(originally published in Dew On The Kudzu)

I’m reading about the crematory owner, as my fourth trip to South Beach since my last great girl traded me straight up for a life of uncertainty comes to a close.  The sheriff discovered bodies, stacked like firewood in sheds, and everywhere else on the grounds except in the incinerator.

“Hang tough, playah,” Maurice the valet says as he tosses my luggage into the trunk of the cab.

“See ya next time, Mo,” I say.

Behind the wheel is a young woman.  I easily trap her eyes in the reflection.  I glance at the bulging bag on the seat next to me and mumble, “I know. I carry too much paper around.”

It’s sunny in South Beach but the Miami airport is being hit with summer lightning strikes that claw at the control tower like a giant, jackdaw crow.  Up ahead is the same unforgiving sky that hung over my last great girl.  I thought she was coming back to me because she emerged from the black and blue clouds smiling, but she just kept walking, kicking up sand as she passed and covering me in a grainy film which, to this day, is still showing at the old theatre downtown.

“That’s Kafkaesque, dude,” the well-read bartender at The Martini Bar at The Raleigh said after I told him I woke up one morning to my wife saying she was leaving, but she had no idea where to.  “She could have at least left you for a surfer stud and given you a target for your hatred.”

I know more about Pablo Cruise than Pablo Picasso. My longest relationship was with the Columbia House Record and Tape Club from whom I bought every Hall & Oates album known to man for a penny.  At first, I looked forward to the correspondence, but soon found their repeated demands that I purchase a Terence Trent D’arby album for $18 plus shipping and handling redundant.  After several address changes, I ended my courtship with the Goon Squad from Terre Haute.

“Did you read about that crematory guy?” I say to the young woman driving the cab.  “Instead of ashes, the urns were filled with cement dust.  I wouldn’t know the difference.”

She’s wearing cutoff shorts; a man’s name is tattooed on her leg in scripted letters, like ones that cover half the windshield of old Ford Torinos.

“I think about getting a tattoo,” I say, “brand something insightful right on my body, like how Megan Fox has that verse on her shoulder.”

“She’s awful pretty,” she says. “I thought about that too but my boyfriend won’t allow any others.”

“I’m probably too old anyway,” I say.

“Where you going to?”

“Back home to Atlanta.  I love flying American out of here; because the flight leaves out of the international terminal, I feel like I’m in another country.  It gives me the chance to explore the cuisine of some foreign lands.  Last time, I went to La Carreta cafeteria and ordered what I thought was a chocolate croissant but it was filled with some kind of leafy meat that tasted like cooked broccoli.”

“I go in there sometimes and get the glass bottles of Pepsi that have funny stickers on them and look like they got rejected by Mexico,” she says.  ”I think about which country I’d go to if I won the Powerball.  It changes all the time.  My lucky number is three so I pick the third arrival from the top.”

We arrive at the airport.  She drops her head and lets her Ashlee Simpson-red bangs fall over her eyes to express her loneliness in a Kafkaesque language I understand, where Kafkaesque means not being turned into a beetle but being trapped in the shadows of a charcoal sketch, drawn by a police artist long after a person has gone missing.

“My ex-wife dyed her hair red like yours one time,” I say.

“No one where I grew up in Yulee has hair this color,” she says.

She looks back at me until her phone vibrates with another excuse.  Circling to the trunk, I wave her off and bear the frayed and ridiculously heavy Samsonite myself.  I’m off to my flight; she to her next fare, probably back to a South Beach hotel for another airport run.  I fear that she’s desperate to raise the money needed to buy the name tattooed on her leg the Cartier Hateblockers he wants to partner with his unemployed, toothy grin.

She surprises me by tucking her pink Sidekick into the front of her loosened cutoffs.  I’m pleased with the effort she makes, getting out of the cab and hoisting my bag onto the curb with both hands.   She smiles, waves, and hesitates.

Sometimes my ex-wife would go stay at a nearby motel.  She wouldn’t let me in unless I pounded, I mean, pounded!, on the door until people were looking.  After I calmed the strangers down and entered the room, I discovered she had locked herself in the bathroom.

“You should leave him.  Not for me.  For your own sake,” I tell the taxi girl.

“You’re sweet,” she says.

She closes the remaining distance between us and places her hands on my chest.

“He won’t let me.  Especially now that I carry his first born with me everywhere I go.”

