The Rooster of Prague*

It used to mean something to be a rooster in this town.

Don’t look so surprised, mister ugly American in your flowered shirt with the sweaty armpits. You didn’t know what two hundred and eighty-nine steps felt like until a moment ago. And only now have you caught your breath, looked around for the first time, and decided that I am out of place.

Go ahead and laugh then. You want to know what I’m doing up here? Well, time was, you wouldn’t think about praying without me. I mean, come on now! Who wants to talk face to face with the ferocious, four-headed, Svantovít, the mighty pagan god who’ll, like as not, swell the banks of the Vlatava, flooding your house, destroying your crop, drowning your livestock? Wouldn’t you rather have a fine black rooster intercede on your behalf? A god’s gotta have a sacrifice, and better me than your virgin daughter, if you know what I mean.

Those were the days.

Back then, we roosters really had something to crow about. A yard full of hens, chief timekeepers of the village, and that whole intermediary to the great god gig. Life was sweet. You’d get fattened up, treated like a prince. OK, so maybe there was a moment of panic, running about, as they say, like a chicken with a head, but that ended soon enough and there you were, rubbing shoulders with the big guy, who just wouldn’t be appeased with anything less than a nice black rooster.

But then came the Christians, who didn’t need us as intermediaries anymore. They had all these other crazy ideas about talking to their god, not a guy with four heads, but one guy with three faces. Something like that. I'm a bird, not a theologian. All I know is, these Christians thought you could just appeal to your own religious leader, or a dead religious leader you never met, or—this is the craziest of all—some of them thought you could just belly up to the trough and talk to god yourself. Can you believe such a thing? No room for a big black rooster in the pecking order there. And what did they think of the great and terrible Svantovít? They built a massive cathedral on top of his altar. Saint Vitus. That's right. This cathedral.

That Vitus really ruffles my feathers. First of all, he wasn’t even Czech. Never even set foot in the golden city of Prague. Besides that, the guy wouldn’t sacrifice a rooster if his life depended on it. And you know what? It did. Those Christians had these newfangled ideas, which got Vitus accused of sorcery. He was supposed to make an animal sacrifice to prove his innocence, and could have just slaughtered a bird and gotten on with his life, but he wouldn’t, and they killed him. Boiled in oil, and of course, they tossed a black rooster in the pot, sent him along for the ride, probably to tell Svantovít just how rude the kid had been. And here’s the lowest bit: Vitus’s followers start depicting us at his side, like instead of being the ones to squawk directly in god’s ear for man, now we needed this guy to connect us!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised then, how I got here. Me! A rooster! You know where I came from, who I used to be. And now who am I? A copper weathervane, stuck up on top of this cathedral. Doesn’t that just beat all? Sure, I’ve got a fabulous view of Prague, the river, the bridge, the rest of the castle. But that’s hardly compensation, do you think? It really sticks in my craw. What good’s a weathervane in divine communication? You don’t need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows. You can quote me on that.

All I can do is hope that angry, four-headed god opens his eyes and looks around. You’d think he’d notice the lack of black roosters. He did swell the Vlatava last year, but no one thought of a blood sacrifice, did they? No, they just cleaned up and started again. And here I sit, a helpless copper rooster, blowing this way and that. Honestly, I don’t know what this world’s coming to.



*Written in 2003

The Gold Dress

Issa found a beautiful gold dress, with pearl beads and silver thread, on the rack at Salvation Army. Twenty dollars was much too much for a dress, she knew, and it wasn’t in the budget, but she fingered its silky sleeve for so long that her mother added it to the cart when she wasn’t looking, and went without new hose and some other necessities, because Issa had been such a help, never asking for anything, and she deserved nice things. Hannah and Dore had had so many nice things in their childhood, and Issa relatively few.

She wore her dress to school, because, as her mother pointed out, where else would she wear it? They didn’t go to church, or parties. They didn’t have extended family gatherings. She didn’t wear it to impress anyone. She just liked to feel pretty once in a while. Even poor girls from broken families living in tiny apartments could feel pretty, some days.

“Did Jenny’s mom give you that?” Susan had asked first thing, even before the bell rang.

