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Across The Wire Vol. 3

HENRY MILLER SAVED MY LIFE

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By Mather Schneider

When I was 30 years old, my grandfather died and left me 6,000 dollars. Never having had more than 500 dollars at one time, I went a little nuts. I quit my job at the collection agency and broke up with my girlfriend, telling her “I just want to stay home and write, that’s all I want to do.” Which wasn’t true. I also wanted to drink and smoke pot and get call girls to come over.  

In 3 months, the money was almost gone and I was miserable and eating beans and eggs and wondering what I was going to do. I’d written a few crappy stories, got an std, blew the engine out in my car and developed a case of the alcoholic shakes. I needed to drink a 12 pack before I could even leave the house. My right eye was completely red from blood vessels that had ruptured while vomiting. 

I regretted having left my girlfriend, and tried to reconcile with her. I made a fool of myself in email after email and phone call after phone call. One day she told me, If you really wanted me back, you would come to my house and try to convince me. She told me if I really wanted her back I needed to “act like a boy scout”. She was dead serious. I had very little pride, but one thing I did have pride in, without knowing why, was that I’d never be a boy scout.

Before I got the 6,000 dollars, I was already thinking about leaving her. 5 years earlier, we had moved to Tucson together from Bellingham, Washington, where we’d met. Her parents lived in Phoenix and she wanted to be closer to them. As long as we don’t see them too often, I told her. Oh, no, she said. Once-in-a-while maybe. 2 months after we moved to Tucson, as if unplanned, her parents moved to Tucson. They were good people. Irish upper middle class. A comfortable, sober, loving, normal family, the kind of family that I never quite understood and felt I could never be a part of. They gave me the heebie-jeebies. After that, every single weekend was spent with my girlfriend’s parents. Before I broke up with her, her parents were planning a trip to Disneyland. For all of us. The thought of this trip to Disneyland haunted me for weeks. It terrified me, kept me up at night. I could not imagine myself going to Disneyland.  

Then a week before we were to go, I got that 6,000 dollars. I never did find out how their trip to Disneyland went.

After the last email to my ex, I decided I never should have come to Tucson and wanted to go back to Bellingham. I wanted to wander, to run away, to escape. I threw all my belongings into the yard of the tiny apartment I rented and had a yard sale. I didn’t sell much and the next day I left it all laying out there. I put a sign that said FREE and got on a Greyhound bus heading to Bellingham. I still knew some people in Bellingham but I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I made a sack full of bean burritos. I had a backpack with some clothes and a notebook, a pouch of rolling tobacco and 100 dollars. I cried as the bus left town. Stupid, self-pitying tears.

It had been 5 years since I’d left the rainy northwest for the desert and when I stepped off the bus the greenery, high trees, low skies, humidity and gentrification made me immediately claustrophobic. I thought, this is not right. Another mistake. The place had changed. I walked down to one of my old bars. It had been called The Beaver Inn but they had changed the name to “The Uptown.” The same bartender was there but he didn’t recognize me. He looked the same but I had aged a lot. You couldn’t smoke inside anymore. I ordered their famous fried chicken which had soothed me through many hangovers in the years past. The chicken now cost twice as much as before and was half as big. A side of ranch dressing was now an extra 50 cents. I got wasted sitting there for hours, feeling isolated and alone with my backpack on the floor at my feet. Eventually, the bartender asked me to leave.

I woke up in a nearby park in the early morning and vomited. I was suddenly ravenous again. One of the things I missed about Bellingham was the food. The fish and chips at The Waterfront Tavern, the French Dip at The Alley Bar, the bagels at the Bagelry, the pizza at Mario’s. I checked my funds. I had 50 dollars left.

A guy on the bus had told me of a bank scam. Some banks will let you overdraw your account, he said. I went down to the bank and opened a bank account with my 50 dollars. I still had my old driver’s license from when I lived there and used that for credentials. I waited a few hours and went to an ATM and tried to withdraw 500. It worked!

Before I’d arrived in Bellingham I had looked forward to seeing some of my old friends. Now, I didn’t want to see anyone I knew. As I walked around I was paranoid I would see an old acquaintance. The park where I had passed out was near an old friend’s place but I didn’t knock on the door. I walked down to the nearest store and bought a bottle of whiskey.

I spent the day wandering around. The town was all cleaned up. The China Delight Bar was now an ice cream shop. All the Indian bars were gone. Some hippies and grunge rockers were still around but they were better dressed than I remembered, certainly better dressed than me. It was all extremely fashionable, like an outdoor mall. Business was booming. People were working, living their lives, hobnobbing. Nothing out of place. Everyone seemed to belong. It felt good to have that money in my pocket but I still felt like a stranger and had a bad feeling about everything.

At 11 a.m., right when they opened, I went into The Alley Bar and ordered French Dip. The place looked the same and smelled the same. They roasted their own meat and the sandwich was just as wonderful as I had remembered, though more expensive. I began to feel some hope.

“Well if it isn’t Matt Glasford!”

I turned in my barstool and it was my old friend Dave Longstreet. He sat down.

“What’s going on Dave?”

“Haven’t seen you in a long time! Shit, you’re getting kind of fat and gray aren’t you? I hardly recognized you.”

Dave was 10 years older than me but he still had that cherub face and rich black hair.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” 

“Where you been?”

“Arizona.”

“Arizona? You don’t look very tan.”

“I had an indoor job.”

He caught me up on a lot of people I hadn’t thought about and didn’t care about.

“Hey, Dave, you wouldn’t be able to loan me a few bucks?”

“I’m kind of strapped right now, man.You gonna be in town long?”

“Not real sure.”

“All right, well take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

Before he left he bought me a beer. I drank that and had a few more but I couldn’t stay in there all day and spend all my money. I walked out into the cloudy, misty afternoon. I walked up the hill through the university to the library. It wasn’t planned that way, I just ended up there. It was summer, did I mention that? Summer vacation, but the library was still open. It was open 24 hours, in fact. There was hardly anybody in there and I thought it was about the nicest place I’d ever been. I fancied myself a writer but I really wasn’t much of a writer. I wasn’t much of anything. Still, I had read a great deal of books. But I had never stepped foot in a University library. 

When I lived in Bellingham I hung out at the public library and a couple of bookstores that let you lounge around. And in Tucson I had done the same. Something always scared me about a college campus.

I went up to the 4th floor where the “literature” was. I was the only one on the whole floor. I guess there weren’t any literature majors going to summer school. They were probably all working on their novels. I was so sick of books and reading by that point. So few books really touched me, really talked to me. It all seemed like a pastime, reading novels and writing novels and talking about novels, being that way. Still, I didn’t know where else to go. The fourth floor was absolutely silent and surreal and peaceful. I found a big soft chair and plopped my backpack on the floor and sat looking out the giant windows. I sipped from my bottle of whiskey. It started to rain against the glass and I watched the drops run down. Below on the brick plaza a few students walked around.

I fell asleep and when I woke up it was early evening, not quite dark. I was still the only one around. I got up and went to the bathroom. I looked terrible in the mirror. I hardly recognized myself. I had dark circles under my eyes and I was bloated and sad looking. I had bug bites all over me. My hair was a rat’s nest and more than half gray. My teeth were yellow. I looked at least 50.

