Characters

A gray day, late November. A tall Mother with a tiny, dry skull and exploding hair makes a sharp left into a diagonal parking space, gets out, and opens the back door for three young kids she doesn't wait for. They straggle while Mom cuts across the windy sidewalk into the coffee shop. She scans the menu as they pile behind, examining Big People as if they're pillars about to fall. What Mother wants isn't here. They slump. Out come their bottom lips. And they follow. Bye bye.

Working

Starbucks is becoming my office away from home. I work here more than anywhere else.

I don't like the coffee very much. Always charred. And these Xmas cups. Blech.

I'd much rather go across the street to Peet's. But the honey bought me a Starbucks card and I got no spare cash. So here I am, drowning out their stupid jazz with college radio and trying to work.

There's a guy sitting across from me who looks a little ridiculous. Brown cords, blue navy vest over a tan button down shirt and tie ... and a mohawk. Business casual punk. I wish I could take a picture.

My hands

My hands are mangled pink and picked at from nail to palm, a potpouri of stabs and broken and trashed digits. The middle knuckle on my right hand juts from punching the fridge. Simultaneous scars on the front and back of my palm from the teeth of a guard dog. A right middle finger twists and bends at the tip. The backs of my palms ripple with time like an old man's neck. We've got unknown kitchen cuts, dried blood, creases upon creases in the palm and a scratched silver wedding ban. My hands, aging way too fast.

Character

David Ginney points his squat and chunky frame in the direction he thinks it should go. It helps if he perceives and casts his eyes on an imaginary spot yards away and holds his arms stiff to preserve intent, so in spite of the floppy dress of an unemployed ne'er-do-well he is a man resolved. He bounce-walks when he wants to run but thinks it impolite, and sometimes he jabs his legs forward when the tiny weights he drags behind him grow heavy. Occasionally, on David's afternoon hike to the coffee shop at the end of the block, where he bathes in the comforting scent of chickory and orange zinger tea, someone calls out, and he stops himself as if impaled on a spit or preparing to be shot out of a pipe. A straight back means self-respect; a level gaze demonstrates one is approachable, engaged. He knows this. Because it is entirely about expressing in solid form the rigidity and shape one no longer owns, a mental suit of armor that may forever allow David to endure moldy kitchenware, unpaid credit card bills and the tiny, red rectangle on the phone that silently blinks its concern...

Old Poem

Boots melt like a black jigsaw
puzzle at the front door:
We need more
Vodka.
Where are my shoes?

It's the final party in this town,
paid for with the final paycheck,
and my home's wrecked
by final friends
who need to be out by noon.

All these hyenas
Sniffing through dollar bill tubes,
needing an excuse
to get stoned and struggle
through buzzes and swoon

I watch like the supervisor of love
that I am,
Effective as Spam
smacked against the wall
Gripped by booze.

Pain is need
two hundred miles of scars
Like bugs
that stick to my truck
A collection of doom

And I'll wake up tomorrow
thinking I could have been
sixty miles to the wind;
Instead, eyes bleeding
to an alarm's salty croon

Good cracker?

I'm a gawker when it comes to politics. Rarely a participant. Partly because of the career I chose, which demanded that I be "objective" about such things. Neutered is more like it.

The closest I came to political activism was attending one of Ralph Nader's "super rallies" in 2000. Lots of folks voted for Nader in 2000. I did because Gore would kick Bush's ass in my state. It still seemed somewhat of a radical thing to do for someone with an unoppressed, suburban upbringing. I went out of my way to show support for a losing cause.

Otherwise I stay away. Unless something really trips me out.

Take George Allen. I didn't even know about him until a week ago, when I heard that he's a Republican and he may lose his Virginia Senate seat.

What freaked me out after reading about him is that he seems like a straight-out racist -- and he almost won.

Besides using racial epithets in campaign speeches, he opposed a Martin Luther King Jr. state holiday, fetishizes the Confederate flag (in spite of growing up in Palos Verdes, Calif.), and courted support from the Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly known as the White Citizens' Council.

I know Virginia is considered a Southern state. I lived in the South briefly in the 90s, and I heard the word "nigger" more times than I ever heard in my previous 28 years -- and that's counting every Tarantino film I saw. So I know how things are.

Still, nearly half of Virginia's voters looked at this scum and said, "All right by me." And until recently, Republican leaders were calling Allen a front runner for the presidential nomination.

Which just amazes me.

So I've been glued to the Internet, hoping Webb's victory holds. Not so much because we'll have a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. I don't typically vote for either party. I'm just curious whether this bitch actually makes it down the toilet in one flush.