Issa didn’t understand. Jenny was the most popular girl in the fifth grade, and Issa was only a regular third-grader. She shrugged, and kept shrugging at the whispers all morning.

“Oh, my god!” someone screamed in the lunch line. “You really are wearing my dress! That is too funny.”

Jenny stood right behind her, glamorous in skinny jeans and a sequined T-shirt.

“My mom bought me this dress,” Issa said, her mouth small and quiet.

“Yeah, after my mom gave it to charity!” There was laughter, sharp and cutting. "It cost two hundred dollars new. What did you pay? Twenty-five cents?"

“There’s nothing wrong with being poor,” a fourth grade boy said. Issa smiled up at him. He looked strong.

“Nothing at all,” said Jenny. “Especially when people deserve to be poor. Like, say someone’s dad was a liar and a thief and stole everyone’s money. Then a person deserves to be poor. There’s nothing wrong with Issa wearing my old dress after her dad took practically everyone’s retirement fun and ran away to the Bahamas. I think someone who takes an old lady’s whole savings probably should wear second-hand clothes, especially when that old lady lost her house and everything and had to move in with her son.”

Issa gulped. Her father had done something wrong. Hannah and Dore had made that clear, but her father was long gone. Issa and her mom had moved on. She smoothed the beautiful gold dress over her hips and picked up her tray.

“You get free lunch, don’t you?” Jenny said. “I guess my family bought that for you, too. ‘Cause we pay taxes. Unlike your dad.”

“Maybe we should take her dress back,” a girl said. “To repay you.”

Jenny laughed. “Who wants it now?”

Issa was already halfway to the door, blinking through the wet curtain over her eyes. The fourth grade boy stopped her. “It’s a pretty dress, Issa,” he said. “It looks way prettier on you than it did on Jenny. I once saw her punch a first-grader when she was wearing that dress.”

“I don’t even know my father,” Issa wailed.

Big Scary Man Syndrome

He was three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, and every inch of him radiated mean. I call it Big Scary Man Syndrome. You’ve met these guys: so afraid that people will reject them based on their looks that they take special pains to be preemptively jerky so they can reject you first.

I consider those guys a challenge.

But this guy was really pissing me off. I had assigned my twenty-five freshman composition students an in-class essay, and no sooner had they found their pens and settled down to write than this bullhorn parked his frame in front of my classroom door and began screaming into his cell phone.

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”

Dirty looks had no effect. Some of the kids started laughing instead of writing. I stepped into the hall, all five feet and one hundred pounds of me.

“What did you say?” he screamed. “Now can you hear me?” He hadn’t moved an inch.

“Excuse me.” I favored him with the winning smile that had melted so many Big Scary Men before him. “You get better reception in the stairwell, or outside.”

“I get fine reception right here,” he shouted and turned away, still shouting. “Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

With two steps, I stood in front of him again. “It sounds like you’re not getting fine reception. And this is a classroom building. And you’re screaming in front of an open door.”

He pushed his chest into my face. “I’ll scream if I want to.”

“I’m asking you politely to take your call somewhere else. You’re disrupting my class.”

“I’m taking my call here.” He was breathing on top of my head now, his face red.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, resisting the urge to raise my voice. “This is a classroom building, not a phone booth. Professors are trying to teach. Students are trying to learn. You are interfering with the education process. This is not an appropriate place for you to stand and scream.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he spat, the ironic emphasis he dropped into the word “ma’am” indicative of anything but respect. “I’m sorry my call is interfering with your learning process.” Then he reattached his mouth to the phone. “Listen, are you listening to me?” he screamed.

Now I had twenty-five pairs of eyes on me as every kid in the room watched to gauge the force of my authority, an authority this guy hadn’t bothered to evaluate. He thought he could dismiss me based on size, but being short has taught me assertiveness. Plus, it’s the rare three-hundred-pound male bully who actually takes his aggression out on a small woman in public.

“I’m asking you nicely to take your call elsewhere, because this space is for learning, and you do not have the right to interrupt my class. I can call campus security if you need help finding an appropriate location for this behavior.”

At last he looked me in the eyes, and while I remained five feet tall, clad in jeans and sandals, he gave a nervous shake of his head, finally realizing to whom he was mouthing off: a professor. “Oh, uh, yeah, sorry,” he said, and dashed away like a shamed puppy.