As down as I had been, I never really considered killing myself. Until that moment. I thought of Hemingway and how he’d done it. I thought of Hunter S. Thompson and how he always said that suicide was a comforting thought for him. He said that just knowing he could end his life at any time made it easier. Thompson had a lot of guns, but I didn’t. If I was going to kill myself, how? Jumping from a building didn’t seem very appealing, nor did drowning in the ocean. I didn’t have any pills or know how to find any. I could slit my wrists, but that never seemed to work. Someone would always find you and call an ambulance. It seems silly now, looking back. But not then. I thought about a guy I knew who lay down on the train tracks in Tucson.

I scanned the shelves as I walked back towards my chair by the window. I smirked, looking at all those books. Thousands of them! It seemed like a joke, a maze, a nightmare. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, except maybe a way out. I had some favorite authors but I’d read them all and didn’t feel like reading them again. And then, I swear to you, I saw a book sticking halfway out from the shelf. This sounds made-up but it’s not. I’ve never been able to make shit up, never had much imagination. I pulled the book out and it was Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I knew of Miller but had never read him. I’m not sure how I missed him all those years.

I took Tropic of Cancer to my chair and read the whole thing well into the night. Nobody came to bother me. The lights stayed on. Almost every word I read seemed written just for me at that moment. The fact that a human being like this had existed, had written these words, was a revelation. His poverty he somehow made hysterical, his travails seemed predestined and purposeful, his energy contagious, his optimism like a balm. In the following days I only left the library to smoke and to buy food and bottles of whiskey. Henry Miller talked about food a lot and it made me hungry. After going days without eating, he would find some rich guy to treat him to a great meal. He was always hungry. And how he would describe those meals! And the wine! Never get bored, never take anything for granted. People say words like this all the time, but somehow Henry Miller made me feel it. He meant it. He knew it and lived it.

I gathered all the Henry Miller books they had. I read one after the other. Was it possible that this man was born in 1891? Was it possible that he had abandoned his family, quit his job and traveled across the ocean to a strange city where he knew no one, where he did not even know the language? Was it possible he arrived with 10 dollars and survived? And not only survived, but wrote these miraculous books? Was it possible he met all these crazy, brilliant people? Was it possible he traveled around the states and wrote The Air Conditioned Nightmare? Was it possible he lived in Big Sur and dragged his mail up the hill to his house wearing nothing but a jock strap?

Why does everyone have to work? he said. Yes, yes, yes! I thought. Why? No hope, no despair, he said. I had known that Miller had the reputation of being a smut writer, but the sex was hardly 10 percent of it. His zest for life, in such ridiculous conditions, blew my mind. And here I was, depressed! Why in the fuck was I depressed? I was sick and Henry Miller was the medicine.

He seemed like a free man. His writing was certainly freer than anyone I had ever read before, his attitude also. He seemed above shame, above pettiness. He seemed wise. But also fun, and no dope. He was a man who had had all his values smashed, and he embraced it, he rejoiced in it. He said, yes. Maybe he was a lunatic. If he was a lunatic he was the sanist lunatic I had ever encountered. 

I read every one of his books in the library. When I got done with those I found the old tape room down in the basement and I listened to old audio recordings and even watched some videotapes. There he was! The grinning swordsman! In one interview he was talking about a book called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I immediately found that book in the library and read it. I suddenly understood what Miller meant when he said, “There’s two Buddhas, see? Two Buddhas!” One was the classic Buddha, the archetype, the godhead. And the other was Siddhartha, the one searching. Which was to say, the Buddha that is in everyone. The Buddha that is you. The Buddha that is me.

He claimed to never worry about anything. He was beyond good and evil. And man I wanted to be there too.

I stayed in that library for 3 weeks. It rained every day. I read several books that Miller had mentioned, and some were good, but none measured up to what I had found in him, so I decided it was time to move on. When I left, I knew I had to go back to Tucson. I thought about going to another country, like Miller, but I didn’t have the guts or any boat to hitch a ride on. I was still drinking heavily, but I felt a change in myself. It was a sense of life opening up. The idea of killing myself suddenly seemed absurd. 

I barely had enough money for the bus ticket back to Tucson. I arrived in the middle of the night and slept in a park. The desert air was intoxicating. In the morning the sprinklers were on me. I called my ex-girlfriend on a payphone. I was ecstatic, but I still needed money. I asked her for 100 dollars, and she said no. She made 69 thousand dollars a year at the insurance job her brother had got her, but she wouldn’t give me 100 dollars. I understood. I even laughed. I understood that she was still hurt, that she didn’t owe me anything. But I also understood that she had never missed a wink of sleep or a meal in her life. I went to the economic security office and got a food stamp card which provided me with 50 dollars of food every week. I spent the next few weeks buying cheap food and hanging out in the park. I had no money for beer or whiskey. Those were some of the best days I’ve ever had and I will always look back fondly on them.

One day I was walking down the sidewalk and I saw a HELP WANTED sign on the door of a photo lab. This was before all the cell phone photos, when film had to be developed. I went inside and filled out an application. I wrote “writer” on the job history part. The manager was there, and he read it, and it turned out he was also a “writer.” He asked who my favorite writer was and without hesitation I said, Henry Miller. His eyes lit up. Henry Miller was his favorite writer, too! I am not lying about any of this. His name was Jeremy. He hired me and we remained friends for years.

With my first 2 paychecks I found the smallest, cheapest apartment studio available. 200 dollars a month. I had no computer, no typewriter. The cheapest typewriter I could find was 100 dollars at Office Depot, but I didn’t have enough.

I hadn’t been to a bar or had a drink in weeks. One day I passed an old dive bar, The Buffet Tavern. I had spent many days and nights in there. There was no buffet in the Buffet Tavern. It was a buffet of people, they said. The only food they had were hot dogs boiled in a crock pot. The most mouth-watering hot dogs you ever tasted! They opened at 6 a.m. and had a small crowd even at that hour. I had a few bucks in my pocket and I stepped up to the door. It was mid-afternoon. Before I could open the door, I saw something on the ground, blown by the wind up against the old concrete block wall. It was a 100-dollar bill. I took that money and held it up to the sun. I looked around for a minute. Then I walked over to OFFICE DEPOT and bought the last typewriter they had in stock, a Smith Corona.

I got back to my apartment and plugged it in. I had no typing paper so I put in some yellow lined notebook paper and sat looking at it. I must have written 12,000 words that night. All bad, all lost, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.  

When I got tired sometime in the early morning, I made myself a quesadilla. A quesadilla with yellow cheese, sour cream and tomato salsa. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten such a satisfying meal. I kept thinking about Henry Miller. Every once in a great while an author comes around like that, if you’re lucky. If you don’t believe in it, I’m here to tell you. It seemed there were Buddhas all about me, and they were all laughing with delight.

END

Mather Schneider’s poetry and prose have been published in many places since 1995. He has several books of poetry, one book of stories and his first novel, The Bacanora Notebooks, was recently released by Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson and works as an exterminator.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Evidence I’m Mentally Ill

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By Tyler Dempsey

When I was in eighth grade I got so depressed I was delusional, convinced everyone at school knew how terribly unhappy I was but they were all pretending they didn’t. But, every now and then, someone would give me a look or a smile and, in that moment, I knew they knew.

I carry my stress around in my stomach, always have. When I was a teenager, I’d have diarrhea or vomit on a weekly or daily basis. Despite owning no money or health insurance my mom took me to the doctor. The doctor sent us home with a plastic container that I had to scoop diarrhea out of the toilet into so they could send it to a lab somewhere. The results were inconclusive. 

