Month: July 2025

Allegra by Michael Bloor

(Our longtime friend in writing and fine gentleman, Michael Bloor, pictured, is our guest writer for July. This week we present five by Mick. Please see his bio at the bottom of this page–Leila)

Allegra

When John started his apprenticeship at Sowter & Son, Allegra was already working in Old Man Sowter’s office as typist/receptionist/assistant book-keeper. John would see her every morning as she made her way through the workshop to the rear office: Allegra kept office hours, whereas John had to clock-on an hour earlier, at eight o’clock. Back then, in the 1960s, any woman walking through an engineering workshop could expect a cacophony of whistles and cat-calls from the machinists and the fitters. John was struck by the anomaly that Allegra’s progress through the workshop was accompanied by no more noise than the usual screeches, bangs and clatterings of a metal-working shop. In fact, Old Man Sowter had previously told Big Arthur, the foreman, that any man found to be disrespectful of his niece, Allegra, would be on a warning of future dismissal. Newcomer John, however, assumed that the muteness of his fellow workers was a tribute to Allegra’s ethereal beauty. For himself, at any rate, an awed silence seemed the only immediately appropriate response.

John subsequently gathered that, although she was The Old Man’s niece, her surname wasn’t Sowter: she was ‘Allegra Heron.’ Such an appropriate name. John was a hill-walker: every Sunday morning that the weather allowed, he’d catch The Ramblers’ Special from the town’s railway station into the Derbyshire Dales. He loved the swift-running, pebbly rivers and brooks of the dales. Often, he’d stop for minutes at a time to watch the progress of a heron through the waters. The heron seemed an exotic bird to be dwelling in the quiet, domesticated English countryside: head held high and rigid, a long-legged, purposeful, solitary walk, somehow both remote and yet vividly aware of her surroundings. By his machine, John would feign activity while secretly watching Allegra Heron’s similarly exotic progress across the dingy shop-floor in her swinging, open, Afghan coat, her pale suede boots, short, flared, red skirt and skinny top.

As the apprentice, John was the workshop dogsbody and so would be dispatched to the office on errands for the foreman. Naïve, but not wholly inexperienced thanks to past youth club discos, John was able to make use of these occasional office visits to strike up an acquaintanceship with ethereal Allegra. After a few weeks, John felt they’d bonded over a common preference for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ over ‘Yesterday.’ So he suggested a Saturday date at the Rams Head pub, where Long John Baldry and The Steampacket would be playing in the big upstairs room.

She agreed! He was to pick her up from the house at seven o’clock.

Apprentice wages were only eleven quid a week, but he felt well turned-out in his black cord jacket and Ben Sherman shirt. He arrived ten minutes late and a bit out of breath, her parents’ house being out in the suburbs and some distance from the bus stop. She answered the door, already booted and coated, with a warm smile. She stepped onto the gravel drive and stopped:

‘Where the Hell’s your bloody car?’

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).

Saragun Springs Presents: The Drifter

(Header image “Mary” by the Drifter and “Drifter” by the Drifter)

Thinkings Upon Hermione, Shakespeare’s Queen; Or

A Phantom of Delight

“She was a phantom of delight / When first she gleamed

upon my sight; / A lovely apparition, sent / To be a moment’s

ornament…” – William Wordsworth

This week The Drifter offers thoughts upon one of Shakespeare’s heroines in honor of Leila Allison, a poet who keeps a large picture of Shakespeare in a prominent spot in her workspace, and sometimes can feel The Bard’s eyes following her around the room as she creates.

Such a fact is not paranoia nor hubris; it is a full-on engagement with The Bard that is a rare thing these days, despite The Bard’s continuing presence seemingly everywhere. Despite the fact that he is “everywhere” as the Western World’s preeminent writer, there are few creative writers these days who have the courage, the ability, or the dedication to engage with The Bard in the way Leila Allison has, and does.

The following reflections concern one of Shakespeare’s lesser known major characters (overshadowed by Cleopatra and Juliet, among others) who would have won her author immortal literary fame of a certain species all on her own, even if Will had never written a line about Juliet, or Cleopatra.

Now bring on the Queen.

Specifically, Queen Hermione.

Shakespeare’s Hermione is a beautiful queen, and a beauty

queen, filled with virtue (overflowing goodness), steady and true (and pregnant).

But her goodness makes her vulnerable to other, less good, people.

She becomes a total victim of her husband’s crazed jealousy.

She does him a favor. Talks his friend into staying over, like he asked her to.

Next, because he got his wish, the king gets paranoid.

He starts thinking the two of them (best friend and wife) must be up to

something together, if the friend agreed that fast.

The king’s paranoia undergoes the snowball effect.

Her odor and her very beauty begin to scream inside him; soon he even starts believing that his friend is the father of his own child; which may be as twisted as it gets on that level.

This king’s self-centered, power-hungry delusions (believing things that

aren’t true) lead him to the basest cruelty.

To wanting to crush whoever won’t do what he says. And so he does all kinds of nasty things to Queen Hermione. Up to and including putting her in chains, throwing her in prison, killing her son, and taking away her daughter right after she’s born. The Queen dies from grief.

But at the end of the play, William Shakespeare gives his good queen her due, as if he couldn’t let her go just yet.

Some of her fans and followers have constructed a statue of her. She rises from this statue of herself, in front of everyone: resurrected, which means brought back from the dead.

Brought back to life.

This is how she said goodbye to the King when he sent her to prison:

Adieu, my Lord:

I never wished to see you sorry; now

I trust I shall.

Anyone who can remain that calm when falsely accused and sent to prison for it has got style in Bukowski’s sense of the term; and can stand out; is one of the best.

We all get falsely accused at times (maybe not sent to prison for it; maybe so).

Someone like Queen Hermione can show you how to act when “they”

are coming down on you.

This is one thing Jesus meant when he said to turn the other cheek.

When they’ve got you, whether you did it or not, your best bet is to play it cool.

Both inside yourself AND with them.

Shakespeare is also saying there are resurrections that happen to us WHILE WE ARE STILL ALIVE, IN THIS WORLD, LIVING OUR NORMAL LIFE.

We get reborn every single day (we have another chance tomorrow) or even every second that ticks by in some cases.

(Sometimes time speeds up; other times, it goes way more slowly…but who here has ever seen it stop…)

And the gentle Bard surely seems to be implying there will likely be another,

very different, resurrection at the end of our own earthly lives.

Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter: This bare bones retelling of Queen Hermione’s life was written from memory; as such, The Drifter takes no responsibility for any minor (and likely meaningless) little things he may have gotten wrong in briefly recounting this narrative.

The Drifter first read THE WINTER’S TALE, by The Bard, well over thirty years ago, when he was a student at Columbia College Chicago, in a class conducted by the great Shakespeare scholar Peter Christensen.

Thirty years later almost to the day, The Drifter espied Professor Christensen, an old man now, sitting alone in a coffee shop in a northside Chicago neighborhood not far from the lake, intensely engaged in the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. (The Drifter waited around until he could see what the book was, without ever approaching the professor.)

Since The Drifter read the play over thirty years ago (twice) and hasn’t looked at it since, he takes no responsibility for the tiny meaningless things he may have gotten wrong, but he does thank Professor Christensen, for reading The Sonnets alone in a coffee shop as an old man; and for his dramatic readings from Shakespeare’s HAMLET, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and THE WINTER’S TALE well over thirty years ago, in a seventh-story, industrial-looking classroom on Columbia College Chicago’s downtown campus.

I don’t know if you are still here with us; but I remember looking out the high windows, watching the blues of Lake Michigan, and listening to your voice bringing Shakespeare alive.

Saragun Verse

i

A field is a magic world

Timeless in sun and storm;

Yet when gold grubs push the worm

The field is killed and torn

ii

Ghosts haunt the other side serene

Of unsettled losses and fields plundered;

The gold grubs cannot turn a dream

They are blind to the wonder

iii

Yet it all moves along

In stumbles and dances;

We do not have to be dead alone

Even gold grubs get second chances

Suicide Spoon: Conclusion

(Dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson, on his 88th birthday)

29 May 1975

Nora had a thing about trains. Sometimes she’d have me and Tess walk with her to where we could see the freighters enter and leave the shipyard. Often she would go alone. Mom never went with her on these trips, even though they did most everything together.

“The Choctaw had a saying,” Nora told me. It was just her and me at the train watching spot. “‘Then the railroad came.’”

“What does it mean?”

“Meaning goes two ways, like those trains. For the Indians, it meant whitey was coming to take everything. But it also meant that you could go away too—at least that’s what I thought threshing in the field, when I heard a whistle blow.”

That has stuck with me through the years. Then the railroad came. For the Natives, it brought smallpox, alcoholism, law, jail, and reservations. But even after the tribes had been wiped out, the railroad never stopped coming. It comes to this very day, obliterating current old ways and bringing back other old ways. In the larger sense, the railroad never brings anything new.

The railroad came for Nora late in 1974.

Mom seldom spoke directly to me when I was a teen. That began when I was twelve or so. But none of that mattered when Nora got sick. For a while, a truce was in order.

Tess and I were in the kitchen playing hearts. Mom was at the hospital. We were waiting for a call. We played a lot of cards during the death watch. Mom didn’t want us hanging around the hospital; we tended to get on her nerves.

The phone finally rang. It was Mom. Nora had named death Roy and she had told Mom that Roy was coming soon. She wanted all of us to be together one last time.

The hospital was about a mile and a half across town. The bus system was a joke, and we would have walked if it hadn’t been raining. Nora wanted rain on the day she died, she got that much. The dope that made her uterine cancer bearable often caused her to share such things. We decided to get fancy and use three of my vast fortune of eight bucks on a cab.

I’ve come to an understanding with hospitals and rehab centers and hospices. I quit being artificially cheerful while in them, and they no longer close in on me like one of those squishing rooms used by silly-assed villains on Batman or The Man From Uncle. Still, their ceilings remain too close to my head.

At sixteen, I’d yet to make the deal, and I felt like I was suffocating. Tess was drawn to places of pain because of that fucking dreampurple light; in her mind, faces that absorbed suffering and kept coming back for more were the only beautiful things.

I never experienced dreampurple. Tried once. Tess gave me a swallow of methadone, which tasted like poison. And for a glittering moment, I felt lifted and expanded. Everything I so worried over meant nothing, and there was a sense of well-being utterly alien to me. Then I got sick, everywhere, and for long enough that a trip to the hospital was looking to be in order. It was like a door had shut in my face. When reality came slinking back, I met it with scorn. I couldn’t believe that the physical universe could be so easily swept aside by a teaspoon of a substance that tastes like cherry-flavored Clorox.

At fourteen, Tess was nearing the end of her free-range dreampurple experience. When we arrived at the hospital, it was on her. She was excited, and her pupils were blasted open despite the harsh lighting. She was connected to every atom of electricity. Only I noticed. She was otherworldly and utterly amoral; something in her sought the dreampurple beauty in dying. I wanted to slap it out of her. It was Nora’s hour and not something to be greedily sucked up.

It never felt possible, yet Nora was going away. I had hung onto false hope much longer than I should have. The last of it vanished when Tess and I entered her room. It seemed impossible that a person could still be alive in her condition. She had gone from one-twenty to under seventy pounds in less than six months. Uterine cancer. Mom was holding a cigarette for Nora, and when she saw us, I caught a glimpse of her shoving something that glinted into her purse with her other hand. Mom usually didn’t give a fuck about such things; and maybe I shouldn’t have, given the situation.

“Hi, Kid. Hey, Sister,” Nora whispered, with an underwater voice. Her skin was the color of old paper, and her eyes were yellow.

I mumbled something and smiled.

I wanted to smack Tess (a long running theme in my life). Her ravenous eyes were sopping up every detail. But that gave over to tears and she sat down and lay her head on Nora’s shoulder.

After a few moments of just standing there, Mom glared at me and nodded at Tess. Nora was increasingly in and out of it, and it was clear that Mom wanted the final moments to herself. So I peeled Tess off Nora. I didn’t know what to do. I kissed Nora on the cheek and hustled Tess out of the room. Without speaking, we left the hospital.

Tess and I walked home. The rain had backed off, which made a taxi unnecessary. Even if it was still raining, we would have walked. That’s the way, we tend to huddle away during the truly big bad times; nobody wants to make small talk with a cabbie after they have seen the face of death.

“Mom hid a spoon,” Tess said.

“A spoon?” I recalled the quick furtive gesture.

“You saw. Bet it had something in it; something for the pain.”

Tess was uncanny. She often had impossible insights when the dreampurple was in her; in her way she was holy.

“But we won’t talk about it,” she said, smiling.

“No, I don’t think we will.”

