Some of my short stories
(none of which are actually about,um, shorts ☞)
Don’t say Yes!
Steve kept repeating it to himself as he ran across the church lawn toward the entry’s double glass doors. He rushed inside and ran stumbling down a hallway until he spotted a sign announcing the wedding in the Main Chamber. An elderly janitor was pushing a broom slowly down the hallway, Steve grabbed the man by his shirt and gasped “the Main Chamber, where is it?”.
The janitor's eyes widened in fright as he blurted out directions for the madman running through the labyrinth of hallways on his way.
Arriving at the Main Chamber, Steve pushed open the swinging oak doors with a great bang, startling the hushed gathering before screaming aloud, “Don’t say Yes!” He bent, placing his hands on trembling knees ,heaving chest barely containing the rasping breaths escaping from his punished lungs. He had run two blocks from where he left his car after getting directions from Cindy’s ex-roommate.
He finally stood to look at the assembled gathering, not quite registering or recognizing any of the faces glancing at him with looks ranging from puzzlement and amusement in the first few rows, to red faced anger and outrage toward the front where the wedding party stood still half facing the minister.
“Don’t do this Cindy” Steve rasped. “I still love you, I have always loved you, and I will always love you.
I have loved you for a thousand lifetimes and I will love you for all eternity. I know you love me too, how many times have you said it? I was wrong to not contact you after we fought, but I was in prison in Mexico on a trumped up charge for a year until I could prove my innocence!”
A few of the people next to the aisles stepped back slightly at Steve’s mention of prison and his disheveled appearance, he had started walking slowly toward the bride while still pleading tearfully.His face was flushed from exertion and emotion, his lanky brown hair fell partly over his eyes as he continued talking only to the bride .
“Don’t you remember how good we were together, Cindy? When we made love, I swear, I never wanted to even think about being with another woman! And you said I was the best lover you ever had, you wanted us to be together always!”
At the mention of sex, several of the women in attendance visibly blushed, and underneath her veil, tears could be seen streaming down the bride’s face. In the hush that followed Steve’s last outburst, a sharp sound rang out. It was the groom, clapping loudly and slowly. As all eyes turned on him, he spoke directly to Steve:
“Sir, your speech is truly moving and heartfelt, you’ve upset my bride-to-be tremendously, not to mention our assembled family and friends. I’m afraid though, that you have mistaken the church for another. My wife, if she remains willing to become that, is named Margarita, not Cindy”
The groom flipped up the veil to reveal an obviously Hispanic woman, who was still shaking with emotion. She spoke now:
“ Whoever is your love, Cindy, she would be crazy to marry anyone else. It is obvious that you love her very much, and I think that is the most romantic thing I ever hear. I hope you can find her to tell her these things.”
Steve stood in the middle of the aisle in shock, feeling ready to faint. He feebly asked:
“Isn’t this the First Baptist Church?”
There was a low murmur from the crowd as the minister stepped down from the altar to speak softly to Steve.
“Son, there’s another Baptist Church five blocks from here on Seventh Street. As far as I know, the wedding there is not scheduled until later this evening. If were you, I’d try to contact this Cindy at home,or at least somewhere else than interrupting her ceremony like you did with this one.”
There was a light ripple of laughter and applause as a red faced Steve slowly backed out of the room while murmuring apologies to the bride, groom and guests.
The minister strode back up to the altar and clipped on his small microphone.
“Now then, if there are no other objections, do you Margarita, take this man….”
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Surviving Marilyn (formerly called The Blues Got me Through)
Steve drove up to the darkened shell of what used to be his house. Drunk enough to be surprised at the blackness below and all the way down island, it slowly sunk in:
Oh yeah, the hurricane.
Weeks ago he’d huddled in the bathtub with his wife and two baby daughters while class 3 hurricane Marilyn destroyed their home. Prayers were murmured in the terrifying calamity, promises to a Being whose name was usually appended to a curse.
Let me live through this and I’ll change. I’m not sure what, but I will.
He lived, but the house didn’t. A small piece of roof over the bathroom and one bedroom remained; enough to crawl into when the wind finally stopped. Flipped the mattress over, found a dry spot, covered the family with a raincoat to keep warm while they passed out exhausted.
A few days after the previous hurricane, Luis, he’d called Shirley in Boston where she had taken the girls to her mother’s.