I used to fantasize in bed about my stepdad’s gun cabinet glowing on the other side of the wall. Thinking of the act, or the word “suicide” would start me hyperventilating. I would desperately try to redirect my mind elsewhere before the thing that had power over me reached a point that was irreversible. 

I didn’t know if the depression was a result of my circumstances so much as a byproduct of violence and anger that lived in me but tried so hard to hide. The effort of hiding was causing it to consume me. When I was fifteen, I had a moment during a night like so many other nights where I heard my stepfather yelling at my mom, calling her names. But this time I broke. The anger and other feelings wouldn’t stay back. They oozed and my body convulsed and when it was over it felt like my brain was emptied of electricity. Like everything that used to be the thing or person that was Tyler Dempsey had left. I was a shell that looked like me. I call what happened that night a panic attack but actually have no idea what it was. 

A week later, I experienced my first auditory hallucination. It’s hard to describe, but a voice that was both in my ear and also outside whispered like a scream. What did it whisper? Tyler. It said my name. What’s more, the voice was one I recognized. It was Joe Tiger. A friend in grade school that wasn’t my friend anymore. I’d said something that made him mad and he never got over it. It made me sad that he had been a part of this really scary thing. Like fear wasn’t enough, whatever it was wanted to hurt me, too. 

When I was in college, more things happened that made me wonder if I was, just maybe, insane. The last day of Freshman year my best friend, Brendan, and I drove to Denton, Texas, for a Pinback concert. It was late getting back. Brendan took backroads and it was raining extremely hard, the sky opening and the wipers fighting but you could barely see the road or our weak headlights. A burst of lightning hit and something very small appeared in the center of the windshield, then expanded, then expanded more, then took over the whole frame. It was veiny and a shade of brown I’ve never seen before or since. It didn’t splatter into the glass but simply vanished as quickly as it appeared. Again, just rain and wipers. Brendan said, “Did you see that?” 

Fast forward to Sophomore year. We’re living in the dorms, Brendan and I, one wing apart from each other. We start having dreams. Cryptic, demonic kinds. I started hearing what sounded like a pool ball dropped on the floor of the dorm above me, rolling into the corner the whole building slanted toward. But no one lived in that room. No one lived in the whole wing actually, except me. Another time it sounds like something very, very large, running full speed, ducked its shoulder and tried to burst down my door. But you know dorms, it’s just one long hall with room after room in a line. There’s only the width of the hallway, no way something could get a running start like that. I eventually worked up the nerve and looked but nothing was there. Brendan watched a black thing with long arms walk across his room into his closet. A week later it visited me. I was in bed with my back against the wall facing a window that faced the streetlight. The light flickered and slowly went out. Then my vision distorted. I felt suddenly, irrationally terrified. I realized I couldn’t move. Then it walked into my peripheral vision. Tall, black arms, everything black. It lifted one arm and pointed out the window. Then, just as unexplainably as it appeared, it was gone. Things like this continued till one day my phone rang. The ID said “Brendan.” I picked up and there was a silence so heavy and somehow, I knew exactly what he was going to say, then he said it. “My brother killed himself.” All of the weird stuff stopped after that. 

Fast forward some more, a year after my brother was arrested, I got really, really into smoking weed. I lived in California and had this bong as tall as I was. On occasion, I’d get super stoned and different parts of my body would spasm. Kind of like what I’ve read about restless leg syndrome, but it was restless everything. Around that time, I had my second, and, up until now, last auditory hallucination. Again, a voice I knew. It was a previous stepbrother I hadn’t thought of in years. This is what he said: Tyler. In a whisper, just like last time. I didn’t tell you this when I mentioned Joe Tiger, but each time, two months after they said my name, in real life, that person died. Joe was in a car with a friend who’d been drinking and they clipped a guardrail on a bridge on some backroad. My stepbrother, Colton, was caught robbing a convenience store. The details get fuzzy, but somehow a cop shot him. Poof. Gone. 

Speaking of spasming, I quit doing it after Colton whispered my name, but one time—this was just a few years ago—I was coming home from a strip club with my friend and he told me something he’d never told anyone but his parents. The jist was: my life could have been irrevocably fucked if we hadn’t had the financial means to fight my way through court. I sat in the passenger seat and he caught himself, and said, “Shit, man, sorry, I didn’t even think about your brother…” but it was too late. Once again it was like a dam in my mind broke. Thoughts and feelings were suddenly flooding out and I started shaking. By the time we got to his apartment it was done but I could barely walk. I sat on his couch like my body and mind were a huge sponge that had gotten wrung out. That feeling continued, accompanied by growing depression and a fear it would happen again. Eventually, it was like the sponge filled back up. Life once again came at me faster than I could process. I never did get that checked out.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of three books and host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Utah with his dog.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Two Poems

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By Scott Neuffer

Trip: NYC, 2023

I will say on the plane over I saw elevators
descending in passengers’ eyes.
I will say when I saw the Empire State Building
it was pointed in the gray light like a compass needle—
if only I were built stiff enough for that sky.
I will say at the Met, the Monets were less than lustrous?

What’s most real in New York are the lurches
between bricks, the way a corner splits
sense,
sewer steam, snuffed ass,
the ache of the unfeted. 

In dusk I come to 83rd Street, metal bench.
Crouched hand to ear, I assume it’s blood running
through my head that makes a gritty sound,
and I wonder if every person also shudders
at the thunder of their own blood.

I will find my way back to you, I believe.
There is a world where we listen to each other;
it lies at the bottom of the poem. 

Pondering the Art of Poetry during Super Bowl LVII 

We didn’t host the party this year;
a broken patio chair sits against the house.
In a friend’s neighborhood to the north, where the river touches
the desert and grows the Northern Nevada Correctional Center,

I sit in a luxury chair and dream of mass transit 
that took the copywriter from Brooklyn to Manhattan 
for thirty seconds of gloss, their million-dollar slot–
but something is off, human.
Maybe before the game the copywriter had a moment
pulling a snake of hair from their apartment sink
and sink from drain in a miraculous fit bruising the drywall.
Maybe it was enough to remember how ink can bleed on the page.

It’s funny how I am not alone but want to be alone
as the TV commercials glow like radiation, 
and the prison windows gleam like half-decisions.
Inside me is something like ice on fire, primal, without ink, 
conjuring words to stay lined up dancing in the air. 

Scott Neuffer is a writer who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founding editor of the literary journal trampset.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

B L A C K  A U R A

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By Bill Whitten

A Georg Jorgenson retrospective is at the Whitney. Georg has been dead for almost twenty years. Among the two-dozen paintings on display is one called Disancorato – Georg’s only known portrait – wherein a pair of disheveled brunettes with brown eyes and insolent faces stare at the floor. I am (or was) the young man in the torn t-shirt and filthy blue-jeans while the young woman in tattered bra and panties was Georg’s sister-in-law, Carolina. The painting is valued at 3.5 million dollars. On the other side of death, Georg’s ambivalence about success has become irrelevant. 

I was reading the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini on the F train when a man seated across from me remarked that Cellini, an embezzler, rapist and murderer, differed from contemporary artists only in the fact that he was honest. 

At least, I’d responded, Cellini hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis like Picasso. We exited the train together at the Broadway-Lafayette stop and as if predetermined by fate, entered the nearby Bleeker St. Bar to drink beer.

We discussed the use of the camera obscura by Brunelleschi, the type of motorcycle Antonio Ligabue drove and a film I’d recently seen called Accion Mutante, about disabled terrorists bent on exterminating beauty from the world.