The world was in black and white that day. The fuzziness of the pollen season had been washed clean by the rain. It all lay in ruins, and yet even there, the railroad had yet to come.

I later dismissed the poison spoon theory. I poured specious logic all over it and locked it in the place I used to stick the things I did not want to think about. I convinced myself that Mom hadn’t helped Nora out the door, even though such potions have always been extremely easy to get in our neighborhood. Still, Nora was as good as gone, why hasten it by what—an hour—and risk a murder charge? (No one noticed anything untoward, it’s unlikely they explored Nora’s cause of death with much of a fine-toothed comb attitude; I doubt there was an autopsy.)

But that only made sense when placed against the ways of regular people. Lovers have their secret expressions, and maybe what had transpired between Mom and Nora was as much none of anybody’s goddamn business as a thing gets.

Tess died in May 2004, not long after her forty-third birthday. I was not in the room because her death was sudden (although never wholly unexpected), but I had been there every inch of the way. Heroin was not the direct cause; years of speedballs had reduced her heart’s ability to withstand stress. Could say she died of a chronic case of being Tess. Now, she was just as loaded as ever, but legally, on methadone, the authorized party plan. Tess had reached the point of gaining weekly carries on Saturdays. Naturally, she had chipped into the next day’s dose (which always meant that a relapse was coming soon), and her turbulent existence ended quietly in her sleep.

So, whenever I’m not quite depressed enough to suit me, I like to look through her things. And as I sat at home, tired of the hand poker game, I looked through her stuff and found the suicide spoon. I’d seen it a bunch of times but always ignored it because it represented the cheap, dirty side of dreampurple. Is the world such an awful place that a person needs to poison herself to find beauty in it, to coexist with it? Yes, yes it is. But this time I picked it up and examined it. I was pleased to see that there were no tell-tale scorch marks on it. She never tried to bail, no matter how bad things got. That made me proud.

It also gave me an idea that would make sense if our lives were a story that followed a plan of some sort. Still, although unlikely and insincere on most levels, the idea gave me something semi-positive to hold onto that particularly long night.

The End of the Mess, 2019

My mother, Kaaren Patricia Johnston Spahr, died at either the age of seventy-nine or eighty-one on 20 April 2019, a Saturday. In a state of delirium that the morphine drip finally brought peace to.

We were outside the evening before, and I went through the motion of lighting a cigarette, ostensibly for myself, but handing it to Mom. The doctors and admin would have gone crazy if they had seen us; but the CNAs, mostly Filipino nationals, the people who do the real work, the human work at hospitals, hospices, and long term care centers, know when to look the other way.

Mom was very high on morphine, and we had to bring her drip along; in America, we all get high in the end. But she was mostly coherent, and kept breathing and producing just enough urine to remain alive.

Mom didn’t say much toward the close. She appeared content, like a person awaiting a bus she knew would come by and by.

She used to love Friday night. And it was a Friday; I remember her and Nora getting ready to go out to the Sportsman or White Pig Tavern, the apartment reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, everyone talking at once. The radio on. The energy was exciting even though I was not in on it.

But the railroad came.

“I can do for you what you did for Nora, if you want,” I said. It would have been easy. And I would have done it if she wanted me to. I figured God might be watching again, maybe giving me a second chance in case I had blown the first.

Mom looked at me, skin the color of old paper, the whites of her eyes yellow, just like Nora’s. “I knew you knew … straight morphine … got it from some guy at the Pig,” she said with a feeble laugh. “It was all over Tessie’s face.”

“I can, if you want.” I knew where to get it, but I also knew her answer, which is why I hadn’t bothered. And I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that I’d made a polite offer of euthanasia, like offering coffee to a guest.

“No, Sarah,” she said, savoring the final drag off her last cigarette. “Hell ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

The End

Suicide Spoon: Part Two

May 1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

“Don’t use the suicide spoon,” Tess said.

“The what?”

“The big one.”

This was the first time I’d ever looked inside her kit. In it lay two spoons. Both faux gold. The smaller of the two was slightly mangled and heavy with scorch marks. The other was basically untouched. A soup spoon? I wondered, because I ask myself stupid questions when I get nervous. Who the fuck cares?

I showed her the smaller one. “This?”

She nodded.

“You shouldn’t cook coated stuff … causes brain damage.”

“Har-dee-har-har, Sar-duh—I’m dying and you make jokes.” She lay on my sofa, used up, dopesick, but knowing she’d be getting well within seconds had perked her up.

“You’re not dying.”

But she was and had been ever since dope became the love of her life. Tess was an artist. Even though she sold a few paintings, the money they brought didn’t legitimize her. You have to be born an artist. Whether it’s a gift or a defect is a matter of perspective. Some called her a genius, but they didn’t have to clean up after her. The clichés are true. Genius does consort with madness, and it also creates a single-minded ruthlessness that gives genius a license to shit on people, especially those closest to them. Regardless, Tess was mine and always would be.

It all began and ended with what Tess called the dreampurple light. The anxious expression on a welfare mother’s face waiting for the mail to come on the first was dreampurple. The old drunk she saw burst into tears at the little store because old Graydon had caught him boosting a bottle of wine was hell dreampurple; giving the fellow her lunch money, oddly, wasn’t. There was no set rule for the condition except nothing in the natural world, no matter how stunning or powerful, could ever be dreampurple. Tess was born with a dreampurple mind, but it began to fade in her late teens. That’s when she discovered the pills that led her to heroin. She swore that it gave her back the thing she loved and needed most.

It’s not my object to present a DIY on fixing. Let’s say it involves powder melted in a (in this case a smaller) spoon by using a (in this case a red cricket) lighter, then carefully drawing the stuff into a hypodermic needle without air bubbles. Everyone said the bubbles go to your heart and kill you. No one knew anyone that had happened to, but junkies are like anyone else when it comes to needing stupid shit to believe in.

I hesitated … it was my big moment, and I felt God’s Hot Light on the back of my neck.

“C’mon big sister, be a nice guy. Slide it in easy-like.”

“Say that again, and you’ll be picking up teeth,” I whispered as I shot her up. The effects were immediate, like what Oswald did to Kennedy’s head. Tess was a different breed of junkie. Smack usually turns the user into a useless drooling mess. Although that would happen to her later in the day, she was someone who became very happy, funny, witty, and alive when she was high. Both pupils enlarged like Bowie’s weird one. Tess was on top of the world, but I’d never felt lower: I just fixed my little sister, has it really come to this?

