That Old Terrorist Vibe

The room is crowded, with more guys than girls, which is surprising until you consider that these guys are probably trying to hook up. They’re wearing clean T-shirts, new high tops, and lopsided grins. They’re scoping out the opposite sex. They’re going to learn the Lindy Hop if it kills them.

I’m probably not going to learn the Lindy Hop, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

“Everyone is going to dance with everyone,” the instructor announces. “Don’t worry if you don’t have a partner. We’ll keep switching.”

Although we hardly talk, you can feel the guys’ personalities: the guy who holds his limbs loosely, the guy who already knows how to lead, the guy who’s afraid to step on your feet, the guy who tells you you’re doing it wrong before you even start. How strange to touch so many strangers so intimately.

And then there’s the guy who really, really doesn’t belong. He’s dressed too formally, stands too stiffly. I caught him pacing around outside before the class started, not making eye contact. And when the instructor tells us to change partners, he doesn’t hold his arms out to me as the others do. I have to jam myself into position like a crow bar prying a broken lock. His body shrinks away from mine, and while I’m older than most of this crowd, I’m not that bad. No one else had a problem holding my hand.

When the music starts, he seems confused. Although we’ve been practicing footwork for half an hour, he makes no effort to move to the beat, to take firm and definitive strides, to execute the triple step. He kind of shuffles his feet as if he’s walking in the dark and doesn’t know where the stairs are. He won’t make eye contact. He’s not even trying. It pisses me off. I’m not a great dancer, but I want to make an effort. I want to Lindy Hop. And you can’t do that with a brick. Girls are supposed to follow.

A little later, I compare with my friend. “Did you dance with that old guy? He can really lead,” and she agrees. “What about that one creepy weird guy who wasn’t even trying?” I ask.

“Which one? Where?”

But he’s already gone. He must have left right after he danced with me. “Serious terrorist vibes. Like they told him to try to fit in but he still couldn’t bring himself to touch a heathen woman.” Maybe I’m judging him on his full beard in a room full of clean-shaven guys, or his medium-dark skin, or the pained look in his eyes, like he’s watching some kind of a blasphemous orgy rather than a Tuesday night swing class at the university. Anyway, he scared me. What was he doing there? What was his motive?

Kitty Therapy

You created the confluence yourself, without intention: one new house, two new clients. The house was a fix-er-up. The clients, one might assert, were, too. “I’m a copywriter,” you want to yell. “You don’t hire a copywriter before you have a site design! A spreadsheet of keywords and URLs does not a homepage make.”

But you don’t say that sort of thing when you’re a freelancer, and just starting out, and amazed at your good fortune in signing clients who will pay you what you think you’re worth, enough money that you’re not even worried about paying for the house.

But you do scream it at your monitor, and your husband, and the mountainous stack of unopened boxes dominating your office, which will never, never get unpacked or organized, because you have tripled your business workload without cutting your ten weekly volunteer hours, and you don’t have time to make a home for yourself.

And your husband, who, to be completely honest, will be doing the bulk of the home remodeling, will understand, and draw you close to him, even though he’s in the middle of configuring your Internet phone, updating his desktop computer, and changing all the light bulbs to compact CFLs. He will take you into the kids’ room, the one space in the whole house that actually looks like a room instead of a shipping warehouse, and cuddle you up on the futon, and listen to you cry.

“I don’t know what this client wants and I really, really need to nail this account so Sarah and I can incorporate this year and all my instant messages come out sounding wrong and I think people are mad at me because you can’t hear frustration or jokes in text.”

No, he soothes you, you’re a great writer. You’re doing fine. They’re gonna love it.

“And this house is crazy and I can hardly work in that office because if I turn my head all I can see are a million unpacked boxes and I’m never going to get the kitchen in order and there’s so much work to do!”

No, he says, rubbing your head. I’m going to get it all taken care of. I’m going to build shelves and fix the kitchen. We’ll take it as it comes and get the whole house taken care of.

“And my kitty probably hates it here. He went out through the pet door and he probably went right over the wall and decided to go back to the old place and there’s four busy streets to cross and he’s going to get hit by a car and I’ll never see him again.”