“Power is on again, it was only out three days. Why don’t you bring the girls back?”
A cool, level response: “You’re sure it’s safe?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Let me talk to my babies.”
His daughters were everything. Having them turned his reckless life around, the world was about more than just him for a change. Things had gone South with the wife, but subconsciously he held out hope that somehow their mutual love for the children could fix things between them.
The next day there was a message on the answering machine informing him that they’d be on a flight the following afternoon. He set about cleaning the house, in the aftermath of Luis, there had been no power to run the vacuum.
The day of their arrival, he’d bought flowers, changed the linens on all the beds, and had just toweled off from a shower when the phone rang. It was Howie, his boss from R&R Real Estate.
“Dude, are you watching the weather channel?
“No man, why?”
“We’re getting hit by Hurricane Marilyn, it’s headed directly for us!”
He cursed, hung up the phone and quickly turned on the TV. Sure as shit, there was the warning in boldface type plastered across the screen. The talking head was droning on about the unusually busy hurricane season, how Marilyn was the thirteenth named storm in 1995 so far, so close on the heels of Luis; blah,blah,blah.
The family was already en route, there was no way to warn them not to come. He headed for the airport feeling guilty.
When they deplaned, the girls came running into his arms at the gate, giggling and both chattering away at once. Shirley let the moment pass, then turned her cheek for a perfunctory kiss. Her beauty still turned heads from strangers in the airport, Steve picked up on a few envious glances from other men. If you only knew he thought bitterly.
Once in the car, he told her about the approaching hurricane. She turned in her seat and gave him a look that spoke volumes.
“ Honest babe, I just found out about it today, same as you.”
She sighed, then looked out her window.
“I only came back so the girls could be with their father.”
That summed it up, there was no chance of any reconciliation in her mind. They survived, but naturally the disaster was his fault. She took the girls on the first flight available back to the mainland.
He played and replayed the whole scenario for days afterward, wondering what if, if only, but the answer was always the same: I fucked up. Other couples comfort each other in times like this, why couldn’t’ we?
Faced with the depressing prospect of another night alone in the cold, wet shell, he decided to sleep in the car. He pulled the seat down making a blanket of his jacket and passed out. An hour later, a backfiring car startled him awake, grumpy and disoriented. The car was cramped, so he stumbled down the stairs and fumbled his key into the lock.
The mattress in the bedroom was wet from a leak in the tarp covering the house. He groaned aloud:
“Just shoot me now, please! I can’t stand this!”
Groping in the darkness, he found a blanket and pillow. The bathroom floor was just big enough to stretch out on, at least it was dry. He had run the generator during the afternoon enough to crank the fridge and freezer, had he stuck any beer inside? Opened the door and found nothing, but in the freezer was an ice cold Heineken. Yes!
Feeling his way back into the bathroom, for company turned on a battery powered Sony Watchman. Flipped through the few available signals, got a clear picture from the PBS station from Puerto Rico. In progress was a program; “Eric Clapton: Nothing But the Blues: An ‘In the Spotlight Special’ “. For the next hour, watched Clapton play the Blues and talk about the greats who influenced him. There were clips of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, and B. B. King as well as Eric with Cream, the Dominos and by himself, playing cuts from his recently released CD, “From the Cradle”. A (lifesaving) onetime showing, it wasn’t available anywhere for purchase for years.
Popping open the beer, he smiled to himself in the darkness. Things had looked bleak, but he’d survived. The Blues got him through!
Power was eventually restored, the house rebuilt, eventually he left St. Thomas and the Caribbean behind. He and Shirley finally divorced, but he stayed a presence in his daughters’ lives, they were still everything that mattered .
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Guerrilla Gardening
The Mexican sun was blinding and hot. If it was this uncomfortable at nine a.m. I
didn't even want to think about the afternoon. I was sweating like the proverbial pig, partly from the heat and lack of
shade, mostly from a hangover: too much Don Julio, not enough sleep.
I was in the teaching garden in Tijuana’s Colonia Obrero listening to Kevin Jones
explain the concept of Guerrilla Gardening:
“Guerrilla gardening is a centuries old technique for beautifying and enhancing
barren, unused land.”
I couldn’t resist:
“But how do they get the apes to put on floppy hats and gardening gloves?”