“That good? Not gonna die on me?”

“Nope.”

Tess couldn’t do it herself. She had a strange complex about not being able to shoot herself up after she’d been dry for a few days. But just the first one, she’d be fine after that. Some sort of mental hangup. Usually one of her tenth-rate boyfriends did it for her (all of whom she called “Earl”), but the last Earl had damned near killed her. I made her promise me in the hospital to come see me for that first dry hit in the future. She knew I wasn’t fucking with her, and I knew that she would turn up sooner than later.

“You mean it? No rehab? No speech? Just bring it and you’ll do it?”

I rose, went to the window, and peeked between the drawn drapes. Junkers do not like bright light. The world was going on in the 1985 fashion. It was the year of the power ballad and mall rats. A pastel, dayglo season that smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes and cinnamon. There was something hopeful about the mid-eighties that I could never lay a finger on. It was more than Michael Jackson moonwalking or power tie money, or the vast amount of teen girls imitating Madonna, painted lips as red as a chimpanzee’s vagina. There was a certain optimism that didn’t last. Alas, sometimes forever comes in 1989. Yet I was a bystander of that world. Even though I was only twenty-six, the era had already passed me by. I had but one purpose, I served the Saint of the Unknown Martyr. Anyway, I figured a world like that would keep moving along without my input, and that God would do the same after watching my big moment come and go. He has yet to tell me if I’m wiser; some things a person cannot judge herself.

“What’s the big spoon about?”

Tess seldom lied to me in the technical sense, but she had the irritating habit of releasing information a bit at a time, usually when it was too late to do anything about it. I really didn’t want to know, but since I’d taken responsibility for her, it was my duty to know as much as I could. She was a tremendous bundle of contradictions that somehow added up to the truth. That’s art, I guess.

“It’s my marilyn-monroeverdose,” as though that explained everything.

“Say that in dumb fucker.”

“Only if you tell me why you kept your promise.”

“Because I’m a dumb fucker,” I said.

“What a coincidence! That’s my reason too. Got anything to eat?”

Junkers crave sweets. You get used to watching them dump ten packets of sugar into a cup of hot chocolate. It usually brings them to dentures. By 1985, I’d been dealing with Tess’s habit for eight years. When she was on the nod, I avoided being in public with her. She’d be up and even charismatic, then all of the sudden, without warning, the smack in her system dropped into low gear, and the result was a half-awake blob of protoplasm. It was the same as hauling a drunk around. At least dope doesn’t stink.

I kept her limited food groups stocked in my apartment. Vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, Mountain Dew soda, Pop Tarts, and “Chocolo’s,” which was a fudge Twinkie-like thing that was only on the market for a couple of years; I figure it got the hook after spreading all the diabetes the FDA would allow from one item.

“How come I never see you eat anymore?” she asked.

I was like Mom and could survive on cigarettes and black coffee for days on end. Tess was the only non-smoking junker I knew. She considered the habit disgusting and even “bad for you;” I’ll let the irony lie where it is.

Do you know what you’re doing to me? was the big question I never asked Tess. The answer was sprinkled like ashes on our lives. Mom asked her that plenty. Her answers were the usual “defensive wound” sort of slogans that sound right, but actually deflect the guilt back to you.

Sometime between her two bowls of ice cream and syrup, she asked why I had fixed her.

“The same reason why you disappear into the bathroom with your kit, like I don’t see,” I said. “Some shit must happen—like there’s a law.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cunt, you know?”

“I am what I am,” I said. “Hey! Do you know how many times I’ve dragged you to rehab?”

Tess scrunched her face sarcastically, as though seriously pondering the question. It was a gesture from childhood that coasted on nostalgia, for without that I would have wanted to beat it out of her face.

“Dunno, six?”

I made a sound like the buzzer on game shows when the answer’s wrong. “Seventeen, not including jail. On average, every six months. I have finally got the picture. Everyone wants you off the shit but you.”

“The big spoon’s my ticket out,” she said mainly because she was quick to change that subject. “I figure a big-ass shot from it should do the job, should it need doing.”

And you wonder why I’m a cunt, I thought, putting out one smoke then lighting another. But what she said released an old memory from the dungeon. “Like what Mom did for Nora?”

Upon mention of Nora, the buffer of the smart-assed, unrepentant junker, which she habitually placed between us, vaporized. All her stories and aversions and justifications puffed off like summer fog after the sun leans into it. I liked seeing that, almost as satisfying as giving her a sharp slap in the face.

Suicide Spoon: Part One

(This story was published in the fine Hotch Potch Literature and Arts earlier this year. It is about six thousand words, thus presented in three parts–Leila)

April 2019

My mother died at either age seventy-nine or eighty-one, most likely the younger. Once upon a time, you could get away with hoodwinking the facts when records were kept on paper. What you needed to get one over was a strong set of lying skills. Although she was pathologically honest at the personal level, Mom was a first class liar as far as the record-keeping side of the world was concerned. It was an ability she needed to master early in her hectic life. The most impenetrable pettifogs of the world couldn’t throw her off a fiction no matter what the files said. She understood that a quality story has few moving parts. Windy-assed explanations, even truthful ones, just sound like bullshit. Active short sentences, eye contact, and a firm, clear voice are the best way to sell a whopper. Plus she was very pretty and knew how to use it.

Mom’s green card states she entered the USA in 1954, at the age of fourteen. Yet two years later, her marriage license placed her at eighteen. On top of that, she changed her name from Karen to Kaaren (after an actress she saw in a movie). She could have been legally married at sixteen but would have needed permission from her guardian. Mom was a Canadian orphan and a ward of the Catholic church. Considering she had run off, she figured that upping her age and marrying a sailor in the United States Navy was her ticket out of both the church and potential deportation (nobody, including Mom, knew why she was sent to America). She claimed that the green card was in error, which was tough to believe because she looked twelve in the picture. However and whatever, she got it over; when a lie settles in as authorized, it is the gospel ‘til the judgment trump blows.

“Don’t you dare try to feed me, Sarah–not unless you want to lose a finger.”

“Alright, Mom. Not like I’m missing out on a dream. They told me you refuse to eat.”

She snatched the spoon from my hand and flung it across the room. At least there was nothing in it.

A young Filipino CNA named Maisy had entered the room to straighten it up just in time to see the latest little melodrama unfold. She tutted playfully at Mom as she picked up the spoon.