Hello, kitty, he says, rubbing his finger together, and you look, and there’s your kitty, looking up at you, maybe just a little dirty from outside, and he hops on the futon and presses his head into your palm, purring, and you sigh.

“Oh,” you sniff. “I guess it will be all right, then.”

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.

Creative Constipation

Her mind felt packed tight with rough edges, ideas of ceramic, brick, and stone. Heavy with unexpressed meaning, she dragged her thoughts across blank expanses, leaving nothing in her wake. Clean, white expanses unsullied by the stain of construction and creation sat like pristine accusations where dumping would be not only permitted, but encouraged.

Push, she told herself. Squeeze it out. Defile the virgin landscape. Unburden yourself.

But for all her effort, the page remained unchanged, as empty as if her head were as cavernous and resonant with unused space as anyone else’s. As if she were ordinary. As if the weight of unexpressed concepts did not bloat her skull.

She took a penknife, cut, bled out one letter, another, and another, and another.

May, 1997

(The following piece originally appeared in Antioch Is My Home: Community Art Project, inspired by the planned closing of Antioch College by Antioch University. Since the writing of this piece, after a prolonged and unprecedented battle, College alumni have been awarded control of the school. To learn more about Antioch College and its struggle for continuity and independence, please visit the College website or the alumni association website.)

Pasha and I sat alone on Pennell House porch. In the turning tide from quarter to trimester, new curriculum to new-new curriculum, we alone had washed ashore. Even Jeff was becalmed in his gallery on Dayton-Yellow Springs Road, and soon I would drift off to work at the Yellow Springs Public Library. Behind us, Birch Hall hung in suspended animation, doors locked and chained.

Pasha tapped his bowl against the railing and laughed. “Listen,” he said. “It’s so quiet you can hear a bowl ash across campus.” He tapped again and the metallic ring echoed back.

I walked to the east side of Pasha’s home, the former home of America’s first fully-tenured female professor, to watch the red brick of my former home light up in the afternoon sun. Eight semesters total I had lived in that concrete block—one in Pennell, one in Willett, six in Hardy—and, still more community member than alum, felt a terrible distance from the chained dormitory. I wanted to walk its halls, crunch broken glass under my feet, lie on a stained mattress in the fortress where I first felt safe among a community. Twenty feet away, I was homesick for Birch.

“It’s the Phoenix,” I promised myself. Birch would rise again, burn, and be reborn in perpetuity. Birch was eternal, indestructible.

The thefts of the future remained hidden that day: the car accident that would steal from Pasha the memory of a campus so silent you could hear the echo of an ashing bowl; the cabal that would steal from everyone who loved Antioch the security of a home to shelter kids like us in perpetuity.

Even in May, I could trace the green path where the steam tunnels melted the snow each winter. I knew how to set the showerheads for the community steams that would be impossible following the remodel, where to cut the bolt to access the roof, and why you must never, ever flush a tampon in Birch Space. I had cooked four years of meals in filthy kitchenettes, collected a pile of 11-D-2s, and cut Birch First! graffiti into the sidewalk in front of me. I had come to Yellow Springs without a sense of place; Antioch provided the roots that let me spread my branches far from home.

We did not know, that strange, silent May, what circumstance would steal, and what we would keep. We couldn’t anticipate the home, years later, nearly two thousand miles from Yellow Springs, where Pasha, Jeff, and I would keep our own Antioch traditions alive, where I would hold for Pasha the memories he had lost. We couldn’t anticipate the phone call, years later, when Jeff’s mother, who once worked in the Office of Development, and later as Al Guskin’s administrative assistant, would announce that the University was closing the College. We didn’t know what to do with that information, six months before the public announcement. Online, older alums told me to shut up about it, not to be such an innocent. Naysayers had predicted the college’s demise for years, they said. Nothing was wrong, they said.

Jeff’s mother insisted that the plan hadn’t been such a secret, that actions taken in the years prior to that still May afternoon had set it into motion. She said Guskin’s chancellorship had been one step in the preparation. She said theft of College resources by the University had been commonplace in the 90s. A conservative, not given to conspiracy theory or outrage, she merely reported what she had seen and heard.

Pasha’s parents had a wooden plaque made up for our home, which reads, “Antioch West” with our names—Jeff, Monica, Pasha—below. We wouldn’t be a little family now if we hadn’t been a big family then, if we all hadn’t been spiritually homeless, drawn to the place where we, as individuals, were included.