I lose my balance and almost knock over a frail man from the Florida Tourism Board.

“You two would make a cute couple,” he says, and hands me a small crate of orange gumballs with a miniature souvenir flag that says The Sunshine State.  He’s got a Polaroid camera at his booth.  I’ve seen couples take shots on previous trips.

“I can’t get enough of those gumballs,” she says.

“Have mine.”

She rips the crate open and I see a cupid wielding a knife tattooed on the underside of her forearm.

“That crematory guy must have lost all connection to people,” she says.  “I like helping folks get where they need to go.”

With my flight likely delayed and no photos from my trip to place in the wooden box I keep such things in, there’s time to have a Polaroid of us taken right here and now, but what good would it do? Although the technology exists at any neighborhood drugstore to blow that small monochrome square up to an 11 by 17 full-size print, I doubt that either one of us will be getting out any time soon.

 Ah, the Dunk ‘N Dine.

Or, to some, the Dine ‘N Dunk. (Once you got that in your head, there was no reversing it.)

Many Atlantans have spent a late night there fueling up on DND’s coffee, also known as Legal Speed. Anxious law students, sitting next to sleepy truckers, sitting next to animated drag queens.

Tasty eggs, grits, and toast for most of us. Catfish or chicken livers for those with an adventurous spirit.

And when the older waitresses spilled coffee on you by mistake while pouring your fourth refill, they’d offer to kiss it for free, to make everything all better.

Although when that happened to me, with a waitress who referred to herself as “Mommie,” I respectfully declined.

(Originally appeared in Burnt Bridge)

Tonight, my girlfriend’s reeling off my faults in an auctioneer’s voice to an imaginary gathering of women, all also displeased with their boyfriends.

“Good evening, ladies.  First up, I’ve got a boy who doesn’t share, doesn’t like to snuggle, and always argues with me when I’m feeling hurt.  I’ll start the bidding at five dollars.”

I sit quietly as she documents my shortcomings, provides evidence complete with specific places and dates.  She orchestrates a reverse auction in which my value plummets from five dollars to two to nothing, before the gavel drops.

She drinks two bottles of sangria, squats behind the couch, and begins a puppet show roast she calls “Boyfriend Bash Theatre” using her impressive array of stuffed animals.  She’s represented by a fox with red felt lips.  I’m represented by a tattered pink bear, the only one that survived her childhood.

“I don’t know why Little Girlie Bear doesn’t pay enough attention to me, wise Mrs. Owl.  I wish I knew.  I really do.”

No way can I break up with her though.  She’s perfected the art of the smoky eye, and dresses like she’s the leader of the all-girl gang in the 1970’s movie The Warriors.  Those are the only requirements I’ve ever expressed to her that I have for a girlfriend.

She’s clever to boot.  When I try to escape into the soothing world of Sade’s “Smooth Operator,” she flings the CD out our Cleveland Circle apartment window, saying she has no respect for a woman with such a pathetic knowledge of U.S. geography – “Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago?”

She’s no longer religious but the next morning she gets me up early on Good Friday.  She returns from Russomanno’s Bakery wearing tall boots and her Catholic girls’ school skirt.  She posts her leg up on the kitchen table and presents me with a box of cannoli.

“They’re the ones from the back,” she says.

This means she intimidated Rocco Russomanno, who is five inches shorter than her even without her heels, into handing over the pastry that’s reserved for his family.

She leaves me in the kitchen and retreats to the bathroom to darken her eyes for the Passion of the Christ.

I’m three cannoli in, licking powdered sugar from my mouth, when I hear her in front of the mirror talking to the stuffed fox. It enjoys a special spot on a shelf above her train case of liquid mascaras.

“I’m serious, Foxie.  Things are gonna be different for us,” she says.

It’s the first time I’ve heard her talk to the fox out loud.

She puts on Jim Croce’s I’ve Got A Name while she finishes her makeup.  Jim Croce was her father’s favorite singer.  Both men died young in single engine plane crashes.  She sings along.

And I carry it with me like my daddy did,

But I’m livin’ the dream that he kept hid

That makes me feel bad because I know in some ways the fact that she’s not livin’ the dream is an indictment of me.  I’m the man she’s counting on now to lay the tracks across the chasm.

She turns off the music and shouts that this was supposed to be her week and she wanted to go to Mass on Palm Sunday but I “was too tired;” she’s sure the old biddies took all the good palms by now and put them under their mattresses, giving them another year of blessings.