“Sorry, Maisy,” I said, “she hasn’t had a cigarette since Tuesday. Makes her a little tense.”

Mom had been smoking since she was old enough to light one; she was a chainer who at her height sucked down four packs of Winstons a day. When advised to cut down, she switched to the 100s and knocked a half pack off her habit. I’d been sneaking her outside for a butt, but we got busted earlier in the week. Still, smoking had little to do with her death; her kidneys had decided to leave the party early.

“They tell me that you’re refusing dialysis too,” I said. With the perfunctory tantrum out of the way, it was time for me to address the real business at hand. I had been coming in every day after work for a month, after shortness of breath caused by excess fluid had landed her in the hospital. She was in that weird state of needing to get better so she could go to hospice.

“Love the way you keep going around my back,” Mom said.

Refusing dialysis made Mom a terminal case; the doctor asked if I could get her to change her mind or at least stop telling him to “fuck off” long enough to lucidly explain so she understood the consequences. She had a procedure done on her left arm the year before to make future dialysis possible (it was already coming to that) due to her lousy veins, but now she no longer wanted to go through with it.

I sighed. “Alright, Mom. It’s your life. Always has been. But could you at least say it plain to the doctor and quit the bullshit?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a selfish bitch, just like me,” I said, softly, my eyes firmly locked on hers. “I’ve always admired that about you–no shit. You do what you want–no hard feelings, anymore. But I’ve gotta tell you, to make sure you got it clear: rejecting dialysis means death, as in fucking soon and forever.”

Mom laughed, a bit of the old fire flickered in her eyes; the petulant child that had been around too long vanished. “They don’t call it death around here, Sarah—oh fuck-fuck no—it’s ‘an end of life event.’ Ain’t that so, Maisy?”

Maisy had finished thissing and thatting.

“So, we’re straight on that?”

She nodded. Mom’s face was always a perfect mask of what she wanted to convey. Rarely, save for scorn, was it an accurate match with what lay behind. But this time it was. And for the second time in my life, I understood the dreampurple light of death.

“Fuck it,” I sighed. “I’ll get you out for a smoke somehow.”

I went home after I took Mom out for two cigarettes. Surprisingly, we didn’t catch hell for that. I knew how Mom could get, so I figured the staff looked the other way and hoped the nicotine would improve her disposition.

At home, I tried not to think about it. My phone sat there, threatening to go off, waiting for just the right moment. But there was nothing else to think about and no one left to talk to.

In every family, there’s one person who has to clean up after the house lights come on. From about the age of two, after my father checked out by choice, I had only three other blood relatives, who fell off one by one, leaving just me. And it remained that way. No children, no unwanted arrivals of unknown cousins. Just the four of us: me, Mom, my little sister, Tess, and our Aunt Louise, whom we called “Anna-Lou.” She was actually an older cousin of my late father and not an aunt at all.

And there was Nora. She wasn’t kin, but calling her a friend has never been good enough, especially with Mom. Although Nora has been gone for fifty years, I can still hear her voice. She was from Oklahoma and said stuff like worsh instead of wash. She also had a way of renaming people and places. I was “Sister,” and Tess “The Kid.” She rarely called Mom by name, opting for common endearments like hon and dear. She called the White Pig Tavern, where she and Mom practically lived at on weekends, The Whore Museum.

She lived in an apartment in our building two floors up. But it was more like Nora and Mom’s room than an apartment. They did everything together. Both had been married once and never again. Our father committed suicide just after Tess was born, so we had no memory of him. Nora might still have been married for all she knew. She ditched the guy in Kansas and wound up here soon after. Both Mom and Nora worked for Howe’s Hardware and sometimes they dated men, but they were always older guys and the type that was easy to push around. None lasted long. For all intents and purposes, Nora and Mom were a couple; I honestly don’t know if that extended to sex. It really doesn’t matter. After Nora died, Mom (only either thirty-three or thirty-five) allowed no new people into her life.

Although Nora was not well educated, she had a keen mind and understood people. She knew things others couldn’t see. Mom begged her to tell us the Facts of Life, after I had my first period. At the end of the story (that she knew we already knew), she smiled, gave me a hug and whispered, “I know you needn’t worry about that shit, Sister—just kick everyone you don’t want in the balls.”

Nora was there at the beginning of my memory. She died at thirty-three. Cancer. Mom saw her out. For years, that was the worst day of my life, topped only by one other.

I thought about Nora more than usual as Mom’s “end of life” process unfolded. In many ways she probably should have been my mother because I was much closer to her than I was to Mom. Frankly, Mom and I didn’t like each other. We had similar personalities, thus we constantly and successfully explored each other for the things we hated about ourselves.

Even though I’m not the most sensitive person in the world, I will care about what I should care about. Still, don’t look to me to hold your hand and lie to you about angels and better worlds than this. But I can be counted on. I showed up for Tess, Anna Lou, and, finally, Mom. I figure my end will happen alone and won’t be noticed until someone complains about the smell. I think it’ll be better that way; I don’t want a socially awkward death.

Mom was always reluctant to give up center stage when she got it. And despite her refusal of dialysis, it took nearly three weeks to accomplish something that should have happened in one. Some say that nothing dies harder than an old lady. Maybe so. But I knew it would be a protracted scene because she was a one-of-a-kind creation, the type the gods are slow to kill.

The protracted death watch gave me a lot of time to visit the dungeon where I keep the memories I cannot kill clapped up.

Music: Conclusion

We seldom brought people to our apartment. It was an automatic thing, neither spoken about nor a source of shame. Mainly the place was one we’d rather not be at and weren’t as much as possible. I don’t recall asking Lydia to come over, she just sort of followed us as we all spoke excitedly about the altercation and got our stories straight if such were needed. But I figured, correctly, that the Jody would claim he had fallen or something other than admit to having his assed thoroughly kicked by a grade schooler, off company property. Still, it was a very very  long time before either Tess or I went back to the House of Values.

“Who plays?” Lydia asked when she saw the guitar Tess had repaired.

“Sarah,” Tess said.

“Do not, not a lot yet anyway,” I said. And I felt a slight blush on my cheeks. Sometimes I’d fiddle with the thing when the radio was on and managed to match the bass line to songs. Tess had copied chord diagrams from a library book and instructions on how to tune the damn thing. I’d gotten to the point where I could do basic first position major chords without causing that damn buzzing sound.

Lydia picked it up and strummed a G chord. She then twisted a couple of Tess’s homemade nobs (which involved plastic and screws) and played a fairly sweet sounding G to D to C. “That’s all you really need to know to start,” she said.

