WRITING STIFF: Adventures in the Literary Underbelly, A Memoir - Chapter 2
Posted August 24, 2012
CHAPTER 2 The Creation of Adam I met Peter Pan. This was a couple of years earlier when we were living on Old Long Ridge Road in Stamford, Connecticut. It was shortly after the show Peter Pan was broadcast on national television. I didn’t just enjoy Peter Pan, I wasn’t just dazzled by it, I was overwhelmed by it. Except that overwhelmed suggests being crushed under a weight and what I felt when Peter Pan went airborne in the Darling kids’ bedroom and sang I’m Flying and then the kids...
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WRITING STIFF: Adventures in the Literary Underbelly, A Memoir - Chapter 1
Posted August 22, 2012
Chapter 1 The Horse in the Hudson “Cut out a picture,” said our fourth grade teacher, Miss Cobb, Dorinda Cobb, a young woman, not young compared to us fourth graders but young for an adult woman, no gray in her wavy dark brown hair yet, no wrinkles in her face, such a pretty face, her skin like milk. Miss Cobb had mentioned recently that she was twenty-nine years old which did sound old actually, it was almost as old as my mother, but Miss Cobb wasn’t a mother, she wasn’t even marri...
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Pride
Posted February 01, 2012
I’ve been hired as a model for a shoot in New York. I’m a little apprehensive, I wonder if the photographer is a real artist or a hustler. I envision his ten thousand square foot shooting space, all shiny hard- wood floors and exposed brick, with a jacuzzi in the living area and a ten foot wide projection TV and a dozen girls with busts like water balloons stretched out on a casting couch. This was my mother’s world for a bright shining moment before she lost it all in a...
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Standup
Posted January 06, 2012
This morning Jerry smelled heavily of aftershave and toothpaste when he came down. His hair which usually flies all over was neatly combed with dabs of hair gel in it. Mimi? (I don’t know the reason but he calls me Mimi even though my name’s Janette.) Mimi, do I have an accent when I talk? What kind of accent, Jerry? The accent of a hick. No, not too much. I don’t sound inbred, like some slackjawed, backwoods type? No, who told you that? My mom did. Jerry’s mom was r...
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March of Time
Posted December 31, 2011
I can’t find Lawrence Welk on the TV listings for the New Year thing tonight. What happened was he cancelled or something? Probably was, for one of these young upstarts like Dick Clark. Barely reason now to pop the champagne cork.
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A Golden Mean
Posted December 21, 2011
I'm struck dumb by you. How stupid can a person be to be so ignorant of the simple fact that shaping one's own body for the best effect means scaling down your over- abundant attributes while scaling up what you lack. Beauty is like money: you crave to have more than anyone else but you don't want to have too much. The rich are envied to a certain level of wealth but beyond that level they're resented, even hated, sometimes kidnapped for ransom when not just robbed at gun- poi...
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My Luck
Posted December 13, 2011
Naomi, do you remember those dead fish? On the beach? In Tampa? Where the condo company paid all our expenses if we just attended a Timeshare Presentation? And the photos looked so nice, white sand, blue- green water, that we went? And then when we got there all those dead fish were on the beach? Millions of them. You couldn’t stand it, remember, Naomi? You threw up. But it wasn’t only fish, it was all kinds of sea creatures, crabs, eels, squids, remember? Dolphins, stin...
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I Am, The
Posted December 02, 2011
Take only as directed koochie koo goo- goo-g’joob scroo-all-thy- parsnipping-parsers; dammm-all-thy- sitting-city-pretty-torpedoes- in-a-row. Sting the butterfly (#), float the bee (#), both obective and correlatively. What matters yellow matters is demi- quavering rigor immortal anarchee, self- negating, self- absorbing, self- rebinding gleeful gallimaufry asking not what country can do for youtube goo- goo-g’babyyoura richmantoo do not go gentle, no, go bumping into th...
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Best Man
Posted September 20, 2011
July the 4th, my brother, name of Brynt, stands with her at the altar in the church. Her hands, nails emoried into points, crimson-lacquered, shake a bit. Her lips are glossed, must taste of mint. Her russet, freckled head is lace-veiled, seraphic, indistinct. His head is Mohawk-cut, his nose has a ring in it. My crosshairs on his occiput. “Will you take this woman – ” With a thwick my bullet strikes. “I do,” he blurts. The rector waves a fly away. I am at such a dista...
