by Kyle Hemmings
(May 1993-Feb. 2006)
I always wanted a dog. Not just any dog. I wanted Ginger, our neighbor‘s dog. Maybe because a kid like me didn’t have many friends, real friends, and a dog never goes out of its way to diss you, the way Herman Freeley did, who lifted weights in front of his fly-faced girlfriend in a garage smelling of grease and dust and old car exhaust.
One time, in front of his friends at a party, his parents away at Coney Island, he challenged me to pull down my pants and compare dick sizes. I walked away. wanting no part of it. All his friends, including a circle of older Freshman girls drunk on cider, started calling me and Jimmy McWalsh pussies. I used to hear them laughing in my sleep. Dogs, I thought, made more sense.
Ginger was a Boston Terrier, with an black wet nose and a shaggy, checkered coat, She had human eyes that were large and black, pleading for scraps of my attention, attention her owner, a kid seven years younger than me, would not feed her.
Somewhere towards the end of spring, Ginger started to wait for me outside the main door of PS 13, and strangers on the way home would stoop down and pet Ginger, and ask me all kinds of questions, and I told them I had her since she was a pup. I felt important.
So, my parents sat me down one night, and my mother did most of the talking while my father listened. “You know,” my mother said, rubbing one side of her face where there was big, blotchy hive, “your father and I think you’re spending too much time with Cory Anderson’s dog. After all, it is his.”
I waited for her to say something more, something final. But she kept fidgeting with her blouse, and my father kept peeking out the window. Then, he came clopping back in his oversized felt slippers and asked me if I wanted them to buy me a dog. No, I said. No need to. With a red spider-like pattern spreading down the side where she scratched, my mother’s face perked up.
“We’re not telling you that you can’t play with the dog, just not so much.”
“Uh-huh.”
Not so much, said dad.
Too much, said mom.
Uh-huh.
My mother looked at my father. Maybe for stronger words of advice. But none came. They just smiled at me as if the whole thing was settled. It was settled before they spoke to me.
Well, later I heard that my older brother, Sean, who worked as a mechanic’s helper at the Exon, got into a big fight with Herman Freeley because Herman dissed me to my brother’s face. You have to understand that my brother never took shit from no one, even though he didn’t lift weights and all, and supposedly, he kicked Herman’s ass so bad that his face looked like some platter of my mother’s spaghetti with too much marinara sauce. The kind that my father always complained about was like chewing string. So, Herman, I figured, who was now old enough to drive, would never bother me again, and I couldn’t kick his ass the way my brother did.
So, one day, a sunny day, not one cloud to disturb the sky, me and Ginger went riding down Parker’s lane on my Schwinn, Ginger sat up front in a wicker basket tied to the handlebars, one I made from scratch, she, perched so prim like some Terrier diva too proud to sniff the ground.
There were hardly any cars and we were just taking in the view of those white sturdy houses with gardens of robust colors, and before you know it, I heard some car behind us, slowing down, engine grumbling and a gang of loudmouths jeering us.
I turned around and it was Herman Freeley and his obnoxious friends who always pretended they were gangsta rappers or something, acting like big shit wise guys who weren’t worth a dime, and the car pulled up, veered towards us; I steered away towards the curb, and Herman zoomed down the street, me watching him, cursing him like rain on a barbecue, and he turned around again, edging closer behind me, now, directly on my side, saying from the driver’s window, “Where’s your brother, now, No-Nuts;” so, I pedaled like crazy and he was sticking besides me like sealant, Ginger barking, up on her elbows, and suddenly, he swerved into my bike, Ginger thrown from the basket like flying popcorn, her head splattered against the window of a parked car, and me spitting up a broken tooth from the pavement.
I picked myself up, ran to Ginger, noticed the blood pooling from the back of her head, some weak attempts to move but then none, and Freeley driving around again, this time, no one yelling; I ran to the front of his car, stood there trembling, hurting like I imagined a television cowboy shot full of holes, yet ready to take on the world, the brakes screeched, but too late; you can’t get away with this I thought, and for one everlasting instant, someone yelling, stop the fucking car, you’re going to kill him; it’s too late, and the feel of hard heavy metal smashing against my knees, blood sputtering from below, tossed into the air, floating in space like I could find Ginger a chance in a million, maybe the both of us free wheeling in space forever or maybe me and Ginger on some cosmic roller coaster ride, wearing blindfolds, afraid to take them off, picturing me and her bouncing off clouds, and without the numbness traveling up my spine, and on the way down, thinking the pavement, hitting it, how my skull would explode, couldn’t open my eyes, and Ginger
Lucretia M.
(May 1952-January 2006)
I am a square man living in a rectangular house situated in a neighborhood you might describe as trapezoidal by county drawn boundaries, zoning laws. The zoning laws are something I have little control over. I am a square man, thirsting, a burning proclivity for circles, yet at times, I find myself fluctuating, oscillating between choosing the solitariness of a square design or the envelopment of a circular one.
You cannot cheat or become tricky by claiming you can compromise by fitting yourself, your person, within the confines of various formed polygons, ie., hexagons, heptagons, octagons, what have you, within the confines, the demands imposed by a marriage.