“Didn’t know Jehovahs played the guitar,” Tess said, for she always said stuff like that. Even as an adult she’d say whatever popped into her head. Some people thought she did so without examination; but it really was her way. Yet there was never anything snide about her attitude, in some ways she was always a child.

“Or wore coveralls,” I added.

“Sure they do,” she said. “I was helping my mother in the garden, earlier–was thinking about getting more seeds at the House of Values–Can’t garden in school clothes. I’m allowed to have music, freckles too.”

Lydia smiled on “freckles.” I’d never seen her smile before. She had what used to be called a “mannish” face and it was also on the thin and long side. She had pretty eyes, high cheekbones and great teeth–but each quality appeared to be on its own, too far spread, without support from the others. But when she smiled the distances closed and rare beauty bloomed. Over the years to come I’d get to know that smile through a wide series of events–including many disasters.

Naturally, Tess saw Dreampurple in Lydia’s smile. Tess was a shelter for hopeless dreams and unlikely causes. They were invisible to all save her. And of the five top life changing sentences I’ve heard, she probably spoke at least three of them.

Looking back that next moment returns with eidetic clarity. Even the fight at the foot of the bank is sepia toned and affected by memory. But the time that had lain between Lydia’s first smile and what Tess said often returns to me as though it were right now. I can feel the soreness in my wrists where the pig had pinned them; I see Tess and Lydia in the slanting late afternoon sunlight, all of us sitting on my bed, Lydia quietly picking an A minor chord on strings I’d boosted from Cates’ Music a week or so earlier; and I can smell the moldy sweat of our plaster walls that were always damp even in late summer. My mind contains at least three other similarly, continuously fresh vignettes, but most of them are painful and only come to mind when I’m too happy about something.

The scene always ends the same. Tess says “You guys are going to start a band.”

The End

Music: Chapter Seven

“Hey! Stop!” A voice yelled from behind, about two seconds after we exited the store.

The dumb fucks always did that. Always with the “Stop!”; it was one of those actions that was both helpful and irritating at the same time. And it meant only one thing.

“Run!”

Tess didn’t need to be told twice. And we were off, as only gazelles and shoplifters our age could be off. We tore across the House of Values parking lot, both consciously resisting the temptation to look back. But I had caught a quick glimpse of our pursuer reflected in the back window of a station wagon. It was the chunky young clerk who’d been giving me the weather eye for weeks. Nineteen, maybe twenty-two, he looked like one of those testosterone driven freaks who was always looking for an easy chance to play hero, to be the tough guy. Maybe he needed to make up for successfully avoiding Vietnam–you saw a lot of that in guys his age at the time.

“Never look back. Just run like hell and get off the property as fast as you can and get into the lots,” I’d more than once instructed Tess before going on our little “shopping” trips.

The people who worked at the chain stores would only chase you to the end of the property–always figured that was universal company policy. And few ever committed that far; unlike Mom and Pop, House of Values’ employees were going to get paid anyway. Yet every so often you drew a John fucking Wayne. And if your luck was very bad, sometimes a samaritan would try to help the chaser out–but they were easy to avoid if you ran directly at them–people think that sort of thing over and almost always opt for the better part of valor.

Our retreats, though simple, were well planned. If whoever was in pursuit could still be heard chugging along behind once we reached the end of the store’s property, we’d split up then dash into the lots and back alleys of Charleston, which we knew as well as the rats, hide our loot in predetermined drop holes (fuck giving up swag you had to run for), meet up at Fort Oxenfree, then double back for the goods later.

“Split!”

Tess veered left and timed a run between a pair of cars headed opposite directions on Fourth Street. She deftly avoided both to the extreme annoyance of the drivers and my cardiovascular system, but it would delay Mr. Man Asshole, if he chose to chase her. Once across the street Tess vanished into a wildly overgrown lot like a ghost through a keyhole, much to my relief. She was as gone as Moonlight Mover. But I decided to take measures to prevent the fuckhead from going after her, for she was much smaller and slightly slower than me–predators and would-be tough guys always go for the easier kill.

Instead of blazing across the street, completely aware that I hadn’t lost an inch of a hundred foot lead (that, to its credit, refused to stretch), I stopped, picked up a stone and hurled it at the guy who, sure as shit, had chosen Tess’s trail. He was sort of running in place waiting for cars to pass. That changed when the rock hit his ankle, I had a good arm. The black deep set eyes in his pig-like face shone at me with hate. I recall thinking “Something’s gone wrong in there.” But I didn’t give a rip, he was already sweaty and I was fresh and could run him to Hell if I wanted. Although I knew that Tess was already clear, just to make certain, I laughed, flipped him off with both hands and yelled, “Catch me if you can, Jody-boy!”

Due to the shipyard, Charleston was a military town and “Jody-boy” was a mean thing to be called in wartime. And being called that by a kid put an hitherto unknown kick into the clerk’s pace–who stopped being a clerk the instant he was off company property. But I didn’t care. I mockingly skipped backwards, maybe five steps, then bolted across Fourth, passing closely in front of the Hull Street bus passing by in that brief opening between the honk of the horn and application of the brakes.

Downtown Charleston in the seventies was a busted smile sort of place. One block would be perfectly reasonable looking, with a run of tidy businesses in it, while the next might contain shuttered shops or ruins being slowly swallowed by the ever flourishing weeds and the grow anywhere trees of heaven. Again, due to the yard, Charleston had been a boomtown during the Second World War, but it was never designed to be the permanent residence of sixty-thousand as the population had swelled from 1942 to 45. After the bomb was dropped the population shrank back down to its prewar level of twenty-thousand and has held it ever since. This emptied plenty of lots and shuttered dozens of shops. Tess and I were frequent explorers of forgotten territories.

I entered a lot located about fifty yards east on Fourth from the one Tess had vanished into. It was late spring, and it had rained earlier for the first time in a couple of weeks, which caused a moldy, earthy smell, sorta like bed bugs, sorta like the odor that often wafted up from the sink-traps in our apartment, no matter how much bleach we poured down the drain. The little trees of heaven and omnipresent Scotch brooms were heavy with moisture and I was careful to avoid snatches of brambles that tried to wrap around my ankles by lifting my feet high as I rushed across the lot aiming for a bluff that lay ahead in a clearing across Fifth Street at the end of the lot. I had already planned on dashing across the street, scramble up the twenty-foot, damn near vertical rise, take the fence at the top and be gone with or without sharing further witticisms. It would be over– there was no easier way up and out that didn’t require a good five minute walk in either direction on Fifth Street.