A nightmare...

They circle the playground, gently timed caws nestling into quiet gaps amid the children's squeals, surfing the wind, softly as naptime against the slate sky, almost like real birds. But they gather in such number that the teacher with the porcelain gaze and hair dark as ink moves away from the window and toward the door, just as the first creatures land among her children. "Stay away!" she cries, jogging awkwardly at them, just as a girl shrieks and a large, yellow-haired boy with freckles and tiny teeth leaps after her, mashing one of the black feathered things between his hands. The teacher waves, pleading with them, only now it seems every boy has grabbed one and found a pigtailed victim to terrorize while they laugh like Christmas. A gust from behind blows black hair across her mouth as she inhales; the strands tickle her throat like ants just as the device in the yellow-haired boy's hands BANGS and flashes in orange fire and he drops, arms gone ... The teacher can only choke while, with machine-gun efficiency, the horrible things slice and gouge her tiny charges as if they were soft ground round and the cracked asphalt hungrily laps up their juice...

You got a problem?

Some German gangster. Just trippin' on this...

Denny

Well, if it ain't daddy's little helper, he says, as I pedal uphill toward the old house. He is sanding a '63 Dodge pickup, his long hair flapping in the wind. A sobriety bracelet clanks and scrapes against the gray metal. The front screen bangs and Megan shoots out with a screech; her blue Keds skid on dirt and she disappears around a corner. Janine pushes back open the screen, holding Tyler in one arm. I feel her eyes going through my backpack. Testimony tonight, Den, she says. Don't forget.

Denny has put on his puffy jeans jacket and we are walking through the old garage, past walls where 60-watt bulbs once flashed over glossy Bud Girls and swimsuit models. Janine tore them down when she became a Witness. We leave the smell of wood rot, sawdust and oil behind and hide out back, to the top of the family picnic table overlooking the East Bay hills. Denny taps out a Camel Light. I unzip my backpack and pull out two large bottles of Anderson Valley ale. What kind of yuppie swill is that, he asks.

Better than that dishwater you drink, I tell him.

Hey, I got a great idea for a Web site, he says, his lips smacking off the top of his bottle. Here we go, I think. Denny was full of good ideas for Web sites ever since I told him I work with Internet companies. This one's about selling used cars online. Been done, I tell him. But wait, this is different, he says, and he rattles on about cable TV shows, digital cameras, dealership presentations and "venture dudes," attacking me with flailing arms and beer spit. You're the Web guy, he says, you can design the site and telephone the billionaires -- as if I have Bill Gates' home number. A visual appears from his breast pocket: It's a folded piece of binder paper with a rendering of a car in blue Bic. So what do you think?

Maybe, I said, and was about to say, I really don't know, Den. Maybe you should get a computer first, maybe you should at least buy a book or magazine on the subject and figure out what you're getting yourself into. Or maybe you should learn a little bit about business besides how to rip off your boss. Maybe, Denny, you should stop getting bright ideas and just divorce the bitch, you hate her anyway, and wouldn't have to worry about misbehaving or the house or testimony or Bud Girls on the walls because she wouldn’t be there to judge you. Maybe you could go back to school so your ideas wouldn’t be so godawful and I wouldn't have to sit here and listen to them and pedal back to BART with your damn Camel stink all over
my clothes.

But I don't tell him this. Hmm, I say, maybe, and Denny knows what I mean.

We are silent for a long time. I drain the rest of my bottle, warm hops slide down my throat and I cringe. I got a couple tickets to the nationals next week at Sears Point, he says. Wanna go?

Can't. Gotta work.

Yeah, he says. I am picking my hangnails; Denny's eyes are boring through the opposing hillside. Well, let's get it on, he says. Finally.

Denny pulls the last of the crumpled up 10s, 20's and 50's out of his charcoal jeans and drops them into my cupped hands. They lay in fetal position, soft like cloth and huddled together like mice. Some have grease on them. Denny must think Dad looks at these wretched bills and believes his first son works hard, is doing the best he can, blah blah blah. I never told my step brother I keep his cash and write Dad checks for the full rent, and it becomes obvious to me now that I don't tell Denny a lot of things. We are brothers -- always co-conspirators, never really friends.

Denny puts his sobriety bracelet back on and sees me still staring at his bills. I'm a little short, he says, which of course I already knew. He grabs hold of his bottle by the neck and when I think he's about to hand it to me -- he knows I recycle -- he says, Web sites, and flings the bottle as hard as he can. It arcs high, makes whipping somersaults, and plunges -- threshhh! -- into an oak tree halfway down the hill. I don’t hear it break. I really thought it would.