on him gave Jerome a peculiar, malevolent look when he took the gleaming scepter up to the cash register to pay for it, then rudely snatched the proffered money from his hand, saying nothing. Jerome, curious to learn why an Army-Navy store was selling scepters, was so baffled by the boy’s hostile body language that he could only meet the clerk’s silence with his own, unsure how to broach the subject of the scepter’s origins in the face of such apparent animus.

When Jerome returned to his apartment, he sat for a minute on the sofa to catch his breath, winded from the long walk. Then he gingerly inserted his moist right hand into the softly creased brown bag in which he’d brought the scepter home, and, with two fingers, pulled it free and let it swing inverted before his face, a sparkling pendulum, trailing warm flimmering smiles of scarlet and gold, which lingered in the air before fading. Jerome’s apartment was

dim, and

drab, and

unclean.

But the scepter shone brilliantly, and the room was newly lit.

Jerome carried the scepter to the bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door, and faced the full-length mirror hung on the back of it, the only mirror in the house. He posed with the scepter, adopting various postures:

clutching the scepter tightly across his chest, then

pointing it at the mirror, as if giving a command, then

naked and pointing.

Jerome expected that holding the scepter would make him look—and feel—different. Like he had felt when looking at the pictures of the crown jewels. Or during that time with Alice .

Exalted .

But Jerome did not look or feel any different. He was not exalted. In fact, he looked and felt rather silly, a glowering commoner grasping a cheap shiny stick.

10.

Jerome decided that a scepter was not enough. He would need a crown.

11.

Jerome looked up “crowns” in the phone book. There was a small entry for the word between “Crowd Control Equipment” and “Cruises,” but it only advised him to “see Dentists.”

Jerome thought about the problem for a couple of days. Where does an average guy buy a crown?

During the time he was thinking, Jerome did not take his scepter to his job with him as he had planned; he left it home, on the bureau. Each day when he returned from work, Jerome approached the bedroom and peered in at the scepter. It seemed wrong to keep it there, as if thrown down without care on the dirty scratched wooden surface, lying next to his much less-shiny keys and loose change, but trial and error had proven that the scepter didn’t look right anywhere else in the apartment, either.

12.

On the third day, a Saturday, Jerome thought: Why not see if they have a crown at the costume shop?

13.

The shopping trip was fruitful. Not only did Jerome obtain a crown, he also got an orb and a cape. They all came together in a cardboard box with a cellophane window. The box was called “Royal Fun Kit.”

The kit seemed intended for use by children, and that worried Jerome a little, because he thought the crown might not fit. And the mottle-faced woman behind the counter would not let him take it out of the box before purchase to try it for size; in fact, she seemed to think he was joking when he suggested it.

14.

Jerome took the Royal Fun Kit home. In the bathroom, he found that the crown was too small (almost comically so), but when he wore it and the cape (short and purple, with a faux ermine fringe) together while tendering both the orb (gold-colored plastic, with red paste jewels) and the scepter, he saw something new appear in the mirror.

A king.

Now what?

16.

He thought:

I am my true self, and

no one can deny it, and

a king must have a queen.

17.

Jerome took off his regalia to eat dinner; it just seemed wrong to eat a chicken pot pie while wearing a crown. After his meal, he called his sort-of friend and endured a bit of uncomfortable chitchat before he managed to steer the subject of the conversation around to where Alice might be. The sort-of friend off-handedly remarked that Alice spent most Saturday evenings drinking with her girlfriends in a tavern called Alane’s Hole. Jerome immediately steered the conversation to another subject so his sort-of friend would not get a weird vibe from him, then hung up as soon as politeness would allow, turned off the lamp, and sat in the dark, thinking.

18.

After a while, Jerome went to the bedroom and got the scepter, brought it into the living room, and held it near the window. He pretended that the pale light coming in emanated not from the flickering street lamp outside but from moon glow, or the cool illumination of stars.

19.

Alice sat with her friends Lisa (small and dark) and Jennifer (large and red) at their regular table. The bar had gotten quieter and quieter as closing time approached.

It’s the shank of the evening, Lisa said.

Jennifer was thirty percent less intoxicated than her friends since she was the designated driver. She said: No, it’s later than the shank. It’s the rectum, the rectum of the evening.

Alice and Lisa both laughed, even though they didn’t understand. When you’ve been drinking the word “rectum” is always funny.

It was around this time on most Saturdays that Alice and her friends complained about men. They said that

all the good men know they’re good and avoid getting married, or

all the good men are already married, or

there are no good men.

20.

The soft murmur of conversation surrounding the three women ceased suddenly and they looked around to see what was going on.

There was a man in a crown and a cape standing in the entrance to the tavern. In one hand he held a big shiny ball and in the other a glittering stick. He began a magisterial procession in their direction.

Oh crap, said Alice .

Jerome moved with regal deliberation along the irregular aisle between tables, surveying the faces around him, searching. The patrons he passed were shocked, awed, and silent. Some of the drunker ones bobbed their heads.

The spell lasted until Jerome saw Alice and approached; the approach brought him within range of the ceiling fan, and one of its leisurely circling blades knocked his crown off. Unfazed, he stepped to one side, reached down, reacquired the crown, and perched it back on his head without breaking the eye contact he’d made with his queen. Meanwhile, the commoners in the bar erupted into laughter—even the approaching waitress, who had previously been sure she’d seen everything.