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Volunteer
Posted September 20, 2011
You balk when someone tells you what to do. It’s not that you’re incompetent, you’re not, but nine times out of ten you screw things up. You take an order then you just forget it when you’re halfway to the place where you’re to do the work. And then ashamed to be yourself you turn around and slink back to the man in charge to ask just what the order was he rolls his eyes like huh just like a girl huh can’t keep a simple order in her head. You chuckle like, You’re...
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Upriver
Posted September 20, 2011
We tried to leave New York just after lunch so we’d make Hanover by dark. I’d planned to take Route 5 along the river bank so he could see what I saw my first trip. But he was slow to pack. We left at six, and soon we lost the light. My Explorer which I bought last week and sprang for custom shocks, just gobbles up the interstate. The feeling’s less like driving than it is like soaring in a glider up on thermals, all your sense of speed and place is lost. You know, I say to h...
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Remembrance of Things Present
Posted September 20, 2011
Dementia is a sorry state It robs you of your memora. You never know the present date; The past becomes ephemera. The future lies ahead, they say, Tomorrow is another day. They lie: tomorrow’s like the snow When springtime comes to make it go. The instant of the sun’s first ray Tomorrow’s name becomes today. You live from now ‘til all time hence In a constant present tense. Maybe that’s all right, my dear Forgetting all you used to fear: Present dangers, future shock, An...
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Blank Verse Blank
Posted September 20, 2011
My dad was a master of rhyme Up until he came down with Alzheim- ers Disease which I rue Has afflicted me, too For I can’t now recall my last line. Copyright © 2010 Peter Maeck
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Emu
Posted September 20, 2011
Flightless in an endless universe where walking on the terra firma is a joke and only flying can transport you anywhere of note. Heavenly bodies beckon you and torture you by how far they are from you. But then again, how near to them could you get even if you could fly? These winking lights are out of reach of even hawks. So what’s the difference who can fly and who cannot since in the firmament even flight is moot. (Copyright © 2011 Peter Maeck)
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My Friend Nancy Sheffer
Posted September 20, 2011
We were awakened by our guards who began to search every nook and cranny of our cell. Trim off the limp or the discolored outer leaves, they were adamant, frisked us even though we were naked or in Frank’s case hadn’t shed his boxer shorts. What had we done in the night? Who had we seen? Nothing. No one. No? Then what’s this grain? This grain is an aquatic grass that grows wild in shallow water and is harvested from a canoe as the Indians first did it. Trim off the sta...
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Nostalgia
Posted September 20, 2011
We stood by the window, refusing to budge, those afternoons as kids watching the cars scoot by on the street, the delivery vans, the ice cream truck, the people walking their dogs and picking up their messes, the kids on their bicycles, their cap pistols, cherry bombs, popsicles, the pot dealers, paper boys, the Catholic girls in their blue uniforms swimming like schools of fish, men trawling after them in their pickups as the sky went blue to gold to red as the sun engorged then...
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Death of the Hero
Posted September 20, 2011
We couldn’t bear to slaughter pigs and with the drought we just gave up the naive hope of ever making gentleman farming work. The year we spent at Allstate, we would rather now forget. We hated scaring folks: Imagine that you lose your house to fire, or you’re stricken with a fatal this or that, something that’s maybe symptomless. Or there’s a workplace accident, you’re dis- mem- bered, God for- bid, or worse, what happens to your spouse and kids? They’re up the so...
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Sheep May Safely
Posted September 19, 2011
bigger cheaper better that's our pledge of fifty count 'em jars and jugs and bottles filled with urine gallons of it high speed to your loved one's heart since 1856 so many ways to give a helping handmedown to hell and back to nature we all pledge ourselves to worry over blood-borne germs worry over lice and fleas and insect vectors at your local LCD that's who we are at ABC talk to corpses let it be you touch anything disturb a single item you change the crime...
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The Beatitudes
Posted September 19, 2011
Life’s a bitch at times but then it can be rapturous. Rapture isn’t free, it’s earned by following what is set down in the hand- etched and ornately illuminated decree. Square pegs into round holes may fit if we stop hammering for a minute and plane off the corners, sand them smooth, widen the hole with an auger bit then soap the hole’s inside for better slipperiness. Then give it a tap and it slips in bingo just like that. Is this cheating? Yes, for some but not for certa...
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Despots
Posted September 18, 2011
It was doggerel, the crappy little poem, or, we should say, “limerick,” in order to be technically correct, which we’d dashed off in something like three seconds flat, our way of saying – thanks? Yes, thanks, why not, for all they do for us. Without them we could not, we let them think, exist. Reciting such goddawful I won’t even call it verse brought up the bile into our throat but they like little half-wit school- kids being read some nursery rhyme from Mother Goos...
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