In the last mentioned forms you are enclosed and you are not afforded the communal living, the communal space a circle forces upon you. You might think of it this way: in a circle you have a democracy, a sharing, thrust upon you. Walk around the perimeter of a circle on any given day and sooner or later, you will converse or touch another person, feeling the same as you, terrified or tired of the monotonous expanse the area of a circle affords.
In a circle, you are forced, if you attempt to travel to its interior, to recognize the other and deal with that person, your spouse, your lover, even your dog, Ginger, as someone who shares your circle, ie., the situation of being enclosed as a unit.
In a polygon, tailored fit to suit your form, you are your own dictator. A polygon is your own private Idaho. A polygon is an intensely private matter and is not subject to the rules and regulations of zoning boards, public committees, public superintendents who pontificate endlessly etc. In a polygon you can masturbate dreaming of that hunk or vixen without the fear of someone enclosed in their own private square watching you. In this sense, a square design allows you the luxury of touching yourself, but not the richness, the diversity, of being touched by others.
Never get squares and circles mixed up. Never mistake a veteran isolationist believing the world is still flat for a blushing newly wed dreaming of swimming around the world with her husband. Never mistake a hexagon for something oblong or round. There is a big difference.
As I was saying. I am a man like any other except that I work in a bank, and I am club footed. On some days, when I am not torn between circles and squares, I am sure headed and rock-ribbed. I once had a wife who was soft hearted and distant. I am a man just like you, if you extend the definition of man to include both male and female. Think of a Venn diagram. Or one large circle with two enclosed within it. I am a man just like you, except I once had a square wife and you probably still do. If you are a woman, think in transpositions.
It is not easy declaring that the rectangular design of one‘s living arrangements was a failure, did not come without reflecting on past experiences, mistakes, upon the exact consequences of entering into a circular arrangement but insisting it be polygonal in shape and dimensions.
My wife and I were once two square people living apart in a house of similar design until her intentions burst forth, like a hidden circle trapped with a polygon, turning bold and spherical, the kind you see on the back of cereal boxes, those children’s puzzles, and she ended her life. I found her hanging in the bathroom, a room with dimensions, five feet wide, six feet long, yes, a rectangular shape; it was very much a private decision.
The moment I found her strung up in that bathroom, I did not perform the practical sort of action one expects to perform in the heat of an emergency. I did not run to the phone nor did I free her from the horizontal pole, a very sturdy one, I might add, approximately seven cubic centimeters thick. Nor did I go about with the usual attempts at grooming, washing, brushing one’s teeth, certainly did not disrespect her by disrobing and sitting on the toilet while she hung suspended like a surrealist film maker’s idea of a mute puppet. After all, I thought, this was once my wife.
I simply stood there watching the swaying of her body as it approached the rhythm of a metronome or the clicking of an invisible clock one might hear on old game shows, the repeats shown late at night. It was the statement of a body reaching its goal of inertia. The feet dangling, the slippers half-off, the arms slack, the head bent at roughly a 15 degree angle, described, I thought, an attempt at a half-circle, an arc. But no, I realized. Her feet traced a straight, even though jagged, line, one-fourth of the perimeter of a square, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
I can’t tell how you long I stood there. I can only tell you that I approximated the movements as five inches either way, give or take one-eighth of an inch, and slowing down, perhaps only one-sixteenth of one. And without a ruler.
Richard M.
(May 1982-)
Think of a man who obsesses over his own death, so much so, that each day he rushes home from work, pets his dog, Ginger, spreads the pages of the day’s paper, and looks for his name in the obituaries. For him, it is like thinking, searching crazily for that one word in a crossword puzzle, a word with four easily pronounced syllables, that he would have no trouble remembering if he were not so frantic, so coiled within himself, so hot as a live wire.
He now misses work, doctor appointments, internet chat rooms, dates with women who tell stories about themselves or disrobe after admitting they had just come from a funeral. He stares vacantly at the TV, with at least 7 different papers with 21 pages of obituaries lying at his feet, wrinkled, crumpled, some puffed like clumsy attempts at building a pup tent. None contains his name.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this could be me. I’m thinking this could be Richard.
He becomes increasingly withdrawn, forgets to shave, cook food or microwaves it only half-way; his buttons are crooked, his shoe laces only loosely looped. His only hope is to buy tomorrow’s paper. He wanders the streets, pondering whether there could be anything deeper than life itself. Life is a boil on the neck. Life is as orgasmic as taking a foreign language course on CD. Life is a serpentine course that comes to no climax or amazing victory. Life is a speechless enterprise.
And all this goes to show that there is a vast difference between being somewhere and thinking about being somewhere. Or perhaps one should not take great pains to find something that will only find you, just when you least expect it, just when you finished your morning coffee, just when your doctor started you on a new angina regimen, just when you decided to give up on crossword puzzles or smoking, just when you decided to give up jelly doughnuts and Slim Jims, just when you decided to walk into someone’s funeral without clothes and jump into the casket next to the body, just like Richard’s present girlfriend does, just when you decided to look at things afresh, like a praying mantis on its back, like a Japanese beetle overturned at the bottom of a jar.