He nodded his head as he lifted a pint of Guinness. “Terrorists and governments despise beauty; it’s too destabilizing for a controlled society.”

Georg Jorgenson was a 6’5” redheaded Max von Sydow lookalike, a graduate of Yale, a boxer of some talent and a reckless alcoholic. A person to be feared in certain situations. He behaved like an aristocrat, like someone without problems or cares who’d grown up surrounded by servants, which as far as I knew wasn’t the case. Fifteen years older than me, he was not only a painter but had designed and fabricated the black shoes, shirt and pants he wore like a uniform. 

I was a rock musician living in Soho amid the ruins of the ’80’s art bubble and had met enough of its former fantastically prosperous denizens – while plying the trade of art-handler/furniture mover – to have cultivated a genuine hatred for artists and the art-world. Georg, I discovered, was no different; he looked down on his fellow artists and considered his collectors – those who occupied the commanding heights of the capitalist class – to be among the worst people on the planet. He understood that the very same cohort who bought his art and kept him in whiskey and cocaine were responsible for despoiling the environment, mercilessly exploiting the working class and more or less destroying Western civilization. But Georg – an avowed hypocrite – needed to make a living. 

I thought his technically masterful canvasses lacked the visceral punch of his personality; they seemed to turn a cool, blank face to the world. That was the influence of Georg’s hero, Lucien Freud. Unlike Freud, Georg’s interventions were devoid of anything resembling a human subject, instead they presented the ghostly interiors of abandoned, uninhabited mansions that were populated by obscure ’70’s architectural motifs and occult pop-culture references. Georg claimed the inspiration for his paintings derived from his drug-fueled career as a teenaged house-breaker in Ridgefield, Connecticut. As the leader of a circle of young friends inspired by Charles Manson’s ‘creepy crawling’ expeditions (in middle of the night the Family would enter a house, quietly rearrange the furniture and then leave) he’d become addicted to nocturnal breaking and entering. To Georg, the vacant structures in his paintings ultimately reflected the architecture of the cosmos, which according to his bleak, clinically depressed worldview, was empty. The Creator – deus absconditus – was long gone.

When Georg suddenly jetted off to Italy with a fellowship and teaching position at the American Academy – due in no small part to the influence of his new (third) wife, the daughter of an Italian diplomat – we carried on our friendship via airmail. He often sent me hastily scrawled, telegram-like notes – I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES – or pornographic sketches made on copies of the Coriere della Sera. 

Returning to my apartment on Broome Street one evening after work, I found a postcard in my mailbox: I’M SICK OF ITALY. EVERYONE IS FIVE FOOT SIX IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. COME AS SOON AS YOU CAN. 

I arrived at Georg’s doorstep in Monteverde Vecchio in a white taxicab. I carried a brown leather suitcase that had belonged to my grandfather. In the bright morning light the neighborhood looked forgotten, even abandoned. Its occupants were either still sleeping or at work. I rang the doorbell and five minutes elapsed before Georg finally opened the door.

Georg’s studio – scattered with requisite rags, canvasses stacked in piles or leaning against walls, sheets of paper covered with half finished charcoal sketches, stalagmite piles of newspapers and magazines, broken charcoal sticks, brown paper bags scribbled with words or images, overturned chairs and stools, rat and mouse droppings, hoghair paintbrushes, a photo of Gabriele D’Annunzio torn from a magazine and nailed to a wall, saucers full of pigment, empty coffee cups, unstretched canvasses – was formerly a bicycle factory.

  “Look at me, I have Cushing’s Syndrome; I’m in the same frame of mind as Che Guevara when he went to Bolivia and got himself killed by the CIA. Have you ever seen pictures of him from that period? Moon-faced with a psychotic glint in his eyes? That’s me baby, that’s what I see whenever I look in the fucking mirror. A black aura is hanging over me.”

Shirtless and bearded in a paint-spattered, unzipped white boiler-suit with the arms tied around his waist, he took a step back from a canvas, paint brush dangling from his limp wrist, shoulders hunched, head bowed, looking like Bill Walton just after completing a free throw. The painting was of a chest X-ray. Instead of alveoli and bronchiole there were nebulae, white dwarfs and strands of sidereal light. Behind every image is another image that is more faithful to reality and behind that another image even more faithful.

‘Painter’, I’d come to understand, was a magnetic category. Painters were monks or criminals, eunuchs or satyrs. Paintings were a sacrificial offering that implied the inevitable destruction of their author or a non-stop celebration of the self from which there was no escape… 

Georg looked as if he’d gained fifty pounds since I’d last seen him and his face had indeed taken on a moon-like countenance. Bruises, some yellowish, some blue were distributed across his torso like countries on a map. Ghastly pale with little splotches of red beneath each cheekbone he walked across the studio to a gigantic mahogany desk piled high with books, magazines and videotapes. He sat down behind the desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a mirror and then opened another drawer, removed a foil packet and dumped a pile of iridescent whitish powder on the mirror. Sighing, he rose from the desk and carried it to me.

“I get my drugs from a former member of the Brigate Rosse, a real fucking mensch. When I was in better health we used to shoot his machine-guns together.”

“What’s wrong with you Georg? What happened?” I held the mirror in my hand and looked around for somewhere to put it. I didn’t feel like snorting cocaine. Hungry and thirsty, I suddenly remembered that in Georg’s presence I became a lesser person, a sidekick, an underling. With any two friends, one is always the slave of the other.

Georg walked back to his easel, picked up his brush. “I have Sarcoidosis – something usually only blacks and Scandinavians get, I mean what a mindfuck – its in my lungs, it’s in my eyes and its even gone to my brain. The same disease killed Thomas Bernhard, maybe Gide too. Usually it’s a manageable chronic illness. My case is different. I’m supposed to be treating it with 50mgs of prednisone everyday single day…but it drives me mad, madder than I already am and it makes me violent. It was a rational choice on Alessandra’s part to leave me. Perhaps, when I eventually return to the hospital, after they’ve given me Last Rites, she might stop by…” 

Nothing is so unbelievable as exact truth spoken in a calm voice.

“What a nightmare.” 

I found it difficult to look into his bloodshot eyes. His personality seemed to have expanded along with his bloated body; he was somehow more Georg-like than he’d ever been before. What was the opposite of apotheosis? 

“You must be seriously jet-lagged, Robert. Snort a line of the coke. It’ll sort you out, cheer you up.” 

I looked down at the mirror. “When did she leave?”

Georg began to cough, a long series of dry sounding, lung-scraping coughs. Red-faced, out of breath, he spoke in short, halting bursts: “You don’t…understand…I am a prisoner here…like the man in the…iron mask…She’s waiting for me to die…Prays for it…You know…how… Italians…are…about…divorce.” 

“Come back to New York with me. They have the best doctors in the world.” 

Georg walked back to the desk and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, removed a silver Zippo from a pocket of his boilersuit, flicked it open and lit a cigarette. He exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled. He seemed to breathe easier. “I’m totally broke Robert. I have huge gambling debts. You can’t imagine how much money I’ve simply thrown away. I can’t stop working. And even then I can’t paint fast enough to cover my losses.”

“What can I do to help you Georg?”

“There’s a painting I need to make. It would be of you and my teenaged sister-in-law. The inspiration comes from a photo of Belmondo and Seberg. I don’t do portraits so this might be dicey but there is a dealer who has…who has…made a kind of bet with me that I can’t do it. A huge bet. Tomorrow, you and Carolina will sit for me.”