He gave me a look, then paused to let me translate his English into Spanish for our
students before continuing. I was intrigued. ”Gardening” and “guerrilla” aren’t usually mentioned together. Extreme
cases of guerrilla gardening involve planting seeds or crops on someone else’s property, usually without their
permission.
I met Kevin and his lovely partner Jeska Summerfield through the Corazon program in Tijuana where locals qualified for
volunteer-built houses by attending gardening classes that emphasized recycling and sustainability concepts. I spend
most of my free time in Mexico and was happy to offer my services on Saturday mornings.
After class we’d have the attendees make seedballs as a way to disperse plants and vegetation, giving Mother Nature a helping human hand.
Masanobu Fukuoka , the Japanese experimental farmer has been credited with the reintroduction of the seedball
technique as a way to rapidly sow crops.
Our budding warriors placed red clay as well as dark brown compost into a large metal mixing bowl and add water.
Then several women pushed their hands into the mass and started kneading it like so much tortilla flour. Once a firm
consistency was achieved, they rolled it into grape-sized balls at the same time placing various clumps of seeds
inside before setting them aside to dry. We would have them make at least one hundred balls every class, and each
student would take a baggie with instructions to throw them wherever they thought something should be growing. By
mixing seeds with equal parts of clay, compost and water, then rolling them into small balls, anyone can toss them,
once dried, onto land that they want to plant (even over fences).
The clay protects the seeds from insects ,birds, and elements until a rain melts the mixture and the compost provides
fertile ground for germination.
One of the earliest examples of guerrilla gardening date back to the 1600s in England where a group known as the
Diggers advocated land reform by actively squatting on unused property belonging to landed gentry and cultivating
crops. They were met with resistance by the landowners and eventually evicted.
The figure most associated with guerrilla gardening is John ”Johnny Appleseed” Chapman. His image is one of a
wanderer scattering apple seeds throughout the frontier Midwest, but in actuality he planted whole nurseries and left
them in the care of others. The concept is the thing, scattering seeds as a form of non violent direct action.
The first recorded use of the term “guerrilla gardening” came from Liz Christy and her Green Guerrillas in New York
City. In 1973 they were planting window boxes and seedball-bombing vacant lots. They saw one particular lot as a
potential garden, and went to the city to inquire about official use of the land. Meanwhile, volunteers had begun
hauling garbage and rubble out, spreading donated topsoil, installing fencing and began planting. Within a few months,
the city approved the site for rental ($1 a month), and the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden was official.
It was started with raised vegetable beds, and soon shrubs and trees were added. Today the Liz Christy garden in
New York has ponds, groves of trees, several hundred varieties of flowers, and is tended by volunteers. It is open to the
public year round and is a prototype of an urban community garden.
In Venice California, my brother Todd saw a neglected parcel of land belonging to the U.S. Post Office across the street
from his home. On his own, he ordered two truckloads of topsoil and had them delivered and spread around after
clearing the area of discarded trash and rubble. When one postal worker asked “do you have permission to do this?”
Todd quickly responded “ yes”, to which the postal worker then asked “ can we help?”
Next, the city of Los Angeles donated 200 bougainvillea plants, dropping them off at Todd’s door, and he mounted
them to the chain link fence surrounding the property, where they remain beautifully today. By posting flyers around
the neighborhood, Todd was able to recruit local volunteers to help out with preparing and maintaining the
garden and the postal employees helped further with access to their water line for necessary irrigation.
When I asked Todd what prompted him to start the project, he surprised me by recalling an old embroidered sampler
in our parent’s kitchen when we were kids. It had stitched in crimson thread the old quote from Dr. Thomas Fuller
“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.”
Before you set out to replant the planet, be aware that the law usually frowns on unauthorized use of someone else’s
private property (it’s called trespassing). In the previously mentioned example of the English Diggers, most of the time the farmers were arrested, run off or burned out.
A few years ago, actress Daryl Hannah was among several protesters forcibly removed by police from the South Central
Farm, fourteen acres of urban garden located in South Central Los Angeles, an area more associated with rap artists
and gangbangers than crops. The area was originally acquired by the city through eminent domain and eventually
granted by revocable permit to the L.A.