It was a microscopic moment, framed by the echo of metal on metal and the glint of sun on brick, in which I prepared to trade the shelter of Yellow Springs for the big, scary world, clutching the knowledge that I had found home. Antioch is a center I carry within me, a home to share with future generations who need it as much as I did. There are children today—teenagers, elementary students, preschoolers—who don’t even know of the forces working to steal their birthright. Antioch College is my home, a home to which I welcome all who seek shelter, and a shelter I weave around myself every day.

He Kissed Her First

He kissed her first. He told her he loved her first. He touched her first. She only allowed herself to follow suit because her body told her it was all right, and because he told her that he would love her forever.

Because he promised and swore, she didn’t believe the rumors. He would never lie to her, never cheat on her. He didn’t want anyone else, ever.

“Together forever,” he would say to her.

“And ever and ever,” she would answer.

They went away to college. He promised and swore that he would love her forever. In the beginning, he promised every day, on the phone. Then, he promised twice a week, then once a week. By sophomore year, it was twice a month. Then once a month, whenever she called him. He always promised to call her back, but he never did. Wrenching herself away from the tear in her heart, she suppressed her desire to hear him lie about his love and ceased contact.

Ten years later, he sent her a chatty, lighthearted email. Her success in business could now be tracked on the Internet, along with her contact information. She read between the lines, saw his unspoken plea for professional help, and returned a chatty, lighthearted email. He dropped off her radar again.

After three more years, he started leaving chatty, lighthearted comments for her on social messaging sites, but now his jokes and opinions left a bad taste in her mouth. Had he changed so much, she wondered, or had she? Would she ever have kissed him, if he hadn’t kissed her first?

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.

Positively

Michael looked more like a beach bum than a professor, handsome with rugged, surfer flair. Sandy blond hair in a disarray of spikes. Hemp necklace strung with wooden beads. Worn Baja hoodie that looked as if it had been to Baja and back. His eyes crinkled in that smiling way that happens to men with the good luck or good genes to reach middle age while maintaining a youthful complexion.

So: easy to look at.

About halfway through class, the crowded room heated up, and he pulled that old Baja hoodie over his head to reveal a most gorgeous, sculpted, muscular torso, framed by a tight white undershirt. This was unfair. How was I supposed to concentrate when the professor looked like a beefcake pin-up? His pecs! His biceps! His deltoids! So vibrant! So healthy! So delicious!

Ignoring the devastating beauty, his teaching methods intrigued. Once he killed the lights, lit a candle, and asked us to meditate. Once he asked us to write about a body part, and didn’t flinch when I chose my vagina. In fact, he submitted the essay to an academic symposium, and stuck up for me when some older professors expressed horror at my subject matter.

As the semester drew to a close, Michael announced that he would be selling his worldly possessions and flying to Africa, where he would empower HIV-positive women by teaching them how to start small businesses.

Did such a perfect guy ever exist?

Somehow, I ended up helping him move out of his apartment. I couldn’t say no to him. After we had packed everything up and he gifted me with a pair of old bookcases, he offered to buy us some pizza. My head was already spinning from an afternoon of proximity to Adonis. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t sit casually with him, discussing his ambitious plans, knowing how the musculature of his chest impressed the thin cotton of his T-shirt. He hugged me goodbye and I almost cried. Oh, Michael, you were too perfect. Too handsome. Too vital.

Years later, his name jumped out at me from the byline of an article in the Trib. He must be back in the States! Expecting an account of his years in Africa, I delved into the piece.

Africa was only tangential to the essay. Rather, it was a poignant, revealing discussion of the change in his own life, over a decade earlier, when he learned that he, himself, was HIV-positive.

I read, stunned, of the miserable, shame-filled, dying man, who, through the power of modern medicine and positive thinking, had transformed himself into the strongest, loveliest, most vibrant human being to ever stand in front of a classroom. He had not always been thus. He had been, according to the writing, very sick, weak and underweight, embarrassed about his sexual orientation.

But he was so alive! How could the Michael I knew have sprung from the man described here, hiding beneath a baseball cap, wasting away in a free clinic?