…Later that evening, we walked up Monte Testaccio, the eighth hill of Rome and one of the world’s most famous middens. Monte Testaccio was formed entirely from broken, discarded amphorae (something like 25,000,000 of them) between 50 and 270 AD. Georg wanted me to see the spectacle of Roma at night – the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’angelo, St. Peter’s, the San Carlo al Corso Church, Santa Maria Maggiore – from the vantage point of an ancient trash heap.

Cold winter wind blowing off the nearby Tiber, we crawled through a hole in a chain-link fence and followed an overgrown path up a slight incline. Above us, the bright machinery of the Roman sky. It seemed that the point of my trip to Italy was to reinforce my belief that things could go wrong at any moment and artists made their best work when they were on the brink of extinction. 

Ancient pottery sherds crunching beneath our feet, nightbirds spreading their sound around us, Georg, his words punctuated by gasps, spoke of exile: “I don’t really miss New York, you understand, but I do miss my memories which were left behind in the subways, on the sidewalks, on the facades of tenements…”

“You can go back, Georg. You’re not going to die.”

Georg pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of his tweed jacket and wiped his mouth. “Exile must be accepted in the same way a terminal illness must be accepted; graciously, without defiance or shame.”

He stopped and coughed for forty seconds. Then he pointed his chin at the Eternal City: “If Emperor Julian had remembered to put on his breastplate that morning in Ctesiphon, the first moon landing would have taken place in 1342.” 

A voice rang out. “You are trampling on the dust of empires!”

  We turned toward the voice. It came from a wraithlike figure – a girl – backlit by the glowing city. Tall with brown hair that fell in straight lines from beneath a black felt beret, she wore a black cape and under that a man’s black suit and white shirt. Was she an apprentice waiter fired after her first day of work? A child refugee fleeing a war-zone? 

  When she smiled her sharp white teeth protruded slightly.

“Carolina, this is Robert.”

A new painting is like an animal glimpsed at the edge of the forest. Is the painter the hunter or the prey? If he has courage, the painter will dissolve into the painting, he will – in an act of faith – become it and live in the ecstasy of that trembling moment of dissolution.

And thus at dawn on a somber day in December, Georg positioned our bodies before his easel and painted us with paintbrushes as fine as eyelashes.

  “Think of yourself as hostages not subjects.” 

Carolina, who smelled – like all beautiful women – of cigarettes and dirty hair, sat on my lap. She wore tattered black underwear of unknown provenance that had been procured by Georg. They are clean was all Georg would divulge. 

I wore a white tank top with slashes across the chest and ripped blue jeans that were stiff with black paint and automotive grease. 

“I distrust anything that hasn’t been weathered or worn out.”

For most of the day Carolina and I barely spoke to each other which was what we both knew Georg wanted; any rapport or complicity would have excluded him or set us against his project which was to put onto canvas an image or shadow of a dream.

  “Seeing is the paradise of the soul.”

Occasionally, Carolina would rise and pace around the studio. She’d pull on an old Russian greatcoat, walk over to Georg, take the cigarette from his hand and smoke it. 

I’d wander over to Georg’s desk and try to read from a paperback copy of Borges’ The Aleph, in particular The Circular Ruins which seemed to be an allegory of exactly what was happening in Georg’s studio. 

“Illness is servitude.”

After nine or ten hours Georg began coughing and cursing simultaneously then picked up a Ka-Bar knife and seemed ready to slash the canvas. Not long after, he announced that it was finished.

“We’ll go for drinks now. I have unlimited credit at The Tomb of Cestis. Come on.”

In The Tomb – the ceilings were so low we practically had to crouch – a man in a tracksuit and shaved head led us (come Giorgio) to a tiny, dirty room that was empty except for a round cafe table and four plain wooden saloon chairs. He left a bottle of Liquore Strega and three glasses. 

A single dangling light bulb lit the space. On one wall was a poster of Maradonna, on the other a framed reproduction of Parmigianino’s Bardi Altarpiece.

The room smelled of bleach, sweat, shit, piss and Lysol.

Georg sat, chest heaving, gasping for air.  

  I was becoming smaller and smaller to the point of vanishing completely. Mingled with galloping fear, I felt a kind of ecstasy. The Rome I encountered was entirely made from this fear, this ecstasy. It was like a stage set. Everything meaningful had been undermined, destabilized. When I closed my eyes, images of earthquake, plague, riot, fire, mobs of people flickered before me. 

Carolina drank two glasses of Strega and leaned her head against my shoulder. A woman – early sixties, five feet tall with black eyes, steel grey hair and the demeanor of someone resigned to face a firing squad at some point in the near future – entered the room and placed three bottles of Peroni on the table. 

  To know what something is, we need time to recognize it, thus we always miss when it happens. Conversely, if we want to know when something happens, there’s no time left to say what it was. 

When Georg finally slid from his chair to the floor, I could at last comprehend the situation. 

The onset of horror has something fresh about it; it shines, it clarifies.

The ambulance arrived twenty minutes after Carolina ran screaming from the room. Then we were hurtling through the narrow, dark and beautiful streets of Roma.

On the Alitalia flight back to New York, I was seated in the rear of the plane, alone in the last row and the stewardesses were merciful and brought me drink after drink. I eventually slept, not waking until the plane taxied on the cinematically lit JFK runway. As I hoisted my bag, deplaned and walked towards customs I thought of Georg lying in a hospital bed in the Machiavelli Medical House, oxygen masked affixed to his face, an IV bag of antibiotics dripping into his arm, the last line of defense as pneumonia bacilli waged war on his lungs. His eyes had scanned the ceiling repeatedly, without pattern, as if guided by some faltering reflex action. Was Georg ‘gone’ or merely in hiding as his body tried desperately to repair itself? I had seen that look before, I’d seen the same eye movement in the days before my father’s death. 

Carolina had been grim and preoccupied as she drove me, in her sister’s Fiat 124 Spider, to the airport, smoking cigarette after cigarette, fiddling with the radio, her eyes seemingly never on the road ahead. Death lurked everywhere as we careened along the A90 ring road. Eventually she pulled up to the departure terminal, kissed me on the cheek and handed me a bulging envelope with my name written on it. 

“From Giorgio. Your salary for sitting for him.” 

Neither of us was aware that Georg had written the word Disancorato in charcoal on the back of the canvas. Did Disancorato – which means unmoored, adrift – describe the painter, his subjects or a way of life? 

It was twenty-two degrees when I landed in New York. After clearing customs I opened the envelope. One million Lire. I changed the money and bought a bottle of Strega at the duty free and still had seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. It would be just enough to cover my rent.

Bill Whitten is a rock musician, writer, reader….The singer and songwriter for St. Johnny (1989-1995), Grand Mal (1995-2010) and William Carlos Whitten (2018-?)…author of BRUTES, a collection of short fiction (2022)

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

TAMALES

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by Elwood Weebs

Three of us in a one bedroom – Alaska, Vegas, Rust Belt. All living in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak.

Alaska brought like twenty pounds of salmon he caught himself. Frozen and carried three thousand miles.

He grilled our first night together. It was unlike any salmon I’d had.

Just gamey.

Gamey as fuck.

I struggled through three bites, Vegas never made it past a nibble.

We only had this small refrigerator, about the equivalent to the size of two minifridges.

The gamey salmon filled the freezer, spilled over to the fridge.