Minutes later, we enter a church filled with Brookline Irish Catholics.  I spot a wardrobe box in the back corner of the sacristy filled with all the leftover palms.  I get so many reeds my beaming girlfriend has to cradle them in front of her breasts, like three dozen roses.  She looks even happier during the part of the Good Friday service where the congregation pretends it’s the crowd gathered in the courtyard outside the jail where Jesus is being held.   All around the country, Catholics are sleepwalking their way through this scripture in monotone voices.

Father McManus, playing the role of Pontius Pilate, asks whom he should spare from crucifixion and release from prison – Jesus, a man who has done nothing wrong, or Barabbas, a vile thief?

“Barabbas!” my girl shouts with glee.

The priest asks for an affirmation.

This time, I join her hand in mine.

“Barabbas!”  We shout in harmony, much louder than everyone else.

Fuck Sade, and the smooth rhythms she rode in on.  Each time, I call for “Barabbas” like I’m hawking red hots at Fenway.  The parishioners in the rows surrounding us disapprove.  Some try to politely shush us but we will not be stunted.

I get in the last word, adlibbing as I yell, “The bandit Barabbas!”

The service ends and we’re left alone.  My girl, Athena, sits in the confessional and hitches her skirt.  I lose her for a few seconds in the light that streaks through the stained glass window.  On the other side, I see black tears running — but they don’t create any distance from her past.  I won’t promise her a townhouse on Beacon Hill or weekends at the Cape or anything else I know I can’t deliver, but I will be right there with her to sort through the twisted wreckage of her runaway locomotive.

I enter the booth where as a boy I spilled silly sins of commission through an ashen screen and draw the purple curtain closed.

You’re knocked out.  I’m choking on nothing.  That means a trip to The Cabinet.  It’s just to the right of the kitchen window. Five floors up, I can see the Canal.  The water there is so thoroughly contaminated it will take one hundred years to remediate.

I start by realigning the two jars of peanut butter, the ones from last year’s salmonella lot.  I usually put the taller objects in the back but not with the shelf already crowded with enough tampered Tylenol to poison all of Gowanus.  I think about releasing some of the fast food super heroes I’ve collected over the years to help but they’re trapped in plastic bags which could morph into choking hazards.  My Batman lay asphyxiated next to a multiplex-sized box of Junior Mints.  The mints hadn’t officially been declared a defect by any authority but after I almost choked on them during Halle Berry’s sex scene with naked Billy Bob Thornton in Monster’s Ball, I declared all three hazardous.

The beef from that shuttered slaughterhouse in Nebraska, it got its own shelf, and was and was sealed in zippered baggies placed in Tupperware containers stacked inside each other like Russian dolls.  How could they be so sure it would eventually go bad?  Could they spot mad cow medallions on sight?

Taped to the inside of the cabinet door is the picture of you from last night that the instigators brought over to calm me down.  They had no excuses, but now feel guilty they forced you into a Girls Night Out in a Godforsaken neighborhood where you six didn’t belong.  In the picture, they’re hamming it up. You’re in the back row, arm bent behind your head, lips so full of promise they brush your bicep.

You used to pray that I would love you more than you thought I did.   Before you went out that night you told me your theory that a man’s beard grows every time he has a perverted thought, and asked did I want to dedicate one to you. I replied only that I had a new-found respect for Grizzly Adams, Confucius, and two of the three members of ZZ Top.

I re-position the photo with clean tape and retreat to our sanctuary.

You’re awake now, legs draped over your cedar chest. They cover scenes of an undiscovered Orient you hand painted on the sides.  In a sheer top, you’re like a dancer posed on a music box.

Did you finish re-arranging your rancid meat, baby?

Yes, I nod.

Have you stopped choking?

Over your shoulder, an urban stud in a wetsuit drops his kayak into the Canal.

Come to bed, you say, but I’m back at The Cabinet.  I toss the super heroes aside to reveal a dust-covered jewelry box, not Tiffany blue, but special nonetheless.  Inside is a diamond engagement ring whose certain carat size and clarity I can no longer recall.

My dad always bragged about Newark’s Branch Brook Park and the great fun he had growing up in The First Ward after the war.  There were many stories we tried to call him out on as kids but one he repeated involved a man who had mounted three metal drawers full of sweet potatoes on a cart and sold them for a penny, a nickel, and a dime each.  The dime drawer had the biggest ones and was reserved for special occasions.