I turned back to the room, aware now of the rapid thunk of my heartbeat in my chest.

Some of my students had already gone back to their essays, but a few smiled and nodded approval, grateful that I could stand up to a bully, or take their education seriously, or provide a good show. I don’t know which. And, in the back row, my two biggest slackers, bad boys who wrote about smoking pot and missed class to go skateboarding or raving or whatever the heck it was that eighteen-year-old boys did, watched with wide-eyed amazement as I made my triumphant return after a confrontation from which they would have run. I had their attention for the rest of the semester.

Artist's Statement

I made the mistake of telling Mr. Gibbons that I wished I could draw really well, so I could write a web comic. He said there were plenty of web comics that were nothing more than stick figures, and then he showed us one that was just dots. Talking dots. And then he made that our assignment for the next four weeks: to write a month's worth of our own comics.

I didn’t even know English teachers could do that.

So now I’m going crazy trying to find someone to do the homework for me. It’s got to be someone who’s good enough that it looks like I’m trying, but not so good that Mr. Gibbons actually gets excited about it or tries to put it in the school paper or something. And it’s really got to be someone who isn’t going to rat me out, because English is supposed to be my best subject.

I’d do it myself, really, I would. It’s not that I can’t draw stick figures, or even something better than that. It’s just that Mr. Gibbons is not an idiot, and if I do the assignment, there’s a better than even chance he’ll figure out who drew that caricature of him kissing the principal’s ass on the rear window of his car last year.

Art Imitates

“Listen,” he said, and I listened.

What we heard was the couple in the next apartment, their voices pressing through the walls with the urgency of conflict. A domestic situation, as they say.

“Should we be listening?” I asked.

“They know the walls are thin.”

And the argument escalated, words indiscernible, emotions projecting, louder and louder, the sounds of impending violence. Vitriol seeped through the drywall. Hatred penetrated the air ducts. Rage shook the air. The couple in the next apartment would not, it seemed, be a couple much longer.

“Should we call the police?” I wondered. If we called now, they might arrive before the unseen neighbors began heaving the cast iron at each other’s heads.

“Just wait.” He grinned, winked.

My stomach turned. Next door, she shrieked. He thundered. I shook, afraid for both of them, afraid for a world that allowed for such aggression between lovers.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“Hold on,” he said.

As the voices reached their fiercest pitch, I slumped in my seat, resigned. And the male voice, booming through the vents shifted tone, moved toward melody, and then exploded into song. The female voice joined in, lilting above it. They harmonized, sang a passionate duet, and then fell into silence. The walls hum with quiet resolution.

“Theater majors,” he explained. “They’re always doing musicals.” He sighed. “I love this apartment.”

I pushed back from the table and walked toward the door.

Harass the Serviceperson: Gameplay and Examples

In their retirement, my relatives have taken up a game I like to call “harass the serviceperson.” It has become the chief joy of their existence, one which they have elevated from a game to a way of life.

To play “harass the serviceperson,” begin with an attitude of privilege. Naturally, being wealthy and old, while not a prerequisite, makes game play smoother. You must also cultivate a complete lack of understanding of the industry in which your target serviceperson works. There are two possible opening moves. Either develop an irrational frustration over a minor problem, real or imagined, which is beyond anyone’s control, or fabricate a ridiculous or impossible request and present it as both reasonable and expected. Then find a target serviceperson—the twenty-first century, with its twenty-four hour customer hotlines, has been a great blessing for the game—and present your problem or request in the form of a non-negotiable demand.

Unless the serviceperson convinces you that you are in the wrong (unlikely if you’ve begun with the appropriate attitude) you win every time! Bonus points are added if you make the serviceperson cry, get transferred to a higher level of management, or receive undeserved free goods or services from the company in question.

My relatives are the masters of “harass the serviceperson” and play in marathon sessions to enliven their old age.

For instance, like many old people, they believe a particular Internet Service Provider is hands-down the best ISP, because it caters to those who enjoy playing this game and provides customer service reps who know how to make the game last. On one occasion, my relatives managed to stretch a single game of “harass the serviceperson” over a space of ten days. Here’s how: they signed up for a service that would deliver a report from their stock account to their inbox every evening. Following some changes on one of the sites, these emails stopped coming.