It’s a myth that you run faster when angry. It takes energy to sustain rage, and the fuel has to come from somewhere. A part of me was disappointed to hear the Jody-Boy (as I thought of him) blundering through the thatch-life behind me, falling further behind. I figured that he might be running out of steam and close to giving up.

I cleared the lot and took the first nineteen feet of the bluff that led to safety, but slipped on the wet switch grass and fell hard just before I was able to take the fence. I slid halfway back and, naturally, that’s when the fucker exited the brush. He had a face like a pig and his work shirt was untucked and appeared to be torn. A weird sort of exhilaration overcame me, so close to being caught.

I laughed, scrambled to my feet but slipped a second time and he was on me.

“Fucking little cunt!” he screamed and pinned my arms down. His face was off the boil and filled with madness and I felt that I could feel what might have been a hardon as he lay against me and moved his piglike face close to mine. God knows what would have happened if Tess hadn’t hit him in the back of the head with her fist.

Over the years I’ve often wondered what the statutes of limitations for a twelve-year-old assaulting an adult. Tess didn’t injure the fuckhead, but I sure the hell did. Her blow took him by surprise and I slipped my left hand out from his greasy grasp and punched him in the throat. Hard. His hands went up like Kennedy’s in the Zapruder film, just before the kill shot. Tess and I were able to push him off of me. I kicked him in the balls and wanted to kill him with a piece of rebar I saw lying in the grass. After a couple of sturdy rebar whacks to his side, the fuck you cunt went out of his attitude and he was blubbering, which made me angrier.

“Fuck you and your fucking boner,” I hissed, fixing to hit him again. Tess grabbed my arm but that wouldn’t have been good enough if Lydia hadn’t yelled for me to stop; she appeared at the top of the bluff, behind the fence. Like out of a dream.

Seeing her clad in denim overalls stunned me. And watching her take the fence with ease and sliding down the bank, landing on her feet was, frankly, a beautiful thing.

She looked me in the eye and calmly placed her hand on the rebar and shook her head no. Tess said we ought to be going. The pig was getting himself together; some people can’t get beat enough. Still, leaving was the best idea.

Sunday With The Drifter: Three Dogs

For Mary Ann; good luck with your surgery!

(image provided by the Drifter)

It was during the darkest, deepest heart of the covid pandemic in the early part of the 2020s. My daughter and I were driving along on Roosevelt Road just outside Chicago, USA. I was in the front seat behind the wheel and she was sitting in the back seat on the other side of our modest automobile (Lou Reed was singing from the speakers). It was wintertime, so the sun had sunk very early, too early, it seemed; the darkness around us was the coldness of a northern Illinois winter post-holiday season, with the wind battering the car.

That was when she told me that herself, my other daughter (her twin), and my ex-wife (their mother) had recently met nine brand-new puppies.

The dogs had been discovered in an alley somewhere in Texas, with their mother, and shipped north to Chicago by the rescue agency. The woman who was fostering these animals had run into my daughters and ex on the street. Somehow they got to talking and she told my daughters about her new rescue project, which was to foster these nine new dogs and their mother.

The nine new pups were half Siberian Husky and half pit bull, with the Husky side of the appearance and personalities being much more prominent, for some reason, than the pit bull side, even though their mother looked like a one-hundred-percent pit bull.

Their mother’s name was Margaux. She was one year old. All of her fur was of the purest, cleanest white imaginable, and she had bold, bright, brilliant, very blue eyes.

As soon as I saw her she reminded me of my dog, Cowboy, who had passed on four years before. Cowboy was about twice Margaux’s size, brown and white with brown eyes (he was born with blue eyes that later turned brown), but there was something about the two dogs that seemed uncannily familiar.

When I met Margaux she immediately walked over to me and started nuzzling my leg, asking for petting. It was as if we already knew one another. And I felt like we really did know one another. The second I saw her I knew I would be adopting at least one of her puppies.

The nine puppies were like watching 101 Dalmatians. They had a habit of all rolling in a pile all at once, wrestling with one another. They would tussle, toss, nip, bounce, yip, zip, wag, fang, bite at each other, flounce, jounce, jump, prance, dance, charge into each other, fall down, dart around, jump into your lap if you were sitting on the floor among them, look up at you, stretch, flop onto their backs, stick their tails in the air, shake themselves off, scratch their ears with their back paws, howl, yowl, laugh, smile, grin, pant, bounce around some more, crash into each other some more, flop around, jump up, run, walk, jog, teeter, totter, fall, spread, splay, spoon each other, roll over, box each other with their paws like cats, leap, jounce, bounce, and jostle all over the floor while you sat in the middle of them. And this was all during the first five minutes.

One of these little dogs was the biggest of them all. When the other pups would sleep in piles on top of each other, he would always go off into a corner of the room to sleep by himself, mostly half sleeping while watching the rest of them from a distance from the corners of his amazingly alert eyes. He had the longest fur, the most human expressions and was the pushiest, biggest, happiest, strongest, most intelligent dog of them all. He was the pup who started challenging his mother for dominance, in a friendly way, while all the other pups were still following her lead.

And he often had his sidekick with him. This other pup was “lean and mean” in a good way. His one shockingly blue eye and his other startlingly brown eye were prophetic and symbolic of his inherently split (not to say schizoid!) disposition. As a full-grown dog, he would be able to nail a squirrel and even a rabbit, much less an opossum, with a deadly accuracy, skill and ease that would stun the viewer of such an event (we always try to stop him but are not always able). And yet, he is one of the sweetest and most gentle dogs, otherwise, you could ever care to meet, someone who is even afraid of little children, when he isn’t trying to guard them, which he usually is whenever they’re around.

The reason we didn’t adopt Margaux, their mother, along with these two pups was waiting at home. Her name is Bandit, a pit bull with the greatest sense of humor of any dog you ever saw, and the strongest jaws you can probably imagine.

Bandit stepped in out of the blue when Cowboy, my beloved pit bull, passed on over the Rainbow Bridge (where he is waiting for us; I am sure of it). Bandit helped save my life by her presence during one of the toughest periods of my life I’ve ever gone through (I’ll skip the details about that for now). She tends to get a bit aggressive with other female pit bulls, especially when they’re on her own territory, so we had to let Margaux go. I heard Margaux is now living with a friendly family on a farm somewhere in Iowa where she has lots of room to run and play with other dogs. I hope so.