Jerome raised his scepter above his head and the bar grew quiet instantly. Tufts of fake ermine escaped the fringe of his cape, impelled by the ceiling fan. They floated in the air, orbiting him like moons.

Jerome quite dramatically dropped his arm so that the scepter pointed at Alice .

I choose you, he said, to be my queen.

21.

Alice blinked. Her friends turned to look at her, then turned back to look at Jerome. He smiled, majestically.

Alice started to stand. Jennifer grabbed her arm.

Alice , don’t, she said.

I can’t help myself, Alice said. It’s a royal command.

22.

Toward dawn, Jerome returned from the bathroom and noticed something glittering under the bed. He knelt down and picked it up. The scepter. He looked closely at it in the lavender light. It was missing two stones, he noticed. But it was still a lovely thing.

Jerome knelt on the edge of the bed. In his absence, Alice had imperially invaded his side of it, sprawling with covetous assurance on as much square footage as she could cover. She was naked, and quite unconscious. Jerome studied her as the sun rose.

Alice :

snored, and

drooled a little, and

was nonetheless glorious.

23.

Jerome placed the scepter next to Alice . There, nestled against her left breast, glimmering in the auspicious golden aurora of sunrise, it at last looked right, safely at home with one of its own kind. James (Jay) W. Morris grew up in Philadelphia and attended Central High School and LaSalle University, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and for a time he worked as a monologue writer for Jay Leno. Recently, his first play, RUDE BABY, was produced by the City Theater Company of Wilmington, Delaware. “Regalia” is the second story of Jay’s to appear in Philadelphia Stories.

Local Author Profile: Ken Kalfus

At a Philadelphia Stories event in the creepy-cool Parlor on South Broad Street, the audience had[img_assist|nid=918|title=|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060501405/sr|align=right|width=150|height=243] a rare treat: to hear the first words of a new book by critically acclaimed author, Ken Kalfus. “I haven’t even shown this to my editor yet,” Kalfus explained through a quiet smile. The raw words of his novel depicted an eloquent, haunting, funny story that started on that fateful day in September that changed all of our lives. Despite the ubiquitous nature of 9/11, Kalfus managed a fresh interpretation of this world-changing event.

This book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel, will be released in July, and fans and critics expect another success. Kalfus, who was born in New York and has lived in Paris, Dublin, Belgrade, and Moscow, has authored two acclaimed short story collections and the terrific The Commissariat of Enlightenment, a quasi-historical fiction spanning two decades in Russia. Philadelphia Stories spoke with Kalfus about the new book, and the sometimes frustrating writing journey.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel comes out in July. What was the inspiration for your latest book?

I think this is something else we can thank Osama bin Laden for. The novel’s a black comedy about a bitterly divorcing couple living in Brooklyn and increasingly entangled in current events. On the morning of September 11, 2001 he goes to his office at the World Trade Center and she rushes to catch a plane, United 93. He’s late for work and she misses her flight, but that morning, with the world shattered by grief, they each think the other’s dead and each is secretly delighted. They’re both soon disappointed, of course, but my novel takes them through the next several years as they try to complete their divorce. Everything that happened to us as a nation in those years – anthrax, the Afghan war, the stock market crash, the invasion of Iraq, etc. – weirdly and satirically involve them, even as their principal concern is the war against each other.

You published Thirst, your first book of short stories, at age 44. Were you discouraged you didn’t get published sooner? Any words of inspiration for those of us still waiting?

First, I should note that all the stories in Thirst were written in my 20s and 30s, and most were published in small literary magazines before the collection came out. But yes, there were many times that I was discouraged, and frustrated, despairing and morose too, before my first book was published – and certainly afterwards as well.

Getting published is by no means the most difficult part of writing. The struggle lies in composing something fresh, important and true. I still struggle and still get very discouraged, and then there are moments of light.

Perhaps the pains and failures of published writers are inspirational to the unpublished. But it may be more productive to remember that as serious readers and aspiring writers, we’re part of the great world literary enterprise, among the noblest human endeavors, whatever our level of success. Passionate reading, receptiveness to good literature, thoughtfulness about the world, the willingness to take creative risks and rigorous craftsmanship lie at the heart of the enterprise.

Has the Philadelphia area influenced your writing?

It hasn’t been a subject of my fiction, but my first book project, Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, was a collection of Morley’s columns and articles from the 1920s and ’30s. I collected the pieces and wrote the introduction, work that made me appreciate the city I found myself in. The book was published on Morley’s centenary in 1990 and is still in print.

Can you offer any advice to the many creative writers who are trying to juggle work and family, yet want to write fiction or poetry?

We all have busy lives, and we’re always juggling responsibilities. For those of us who want to write, writing (and serious, committed reading) is work and we have to give it the same respect and effort that we do our more lucrative employments. My practical thought is that if we can’t write every day, we can write at least once or twice a week, even when it’s as inconvenient as, say, going to our jobs. We can give ourselves a minimal weekly word count – say, 250 or 500 words, or 1000 words and pull an occasional late-nighter if we have to. As the weeks pile up, so will the words.

I also suggest that we take the work of other writers seriously, allowing ourselves to be moved and transformed by their words. Reading is the best thing for an aspiring writer, not because it necessarily helps fulfill those aspirations, but because it most fully engages us in the literary occupation.

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