Thanks to Michael Immerso’s book, Newark’s Little Italy The Vanished First Ward, and The Old Newark Web Group (www.oldnewark.com), I have discovered that The Sweet Potato Man was named Francesco Galleto.  According to Mr. Immerso’s book, Mr. Galleto was known as “U Fumo”  because great clouds of smoke surrounded his pushcart.

People from the neighborhood would take a date by for a ten cent sweet potato even though they could normally only afford the penny or nickel ones.   I like to picture the couples gathered around U Fumo’s cart, dressed to go see Sinatra or Jimmy Roselli, the smoke so thick it burned their eyes.  The trick must have been seeing through the haze to pick out the right one.

Sam married a model.  Elsewhere, they were manufacturing better ones.

Her Dreamcatcher hung from the rearview mirror of Sam’s Mustang long after she deserted him.

At the VA Hospital, Sam became paralyzed while snowflakes that glittered like crystals dissipated outside.

Sam lent the Mustang to an acquaintance who sold it for quick cash. That weasel waved goodbye to Sam with green hands.

The Canal

I have a new story called “Gowanus, Brooklyn” in the Fall 2011 issue of Corium Magazine.  I learned a lot working with Editor Lauren Becker on this story.  I hope you will check it out and also the other writers published in Corium.  In the meantime, here are some rooftop shots of Gowanus I took in 2010 to get you in the mood. 

Seven Floors Up

So my story “Athena Barabbas” which appeared in the November 2010 edition of Burnt Bridge was recently nominated by Burnt Bridge for an award.  In the story, Athena is having a tough time with her relationship.  So much so, she auctions off her boyfriend to a room of imaginary women who are also displeased with their men. 

It got me thinking that I should combine the next “Greatest Song” entries with two that focus on different aspects of love.  Here goes.

Billy Idol’s Rock the Cradle of Love (1990).  This one is optimistic and fun, as in I want to rock the cradle of love.  I had a Mac II and round glasses.  It’s voyeuristic but that’s okay because who wouldn’t want Billy Idol looking in?  Plus, you know he’d give you the fist pump and smile if you were making any headway.

I also like how he shoves Marilyn out of the way at 2:55.

SM Bonus Tidbits: Like one of the comments on You Tube says, it looks like Billy Idol invented the flat screen.

This one is more realistic.  Fancy stereo equipment and a West Hollywood address don’t cut it, but a hammer and vice might if work really long and hard.

This is a live version of the song that also appeared on the Jerry McGuire soundtrack.

Buried in that Secret Garden?  There could be angels or a living soul but good luck getting there.

SM Bonus Tidbits: The video has no Jerry McGuire clips but does have the lyrics in Italian for all the Sauro Motel fans in Italia.

 Lyrics

 Fountain of Sorrow has some of my favorite opening lines of any song:

Looking through some photographs I found inside a drawer
I was taken by a photograph of you
There were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more
But they didn’t show your spirit quite as true

You were turning ’round to see who was behind you
And I took your childish laughter by surprise
And at the moment that my camera happened to find you
There was just a trace of sorrow in your eyes

After six beers and listening to this song fifteen times in a row, JB’s intelligently sad lyrics will have you curled into a ball or crawling on your stomach in the closet under your dirty laundry.

 Advantage Jackson Browne.

 Presentation

 Jackson Browne is often seated behind a piano or organ when he performs.  The Heat Miser, on the other hand, was trained by Vaudeville song and dance men.

 Jackson Browne has accomplished back-up singers and band members that also play with artists like Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty.

 The Heat Miser has 6 smaller clones, who do a perfect soft-shoe while touting the praises of their boss and catering to his every whim.

 Advantage Heat Miser.

 Grooming and Attitude

JB has the silky long hair that many women find attractive (at least they did in the 70′s and 80′s).  A mature star, he’s sure of himself on stage.

Heat Miser gets mucho props for the pre-Clash (1974) spiky orange hair.  Boasting that he essentially can control the weather and prevent a White Christmas while belting out a song that’s a cocky testament to himself, he rivals the bravado of legendary rappers Digital Undergound and Young MC.  Not content to have critics like me pigeonhole him, The Heat Miser crafts his identity right in the song – he’s “Mister Heat Blister.  He’s Mister Hundred and One.”

 Advantage Heat Miser.

 This one’s too close for me to call.