The entire apartment stunk, mild at first, but always building.

Alaska wouldn’t throw it out, and we wouldn’t eat it.

Alaska had a Mexican girlfriend who stayed over all the time and cooked tamales.

Vegas had a friend who didn’t do shit but sleep on our salvation army pull out sofa bed for five, six nights at a time. He always talked about how much weight he’d gained, and kept to a strict diet of canned tuna.

He didn’t like the salmon either.

Five of us – count em – one, two, three, four, five – in this four hundred square foot space that reeked of fresh(ish) salmon, tamales, canned tuna, and body odors from all over North America.

I’ll tell you, all those aromas will kill your morale.

It was inescapable. 

It stuck to my clothes.

Formed a film coating my skin.

Seeped through my pores and into my nightmares.

And I caught everyone fucking, all in the same day.

Alaska and his girlfriend when I stopped home for lunch, Vegas and his friend when I got home that night.

Doggy-style, both times.

Alaska ignored/was ignorant of the smells, but Vegas couldn’t stand it.

It was walk-in-the-door-and-let-out-an-“Oooof” bad.

One day, Vegas and I came in together and let out identical “Oooofs” that said everything that needed to be said.

We filled paper bags with salmon and carried them to a dumpster down the block.

When Alaska came asking about his special Alaskan salmon, we both swore that it was not us, but his girlfriend that threw the fish away.

We said we’d witnessed the whole thing, that she swore us to secrecy.

Well, they got into a blowout fight.

Trust was broken.

And our apartment, in the shadow of Humprey’s Peak, no longer smelled.

Alaska moved out first, Vegas a few months later.

The only thing I missed were the tamales.

Elwood rambles through the rust belt hills with the fatboys. Some people call him Slim, some call him Automatic. No matter about names, he’s often in the middle of a sticky situation. You might find him on Twitter @dntcallmeelwood

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Three Prose Poems

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By Steve Gergley

1. Candied Pears

My wife and I eat dinner on the back deck of our rotting French colonial. It’s August. It’s ninety-six degrees out. It’s been nineteen months since we spoke to another human being. The sun bakes my hairless skull like a smooth stone stranded in a Texas scrubland. For the next forty-three minutes, I watch my wife devour the mound of candied pears sitting atop her spotless ceramic dining plate. As she eats, her lips shine sticky with sugary syrup. The shadows of the circling buzzards flicker across my mud-crusted fingerpads. A pond of silky blood kisses my gold-plated salad fork. Excusing myself from the table, I clomp into the overgrown backyard and begin digging the rectangular hole at the foot of the gnarled sugar maple.

2. No Names

There is a room with no door at the end of the upstairs hallway. My wife has been in there many times. At dinner she talks about the elderly man and his young trophy wife who have lived in that room for the past fifty-nine and one-sixth years. By my wife’s word, the couple spends their long days in the dark carving foot-sized blocks of yellow cedar into intricately-detailed sculptures of Tudor-style mansions. Sipping my sparkling water, I tell my wife that this is a beautiful and interesting story. I tell her that she leads a complex and thrilling life. I tell her that I am glad she regularly experiences these fascinating adventures. In response, she sips her sparkling water and agrees with a satisfied smile. We eat in comfortable silence for three minutes and forty-four seconds. The man across the street tries, and fails, to slam his front door. The ice cream truck with the unsettling robotic voice drives past the front of our house. I ask my wife to spell out the names of the married couple living in the sealed room upstairs, but she only surrenders the middle three letters of the old man’s first name.

3. My Greatest Ambitions

At 6:17 a.m., I wake up on my back in bed. My wife lays on her side beside me. We do not get up for many hours. A square of yellow sunlight crawls across the carpeted floor. Our cell phones buzz on the end table like ambulances dissolving into a humid summer night. Next door, the teenager with the coal black hair plays a riff on his electric bass for two hours and twenty-three minutes. At noon, a male goldcrest lands on the sill of the open window and stares at us through the thin mesh screen. I stare back at the small bird and yawn. A red Honda Civic parks in front of the Tudor-style mansion on the other side of the street. The teenager next door begins playing a new riff. The male goldcrest flies away. My wife rests a soft hand on the warm skin of my throbbing shoulder. The stabbing feeling in my stomach disappears for the first time in thirteen years. These are the days that supply the component parts of my greatest ambitions on earth.


Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), There Are Some Floors Missing (Bullshit Lit ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Hobart, Always Crashing, and others. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

THE GREAT COMPETITION

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By Nathan Bogart

Artie sat in his old beat up puke green Grand Marquis outside his father’s house, still wearing his Bagel Boy work apron, doing his best to compose himself before heading inside. He looked out at the dirty snow that lined the sidewalk to his father’s front porch. Winter had washed the sky of color and the trees stood leafless against the cold wind. 

 The house looked like all the other pre-war houses in suburban Detroit. Except his father’s house was in shambles: the roof was beginning to cave in, the porch steps were missing, and there were holes in all the window screens that let mosquitoes and wasps in during summer. 

Artie’s cell phone rang. He hesitated for a moment. 

“Hey, Laurie. I’m outside his house right now.” 

“I just wanted to remind you…”

“I know.” 

Artie stared up at the house, he could make out the electric glow of a television through the front window.  

“Stop hesitating and just do it. Just tell him already. If you don’t do it, I’m going to.” 

“He’s a difficult man.”

“That’s not an excuse, Arthur. Tell him. Jamie needed help with math homework and you weren’t here. Yesterday it was science. Enough is enough.” 

“You know it’s complicated.” 

“Tell him.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at home.”

He hung up the phone and sighed. Artie felt every night he visited his dad was like crossing a threshold into a different world, like landing on an unknown planet and realizing that not everything operated according to the laws of earth: there were places even gravity could not touch. 

The porch creaked beneath him as he made his way to the front door. 

“Pop, it’s me,” he called through the door. 

“Who?” 

“Me, Pop. Your son.”

“Well, come on in already.” 

Artie opened the door. The floors were covered in empty whiskey bottles and unwashed clothes. The smell of cigarettes hit his nostrils. His father sat on a mustard-colored recliner, his feet up on a coffee table, eyes fixed on the television screen. A half empty pint of whiskey sat between his legs. 

“Hey, Pop.”

He held up a yellow finger, cuing Artie to shut up.  

“Look, kid,” his dad said and gestured at the television. 

A line of muscular men flexed on a stage, their veins popping and their skin glistening with oil. Artie knew all of them by name. 

“See him? On the left?”

“Yeah, Pop. I see him.”

“That’s Frank Zane. The man was a living statue. That’s art. Look at his posing. Beautiful front-double. See that?” 

“Yeah, I see it, Pop.”

His dad lit a cigarette, handed it to Artie. 

“That’s the art of bodybuilding right there,” his dad said, “not the bullshit you see nowadays. True bodybuilding is sculpture. Proportions, symmetry, flow. That’s what it’s all about.” 

“Definitely, Pop,” Artie said and took a drag of his cigarette and tried not to cough. He made his way quietly to the couch, making sure he didn’t walk in front of the television. 

“So, Pop. I’ve been talking to Laurie.”

“Please, son. Not now.”

“Well, it’s just that—”

“Your ears okay? I swear you can’t hear sometimes.” 

Artie’s father leaned closer to the television: 

“And there’s the man of the hour. You see who that is?”

