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Mathew 13:54-58
Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us?
The inside-bevel gouge jumps when it hits the knot, the tip leaving the wood and creating a small but deep cut on my right hand. As a left-handed carpenter my right hand often suffers for any clumsiness or lack of attention. I extend the hand too late and drops of blood appear on my good tunic. I can already hear mother’s shrill cry about the cost of Egyptian cotton and her time and my lack of consideration for the work of others. There is no real pain, though. My hands are like my father’s, strong, muscular: the hands of a carpenter always are. I can remember, as a boy, my father picking us up or holding our hands, his own like two oaken limbs, hard and powerful. I always felt safe when I was touching one of them.
“You’re hurt.” The voice behind me is startling.
“I’m fine.”
“Simon, dear brother, please let me help you.”
Before I can respond he is on me. His soft hand covering mine, his eyes pinched shut, his lips moving. I feel the sting fade and know that there won’t even be a scar.
He finishes, lifts his hands, steps back.
“Thank you.” (...)
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“Mostly we just check ID’s and stand around.”
It was my first night as a casino security guard and my training had fallen to Officer Frank DiTelio. His instruction and advice were all delivered in short staccato statements made surreal and robotic by the device he pressed against the plastic lined tracheotomy hole in his neck. The same hole that, on breaks, he would insert his cigarettes; an irony he failed to see and no one wanted to point out to him. His deep frown lines attested to his utter lack of a sense of humor and his 6’6” frame carrying 250 lbs more than likely discouraged critiques of any kind.
We had spent the better part of the shift; graveyard, midnight to eight, touring the building. At each new room or hall or store or restaurant he would point with his right hand while his left brought up the mechanism. A mechanical Grand Ballroom or Main Lobby or 24 hour Buffet or Employee Lounge narrated. The building was huge. The customer areas were bright and gaudy while the hidden employee areas were cramped and often mazelike. I knew I wouldn’t remember much of what he said but I never asked him to repeat anything. And despite an almost overwhelming curiosity, I never asked him about the hole.
We took a lunch break at three. I ate rubbery chicken and slightly undercooked French fries and managed to get down most of it as I sat (...)
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By her second drink he could see the ‘friends’ speech ebbing over his horizon even though it was, more than likely (or maybe not), still weeks away. At 36 he had her by half a dozen years and, while she could still fill in the ‘single’ circle on a questionnaire, he had to begrudgingly fill in ‘divorced.’ She was pretty though, with her wide green eyes and shoulder length brown hair and her perfect chin that seemed to remind him of that armless Venus statue. He liked the way she looked right in his eyes when she talked and seemed to really listen instead of waiting for her next cue. It was a trait he lacked in any natural sense but tried to implement through sheer will. He failed as often as he succeeded. They traded anecdotes about work and family and single life. More often than not his stories slanted towards self-depreciation while hers went either towards politics or, again, work. They both taught.
‘This woman wants kids,’ it may as well have been a neon sign blinking above the slightly tussled hair on her head. He, on the other hand, already had a few. One living with an ex-wife and a second, almost voting age, living in Florida with her mother, the results of a teenage fling he could barely remember.
The word you’re thinking of is ‘baggage.’
He hated dating. He’d spent six years with a woman even though after three (two, let’s be honest) (...)
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Tommy hits her and she goes down. She doesn’t even scream or yelp or say “help” or “stop” or nothing. Tommy laughs, says “quiet old bitch” and pushes her head with the bottom of his Nike. She’s real old, maybe 60 or 80; her face is wrinkled like dried fruit. Her clothes are old, too, some dull blue material for a skirt, her shirt all pink and flowery, her shoes black and flat and cracked in the leather or pleather or whatever they’re made of. I wonder for a second if maybe Tommy killed her but then she moans and we both laugh, Tommy and me.
“Did you see that?” which sounds more like “dijuseedat” and Tommy is marching around her, his arms flexed, his fists by his belt buckle like some body builder. “She went down faster than your mom, dude.” I punch his arm for the rip, not as hard as I could but hard enough to let him know he should stop. He holds his hands up like he’s surrendering, “Sorry dude, I take it back.”
I nod. I know Tommy can get carried away since he’s only thirteen and all so I let things slide sometimes. I’m older, fifteen, so what I say pretty much goes, regardless. And this is the first time I let Tommy hit a geezer and he’s been bugging me to do it for so long so he’s gotta be buzzing over it. His mom’s new boyfriend is an asshole, he says, so I guess this way Tommy gets to be tough, too. One time I found Tommy crying about him, (...)
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It’s Saturday night and I’m sitting at the bar in Tony’s Baltimore Grill in Atlantic City, contemplating my life over a cold beer and waiting for Paris Hilton who is, as always, late. We’ve been dating (boyfriend and girlfriend, she would correct me) for exactly three weeks. I teach English at a local high school and at the urgings of my students, entered an MTV internet contest. In truth I was hoping for one of the 100 runner-up prizes, a Dell laptop computer. Instead I won the grand prize, “Be Paris Hilton’s New Boyfriend!”
So now I’m Paris Hilton’s new boyfriend. Aside from the obvious, I find this ironic for a number of reasons. First of all I’m almost 40 and she’s in her early twenties. Also, I’ve never watched her TV show but I did see her get killed in a horror movie (she told me the make-up was icky and she broke out afterwards and couldn’t go to some huge party that Christina Aguilera was throwing and she was really pissed about that because simply everybody else went) and I did see parts of her sex tape on the internet (which she wasn’t entirely displeased with, to tell you the truth, but everything was so damn green and she fears she came off kind of ditzy).
I check my watch, a gold Rolex she’d given me three days ago when we flew by helicopter to New York to spend the afternoon shopping, and see she is over an hour late. The watch is one of three I (...)
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Agnes waited until Billy Ray’s truck had pulled out of the driveway before going to the mirror and examining her jaw. He had hit her open handed so she did not expect more than redness, perhaps a slight swelling. She’d had worse and since it was Friday she was expecting it later, maybe. Paydays were usually bad with Billy Ray coming home late after drinking ten percent of his paycheck, ‘his due’ he called it. Sometimes he would simply fall asleep after vomiting and on a good night it would be in the toilet. Even the sink or tub wasn’t so bad, easy to clean, quick. But he wasn’t always as careful as she’d like and many a night she’d spent scrubbing a rainbow of semi-digested bar food out of some patch of carpet or piece of furniture.
She went to the kitchen and washed the breakfast dishes. It was 8:18AM.
And sometimes he wanted her. There would be no courtship or pause, no words. It would just be him, pushing himself inside her, kneading her breasts roughly and breathing remnants of everything he’d had that night into her mouth and nose: beer, whiskey, pizza, chicken wings in hot sauce, pickled eggs, beef jerky. It seemed Billy Ray would eat just about anything when he was drinking and his breath would make her gag, make her eyes water. She had learned long ago that the best way to deal with this, the only way, was to relax, or at least try to, and hope he finished quickly. (...)
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