My relatives immediately called the ISP’s customer service hotline to complain. For the next hour, they happily escalated their argument, demanding that the person at the other end, who had no part in the problem, fix it. (Keep in mind, to properly play “harass the serviceperson” you must drop any notion that you could solve your own problem, for instance, in this case, by just checking the stocks yourself. Remember, privilege means you’re always right, and other people always cater to you.) The serviceperson ceded the first round by announcing that the problem was with the stock site, not the ISP, and my relatives enjoyed a nice bout of vivifying rage, which is not the purpose of the game, but a welcome side-effect, like runner’s high.

The next night, they had the same conversation with a serviceperson for the stock site, who ended the conversation by claiming the fault lay with the ISP. The night after that, they called the ISP, with the same results as the first call, and the fourth night they called the other site. If you can believe the tenacity of my family, this pattern continued for a week and a half, until the glitch was fixed and my relatives “won.”

Using the second opening gambit, they once filled an afternoon with the game. Deciding upon a financial course of action, they went into a bank. Not their bank. Not a bank they had ever done any business with. Simply a random bank they passed in the car. With no documents, they demanded that the bank officer make a change to a certain account. The bank officer insisted that this was impossible, that he could not take action without the appropriate documents, IDs, account numbers, and passwords. After working up a nice rage, my relatives left the bank, mumbling that the guy was an idiot.

Then they went into another random bank, again, one where they had never done any business. The sequence of events was the same as at the first bank, right down to their insistence that the guy was an idiot. And believe it or not (and if you’ve read this far, you’ll believe it) they repeated this performance at a third bank, after which it was almost five o’clock, and they could play some shorter rounds of “harass the serviceperson” at an early bird buffet.

Seeing the joy the game imparts to my family, I can’t wait until I’m old enough and rich enough to play.

The Awful Woman Next Door

There’s an awful woman next door. She doesn’t live there; I think she’s visiting her grandmother, a kindly but slightly demented old lady who insists on feeding a herd of feral cats, which we have neutered, one by one, when we can get charity funding to do so. But this awful woman, she has the voice of a fishwife. She’s always shrieking at someone to do something.

There’s a man she shouts at, and a little girl, and a dog. You can always tell when she’s leaving her grandmother’s. Her voice, piercing, harsh, and loud, jars you out of whatever peace your evening might have had to offer. Usually she’s screeching for someone or something to get in the car.

If she yells at the man, he responds in a voice too low to hear. If she yells at the girl, the girl cries, but she can’t match her mother’s volume. If she yells at the dog, it goes on and on. The dog, gifted with a simple intelligence that tells him to run from that deadening noise, sets off all the other dogs in the neighborhood, but never gives away his position by barking himself.

I feel sorriest for the girl. The man committed to his path by choice, and the dog, at least, gets a nice run out of it, and a moment of the freedom. The girl lacks the agency to choose or to run, but must suffer her mother’s shrill imperatives with nothing but a tiny version of that voice with which to retaliate. Still, it’s disconcerting. There’s a clear view of their driveway from our front door. The woman isn’t physically abusing the girl, at least not in our sight. It just sounds like she is.

Eventually, she stuffs the man, the girl, and the dog into the car and drives off, leaving echoes of angry and canine wails in her wake.

Nicky's Space

Drew still blamed his mother for his brother’s death.

Every morning, he turned first to Nicky’s graduation photo. Everyone said it would be impossible for someone with Nicky’s developmental disabilities to earn a high school diploma, but Nicky had done it, which was why Drew didn’t believe that Nicky had drowned in the shower, like his mother said. Drew hadn’t been out of the house six weeks when it happened. He would always blame his mother.

One morning, the image of Nicky’s lopsided grin under his mortarboard foremost in his mind, Drew created a MySpace page for his dead brother. He updated it regularly with information about Down’s Syndrome, resources for struggling families, and memorial letters to Nicky, so no one could ever forget. He tried to friend his mom but she wouldn’t add him back. So, he set up a gmail account in Nicky’s name, which he used to send her birthday, Christmas, and mother’s day greetings.