A familiar man with a barrel chest and large arms made his way to center stage. The hair, the chiseled jaw, the mountains of muscle; he resembled Superman. Or at least that’s what Artie thought every time he saw him. He flexed his biceps, puffed out his chest. The crowd cheered and the judges marveled. 

“Yeah, I see who it is. It’s you, Pop.”

“Damn right,” he said. A wide smile smothered his face. “This is the year I almost won the Mr. Universe competition. That’s what a real man looks like.” His eyes turned to Artie for a moment, then back to the television. 

“Look at my transitions. People don’t know this, but it’s not just the poses, but how you move from one to the other. It’s like dancing. Look at that front-lat spread! I’m unstoppable.”

Artie looked from the television to his dad. His bloated stomach hung out from under his shirt and his legs were swollen and red. A once chiseled jaw was hidden beneath puffy cheeks and a scraggly gray beard.

“You know, Joe Wieder told me I would be the next big thing. That if I wanted I could become an action star, a real celebrity, a somebody. Maybe even get my name etched in one of those sidewalk stars. Everywhere I went, I kid you not, people stared. I felt like a god.” 

Artie tried to muster the courage to break the bad news. He’d spent many late nights recently in front of the bathroom mirror, splashing cold water in his face and practicing what to say: 

“Pop, we’ve got to put you in a home.”

“We’ve got to place you in an elderly care facility, Pop.”

“I can’t take care of you like this anymore. Your health is declining. You’ve fallen twice. You broke a rib last month. I no longer spend quality time with my children. I’m becoming an absent father like you were.” 

“You’re fucking going away, Pop. That’s that. I’m tired of this shit. I’m not you’re fucking servant. I’m your son. I deserve better. Why don’t you respect me?” 

Admittedly, he hated to think about his father at an elderly facility. Perfectly manicured lawns, soft-spoken orderlies, tiny paper cups filled with pills: all hiding the fact that it was a house of death. He wondered if he struggled to tell his dad for his own sake, his own fear of seeing Superman tumble from the sky. 

“You know, bodybuilding used to be a circus act,” his father suddenly started. “Strong men were freaks, like bearded ladies or wolfmen. But Eugen Sandow changed that. He held the world’s first bodybuilding show, called it ‘The Great Competition.’ What we call bodybuilding now was born from this great man’s vision. Great men, Artie, shape the world.”

His father’s monologues still had the ability to move him. When he was a kid there was nothing he aspired to be more than one of the great men his father talked about.  

“Well,” his father said, “I’ve got to hit the shitter. Don’t touch the remote.”

He went to sit up and failed. And then tried again.

Artie rushed to his dad’s side and grabbed his arm. His dad slapped his hand away. 

“I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly capable of getting up on my own.”

He slowly pushed himself up out of the chair and then grabbed his cane and marched off to the bathroom. 

Artie sat alone in the living room. The silver screen flashing with images of past muscle men, some long dead. He wondered where those still living were now. He closed his eyes and imagined all of them clambering onto stage in their old age, including his dad, barely able to make it up the steps. Gray hair, wrinkled flesh, hanging jowls. Each standing almost naked in their posing trunks, greased and tanned and not long for the world. 

On the screen, he watched their former selves pose. He knew all the moves, all the various postures: front lat-spread, most muscular, side chest, crucifix, ab and thigh, etc. He was an expert in a subject he didn’t care about. 

He studied his father’s face on the television. He looked exactly how he remembered him as a kid, when he was only ever a visitor in his life, always coming and going, always on the road competing, posing for magazines, running around with women that weren’t his mom. 

The walls of the living room were filled with pictures from magazines of his father in the seventies, at the height of his career. Plus, any clippings from newspapers that happened to mention his name. In the center of it all, right above the television, was a picture of him holding up Artie as a baby on stage like a trophy, his father’s handsome face beaming. Artie was too young to remember the moment and his dad never talked about it, but it was the first picture his dad put up when he moved into the house. 

Artie started to pick up some of the dirty clothes and empty bottles on the floor when he heard a crash come from the bathroom. 

He ran towards the noise. 

“Pop, you okay? Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine God damn it. I just slipped, that’s all.” 

Artie threw open the door. His father was sitting next to the toilet with blood running down his face. 

“I said I’m fine, God damn it.”

“Pop, you’re bleeding.” 

Artie stared down at him. His dad suddenly looked small, frail. 

He thought about all of the stories of great men his dad told him. Eugen Sandow, Frank Zane, Brian Buchanan, Lee Priest. ‘A great man takes no shit from anybody,’ his dad told him once. ‘He does what he must, he looks fear in the face and says fuck you.’ Artie slumped down on the floor next to his dad and handed him a rag. 

“Pop, I’ve got to put you in a home.”

His dad looked over at him in silence, blood running from his forehead to his chin. For a moment nobody said anything. The only sounds were his father’s heavy breathing and the bodybuilders posing in the living room. 

“Fine, but I’m taking my tapes.”

Nathan Bogart is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Detroit, Michigan. He’s been published with Flash Fiction Magazine and Macrina Magazine. He’s currently an MFA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Eyes in a Jar

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By JD Clapp

When Titus tired of seeing his life, he plucked his left eyeball from his head with a grapefruit spoon and put it in a mason jar filled with moonshine. He put the jar in a burlap sack he carried everywhere. When he needed escape from the struggles of life, he’d pull the jar from its sack and close his right eye to view his life through a drunken haze. 

He began to favor this drunkard’s view, and one day plucked his right eye out and added it to the jar. For a while, Titus carried his eye jar of ‘shine around, happily seeing the world through drunken, pickled, martini olive eyes. 

With time his eyes became tolerant to the ‘shine. It was then that Titus came to understand the world was as he’d seen it before, made worse from being hungover. So, Titus ventured to the edge of the sea and opened his jar and drank the ‘shine, leaving his eyes at the bottom, staring dully up at him. He filled the jar with sand and put it in his sack and tossed it into the waves.

Unable to see and stone sober, a good man came by, took Titus by the hand, and led him to his home, where he fed and cared for him. And together knowing the joy of friendship and compassion, they ventured out each morning and spread the good word, and the inherent kindness untapped in all people, Titus not seeing their words held little sway on the drunken, deaf masses.

JD Clapp lives in San Diego, CA. His work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Bristol Noir, Roi Fainéant Press, Trampset, Punk Noir and numerous others. In 2023, he was a Pushcart nominee in nonfiction, and had a fictional story selected as a finalist in the Hemingway Shorts, Short Story competition. He is a regular contributor to Poverty House.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Blinds

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By Alexander Fredman

The deer out there will still be eating when we finish. (We’re eating tomatoes on toast.) The fence of the garden is for rabbits, for show. Anything that wants can hop it. It’s a foot of chicken wire taut between wooden posts. 

There are four of them. A buck and two does, one fawn. It is natural to wonder what happened to the other fawn. (There must have been another.)  

Green stalks turned in, trampled. The buck’s antlers haven’t yet come to point. We’ve watched him for years. You’ve said Get the gun and meant it. So what if that was another. In crepuscular light on a cool morning, hungry. I picked the ripe tomatoes this morning. I prepared these plates for us both. It’s silly, I know. 

It’s still too early to shoot, even if—let them have at it. See the pale juice bead their elastic lips. So happy they are to have a mealy tomato, undone. What would go well with venison? Recollection is sparse. When I last had it deer were still rare here, it was a task to hunt them, it was a succession of failures. Childhood was spare and sketched in places to hide. Or ways to see the world and forget you’re in it. You know it wasn’t hate, that ancient thing, perched on a platform on a tree, watching for something to break the stillness. Gun in hand. It was love, of what? You taught me, but I let the years crawl on. 