Regional Foodbank, a private, non-profit food distribution network. The Foodbank got the soil tested and approved for
urban gardening, and then set up requirements for income and location. With those guidelines in place, a call was sent
out to local farmers who began farming sustain gardens. While the Farm became the largest urban garden in the
United States and provided jobs for hundreds and food for many more, the understanding was supposed to be that it
was temporary. The original owner, a Ralph Horowitz, had the right to repurchase the land, and after many years of
lawsuits between the farmers and him, he was granted ownership and bulldozed the Farm out of existence.
For those who prefer their rebelliousness tempered with caution, it is possible to cooperate with or even receive
assistance from the government. On a drive back to Orange County from Mexico recently I was stunned by the vibrant
colors of some of the flowers blooming on the hillsides. In checking with Jack Broadbent, the “Office Chief of
Roadside Management and Landscape Architectural Standards” (he laughed and said he hasn’t put that on his business
cards) for California’s Department of Transportation he suggested that the public can get involved with planting along
the State’s highways through the Adopt a Highway program. When I asked about the areas well beyond the roadsides,
he felt that it was merely Mother Nature healing herself with natural growth after the devastating wildfires we suffered
a past autumn.
Me, I prefer to think that some “Green Guerrillas” snuck onto the hillsides at night and scattered the seeds that
bloomed into the colorful vegetation we enjoy today.
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On Turning 60 ( or Why I Can't Hear)
“If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself”
I used to think Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra said that, but it was jazz pianist Eubie Blake, who lived to be 100 years old.
Okay, 60 down, 40 left to go. Should I start taking care? Nah, I’ve gotten this far living with somewhat reckless abandon,
why stop now?
You’ve heard the phrase “wine,women and song”?
I never was much of a singer, so I concentrated on booze and broads, er, I mean wine and women.No less a luminary
than George Raft once stated “ part of it went on gambling, part of it went on women. The rest I spent foolishly”
(explaining how he went through ten million dollars).
Something happened to me when I was around 10 years old. I’d had earaches and colds,and, as was common back
then had my tonsils removed as a preventative measure to avoid future infections. It didn’t completely stop earaches
though, and one night my worried parents called our doctor when I kept complaining of pain. He arrived with his little
black bag,( they still did housecalls when I was a kid) took one look at my eardrums,and informed my folks that he
would have to operate right there in the house, he didn’t want to take the chance on my drums bursting and causing
brain damage( I would spend years self-inflicting damage to my brain after I grew older, so he needn’t have worried)on
the way to the hospital.
He removed a grey metal tank from his bag, and hooked it up to a mask that covered my mouth and nose. “This will put
you to sleep” he said. “Count to ten,and you’ll be out”. I think I got up to 45 or 50 when the doctor told my parents
“ hold him down” and then put an instrument in my ear and lanced the eardrum. I’m surprised my screams didn’t
shatter the windows,and then I vaguely heard him say “ okay, turn him over”.
What? What? Mommy, Daddy , NO!
My poor parents were both crying hard as they held me down to let the doctor lance the other drum, and then
blessedly it was over. From that moment on, my eardrums were scarred and I’d spend a lifetime of learning to read lips
and guessing at missed words in conversations.
It didn’t help my hearing that my career choices involved overly loud sounds. After a year of college,I went on the
nightclub circuit with a rock band as their roadie. For three years, my job was to sit in front of the PA speakers and hear
how the band sounded…too much bass? Not enough midrange? Are the guitar amps cutting through? After the band
broke up, I traveled to Puerto Rico to work as a deejay in the burgeoning Disco scene. After a few years of that, I found
work on the ramps of airports parking everything from single engine to jet planes. No wonder I can’t sing, I can’t hear!
I finally broke down and bought a hearing aid type device last year after my current boss complained that I couldn’t
hear him asking me to do extra work (well…), actually it was out of a sense of frustration at not hearing the sounds on
TV and missed words of songs on the radio. I inserted the Magic Ear or whatever it’s called, and it worked well
enough,but guess what? It also amplified a lot of background noise as well, urban street noise, fan or air conditioning
hum, or people chattering away about nothing.Maybe I haven’t missed out on all that much after all.
Do I have regrets? Not really. I’ve traveled the world, made lots of dear friends, become a parent to three lovely
children and have loved and been loved by countless beautiful women. I’ve learned a lot and hope to keep learning n
new things everyday until my last breath is taken. If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably live my life exactly the way I
already have, perhaps taking a little bit better care of myself, but I’m looking forward to 100!