We named the leader Boo, after Bucephalus (Alexander the Great’s favorite horse), and the Sancho Panza dog we named The Colonel, after Elvis’s pal (and manager).

Bandit, Boo, and Colonel are all black and white, with almost exactly the same markings, almost like a miracle.

Life with these three animals in it is infinitely enhanced, endlessly better than it could ever be otherwise without them. It’s probably fair enough to say that I would die for any of these animals if I had to (like I would jump in front of a car to try and save them, if it ever came to that). They would do the same for me and my kids, and I know this for a fact because I’ve seen them try to do it when they thought we were in danger.

A few years ago I heard a story in the local news about a teenaged boy who ran back into his burning-down house to try and save his dog who was trapped inside. He wasn’t able to make it back out and both himself and his animal met their end together in the flames, and mostly the smoke. Their bodies were found side by side. The news reporter talked about it like it was the most tragic thing that ever could have happened, a bad decision made by a naïve child.

My heart goes out to the boy’s family in every way you can possibly imagine, but that news reporter was deadly wrong. Only the good die young. If there is a heaven (and I’m almost certain there is, I don’t even know why), that boy and his dog are in it. And they are together: forever now.

THE DRIFTER sometimes calls himself Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD.

Music: Chapter Six

The earliest memory I have that can be linked to a known date is the Kennedy assassination, which occurred just after my fourth birthday in 1963. I certainly have what feel to be older visions, of faces and mental snapshots of rooms and such, but nothing verifiable. This means we were too young to have gotten infected with the original strain of Beatlemania. I was two and a half years older than Tess and held only fuzzy memories of their arrival three months after JFK (mainly, I recalled a stupid cartoon show, voiced by pretend Beatles). Save for Mom’s kitchen radio eternally set on “Kountry KAYO,” music was never a big part of our lives until Tess located the Dreampurple beauty in the sixties. It was like her to support a dream that died because it had died, to root through the cold ashes of torched martyrs for moods and glimmers. Tess in all ways was all about the beautiful loser. It made sense that big winners like the Beatles had to break up before she could like them. Still, she once told me that she didn’t trust the Beatles “all the way” until Lennon was killed. I understood.

Albums used to come with cool stuff in them; you’d almost always get a poster from the big acts (Cheech and Chong released one that had a giant rolling paper in it). The White Album came with a montage poster, but I can barely remember it because Tess never fixed it to the wall, for she liked to read the lyrics that were printed on the back, and it eventually went wherever such things go after a time. But I have the four pictures that were also included memorized. Paper reprints of 11 by 8 color headshots of each Beatle. I can close my eyes and see them: Paul needs a shave, John looks unhappy about posing, George conveys a desire to be taken seriously, and Ringo appears to be high on something.

Although Tess was already too human to live long, she was still a ten-year-old girl who did stuff like tack pictures of the Beatles to the wall by her bed. (But, inconsistent with ten, she was smart enough to tape each picture to a piece of cardboard first then tack them up because our basement walls were never completely dry.)

“Kiss your hippy boyfriends night-night yet?”

“Har-har-dee har har, Sar-duh.”

We used to have a kiddie record player that Tess had received for Christmas a couple years before. It was actually pretty good for 45’s by silly bubblegum acts such as the Ohio Express, Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company–but was plain dumb-looking with a serious piece of music on it. Plus the needle had dulled to the sharpness of a carrot stick and the speaker was not much better than that of a clock radio.

We hid the system we’d claimed in the closet until every last scrap Mrs. Roebecker later left in the hall after cleaning out the room had mysteriously vanished. I once saw a time lapse film of what happens to a dead whale on the ocean floor and recalled the Moonlight Moving Company. I noticed that the coffee pot, flashlight and cutlery never saw the hall. I also noticed that the end table I had scooped the change off of debuted in our front room soon after; Mom knew a thing or two about the Moonlight Movers herself. Tess also visited the third floor and brought back the guitar I’d seen earlier.

“You forgot something,” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “It’s busted. That’s why nobody wants it.”

“No, it’s not. Just needs strings and a little help with the pegs, that’s all. I’m gonna fix it up and you are going to learn how to play it.”

There was something dreampurple in that statement that didn’t get me to agree, but almost as magically prevented me from getting too bitchy about it. “Sure,” I said. “Then I’ll get a job with Loretta Lynn. Then Hee Haw.”

As it had been evident in her work at Fort O, Tess had a good dose of mechanical intelligence along with her artistic genius. Although what she eventually did with the guitar was a triumph, Tess was almost as impressive in her ability to quickly set up the “Realistic” brand stereo. It worked, well, sort of, but was coated with greasy dust and was rapidly declining the way inexpensive electronics will when neglected. She cleaned it and connived an effective antenna for the radio; she also eliminated a weird buzzing noise from one of the speakers and removed the dials and used a paper clip to clean the gunk that prevented them from working smoothly. The turntable was a mess, and if it had been up to me, it would have been tossed. But Tess took it apart as far as it allowed itself to be taken down and the reassembled device and the damned thing worked as it should–though she could do nothing about the needle other than replace it.

And we’d listen to the radio at night as we lay in bed. Mostly it would be KJR the Top 40 station, but on Friday and Saturday nights we tuned in The Weird Radio on FM. “Calbert of the Night” would play songs that KJR never would. Stuff like “Taxi” by Harry Chapin, early Bowie cuts, Leonard Cohen, and entire sides of albums by people I’d never heard of. Something wonderful was born inside me then. Nostalgia can be a form of spiritual cancer, but I’d certainly give anything I have to hear the music the way I did then. It was then that I understood the world was a big place and contained infinite possibilities, another view somewhat corroded by time.

Mom never said shit about the stereo system or the guitar or anything about the conspicuous amounts of candy or oddball shit we had lifted from stores. There were plenty of things she might have said shit about that got no further than the arch of her brow or a dark gaze. She wasn’t a dummy, of course she knew–probably figured she’d have done the same herself. I sometimes wondered if things might have turned out differently if we had the sort of mother who’d routinely turn our room out like a prison guard while we were in school. But I stopped wondering about it long ago. Some things are hardwired in us to the extent that they must play out a certain way.

Call it destiny.

(Part Seven on Monday. Tomorrow the Drifter will come in from the road and tell you things you ought to know–LA)