This house has been patched on with fresh space in the time since. Sometimes I sit where the old floorboards give way to new. Smooth wood, lacking the gaps that grew with time. The gun is gone but what could be done there, there there, your voice–there are such things as laws in this country. Damn what I could do about it. 

Outside a deer kicks at a post. The wood is soft and rotting, but it doesn’t give way.  After the tomatoes, they move on to the zucchini. Our largesse. In the pall of a thicket just beyond the garden a fifth stands, its body slight and shadowy. The other fawn, but as a cloud ducks the sun and a young light comes I can see that it’s not, it is an old one, the early markings of this year’s larger antlers. A blanched face, he emerges shy for the feast. He stands on the edge of the dark overgrowth and in the white light he is particulated, smoke in the air. He watches his progeny gorge themselves. Get fat to get through the winter, if they get there. Season starts October 1. Licenses cost twenty-two dollars for state residents. He knows this, the old one.  He is cautious, from a different time. Like you, I think. Eat your toast, I think, and look to where you would be, the seat that still wears the indentation of your body. The oak chair with a memory of you in relief. 

 By hunting season, the gourds will be in. Orange flesh melting on black dirt brings the memory of what you once loved. That pie that I made just for you. You did love it, I tell myself, insecure even in absence. With the shifting wind comes the smell of cardamom and ginger. 

No gun, but there are still some unspent shells in a drawer. Somewhere. I could throw them on the ground and hope for a pop. At a campfire as a kid—I smile at that thought. No carcasses that day but bullets tossed like bullets. We were happy without. Even in lean times you laughed at that. The fire made the woods dark.  Faces in weird clarity.  The day was stripped bare. We tossed bullets like bullets, through the fog. Off to a good start but they hit without a bang. We threw and gathered them, us kids. Later I slept against your leg. You kept your hand on the gun. Your age then is now young. It has been longer without you than with. 

The curtains feint in slack air. I push them aside. The deer eat on. I pick a fleck of black on the window, shut one eye, and aim. Get the old one right in my sightline. Cock my head, pop my tongue. Then I laugh. As long as I watch the deer they can’t leave. That was my trouble with you. I let my sight slip, then and now. My eyelids soften here on the leather chair facing the window. Dreaming, the man of the house waits patiently for the past to arrive. 

Alexander Fredman lives in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Post Road, Heavy Feather Review, and Hobart.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

It Wouldn’t Hurt You

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By Claire Hopple

They are burying him in a red nose and overlarge shoes and a rainbow wig, all of which they found inside the chest up in his attic. His mistress is the first to scream at the big reveal. Then some kids who look like they’ve been playing in the mud even though they’re wearing their dressy clothes reserved for special occasions. I consider joining them. Screaming has a certain allure to it, and nobody knows what to make of this configuration in front of us. A good release is in order.

He would’ve hated this final act. They did it because they all wholeheartedly agreed he deserved it. These are his children, mind you. Grown children. They felt Jackson deserved this treatment because he was not a very nice person. Joe, the firstborn, said it was okay. Joe gave them the all-clear, and that was all they needed. They thought he’d never looked more appropriate, more himself, in this getup. They had to tuck in the wig at the sides before they closed his cardboard coffin for good. 

Now here we are, incurably witnessing them hoist the coffin up, over, and down into a freshly dug hole for a somewhat un-fresh body.

We don’t really concentrate on Mikey, the youngest son, drinking one of his kid’s unnaturally hued beverages from a plastic container in the shape of a barrel, strips of foil lingering around the top’s circumference. 

Their dad found himself at a safe distance from safety one too many times. Jackson was struck by lightning while opening the garage door of his mistress’s house, we’re told. Everybody tried not to read into it. You could say the man had a death wish long before that, but that’s the one that did the trick. 

I stare Mikey and his plastic barrel down a little too hard and he gives me this look like: What? It’s not as if I went looking for this drink. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to picture Mikey rummaging through his father’s valuables. We met in front of the dunk tank at our town’s carnival. His wife had left years earlier. Our relationship is not of great importance to you, and I’d like to keep it that way. 

These exploits might sound rather morbid––maybe even cruel and unusual, to use the government’s phrasing––but I am accustomed to morbid. 

A teacher of mine once recited a famous quote that went something like: Every time an old person dies, it’s like a small library is burning down. And that quote really stuck with me. So I moved to an apartment beside a crematorium in case their ashes of wisdom would float over and stick with me too. Plus I’ve been waiting my whole life to become an old woman. Imagine living long enough that everything becomes nostalgia. Nostalgia is magic because we know we make it through what’s already happened. We’re safe. The phrase “your whole life is ahead of you” means you should be overwhelmed if not frightened, whereas “your whole life is behind you” means you’ve worked hard and you can rest now. You can be your best and worst self––sometimes simultaneously––without having to make excuses anymore. Every day, I’m one step closer. We all have our rituals. We’ve entangled ourselves with violent affection. And these rituals will lead to our downfall.

We live in a town that’s famous for its number of Arby’s restaurants per capita, if that tells you anything. 

Mikey says we’ll get an inheritance sometime in the near future. The overdue bills tell me it’s already the near future. Arguing with paper gets you nowhere. There is ample evidence. 

Tim, the middle brother, decides right then and there to interrupt the minister––who’s actually a friend of theirs that got some kind of religious certificate from the internet and won’t let anyone forget about it––to speak his peace.

“Our subject was loaded. And we were, we are, his blood relatives. That has to mean something,” Tim says.

“A shopping spree,” Mikey says.

“Something else,” I say.

Joe approaches the grave and throws his phone into the hole beside his father’s body. “There will be little to no consequences for these actions,” he says, inching back to his place in the crowd.

“I never put much stock in communication,” Mikey agrees.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave early. My cat is sick,” says a distant relative.

“But you don’t have a cat,” says another relative. 

“It wouldn’t hurt you to at least pretend,” says the first relative.

Jackson’s wife clears her throat. Here comes.

“He was a wonderful husband. I don’t care what anyone says,” she slurs.

We’re unsure whether she said too little or too much. Some of us were expecting a showdown, albeit a one-directional showdown.

A reporter peeks his head above the crowd for a few seconds, scribbling notes. 

“Get a good look,” she says. Then she whispers to the coffin, “I know you’re in there.” 

You will notice we’re all here for different reasons, and these reasons have shackled themselves to each of us. We’re losing patience with these very reasons as we speak.

“And that’s how you host a burial. Piece of cake,” says the fake minister. 

Jackson’s wife, Joe’s and Tim’s and Mikey’s mother––she was a person before any of them came along, and her name is Cassie––will disappear after this. What they’ll find is a used box of hair dye, some rusty scissors, and a pile of old clothes in the single-seater bathroom at one of the (almost) innumerable Arby’s locations.

You can call this guy, Terry, and he’ll make you a new life just like that. Or so Mikey will say to me after his mom’s gone missing. It will be too soon to tell whether she will ever come back. It will always be too soon to tell, just like it will always be the near future. 

In the meantime, Mikey will keep a copy of his father’s will and testament under his pillow right next to his high school soccer trophy. He will say sleeping atop these objects doesn’t hurt one bit.


Claire Hopple is the author of six books and the fiction editor at XRAY. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Asheville, NC. More at clairehopple.com.