It shames me, sometimes, still. My own little problems discourage me. It’s hard not to give up. I think of Michael, suffering from one of the most dreaded diseases of our age, transforming himself from a pitiful, sickly weakling to a golden god only after learning of his diagnosis, then taking his new lease on life across the ocean, to give what he could to those who had less. And then there’s me, with more advantages than most people, even in America, crying into my pillow because my carpal tunnel has taken a turn for the worse, and I can’t do push-ups anymore.

Perception

She scribbles in a leather-bound journal, and I like to think I know just what she’s trying to say.

She’s young—perhaps not yet eighteen—and blonde, and what’s probably a great body is covered with baggy clothes. Kind of punky, oversized black pants. Chains. T-shirt advertising a band nobody ever heard of. Thick-framed nerd glasses with lenses than distort her eyes. Ugly-pretty. Like, if this were a sit-com, everyone would make fun of her as an outcast. And then, in the last scene, she’d get a makeover and everyone would mistake her for a super-model. The snooty guy would suddenly fall in love with her, but she would go for the cute but dorky guy who’d always had a crush.

I bet she’s writing about angst. How much she hates the plebians sharing this train car, how no one understands her, how she can’t wait to get away from her family. She’s dreaming of college. She’s ready to ditch her lame high school crowd and meet some mature adults.

Or else, she’s writing poetry. Overwrought poetry full of images of pain. The journal’s leather binding is dyed a rich purple. Her favorite aunt—the only one who understands her—probably gave it to her last Christmas. She eschews the commercialism of the holiday, but she loved this one gift.

I wish I could tell her that everything will be all right, that she will get a little older and life will get a lot better. I imagine we have a lot in common. When the train stops, people start shuffling around. I end up a little closer to her, but she has her back to me. The train starts up again.

She snaps the journal shut and reaches into her pocket. It’s her cell phone. “Yeah, I’m on my way,” she says in a voice far more mature than the one I imagined for her. “Had some great ideas for the website. No, no, I wrote it all down. What? No, I’ll tell you when I get there. God, I hate public transportation. This crazy old dyke was leering at me the whole ride.” She laughs at something I can’t hear. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Anyway, she’s gone now. See you in five.”

The phone goes back in her pocket and she opens the journal again. It’s not poetry. It's computer code. She’s a programmer. The train lurches and she steps back into me. She isn’t the type to apologize for that. It’s a crowded train, after all. But she does turn to see what she’s hit, and the moment my eyes catch hers, before I can say something clever about the human condition, she turns away, squeezes between two men to get closer to the door.

I realize that I am the crazy old dyke, although I am completely sane, and only twenty-eight, and only experimented with girls a couple of times in college. She gets off at the next stop. A guy my age tries to stare me down as I watch her depart. He’s starting to lose his hair, but he thinks he’s hiding that fact with a baseball cap. Probably, he played varsity football in high school, but wasn’t good enough for a college scholarship. Probably he went to his dad’s alma mater, joined the same fraternity, knocked a girl up, paid for her abortion. Now he works in a cubicle. Drinks beer afterward with the guys from his office. Lives for Monday night football.

He smiles at me. I turn away.

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.

Pierced

Her little sister possessed something that she lacked. The girl couldn’t say, quite, what that thing was, but obviously, her sister was more acceptable. Her sister didn’t mind wearing dresses. Her sister didn’t prefer playing with boys.

Her sister did the things their parents expected her to do.

The girl didn’t do certain things because she didn’t like them. She hated how dresses looked, she hated how they felt compared to jeans, and more to the point, she hated being told to act like a lady. Wearing dresses meant you weren’t to run, jump, shout, fidget, or climb trees. Why would anyone choose to wear a dress, given the attendant restrictions? The little girl accepted the limitation of being a girl; that didn’t mean she must become a lady. It didn’t indicate any compulsory girliness. She was a case in point. If she had been meant to be a certain way—for instance, feminine—wouldn’t she just naturally feel, behave, embrace that label? And not being feminine, didn’t that mean that she wasn’t all the other things they thought she should be, and shouldn’t try to fake it?

Why would they force her to pretend to be something she so clearly wasn’t? They told her lying was wrong, and then they told her to lie to them.

When her sister came home from first grade insisting that she needed pierced ears, the girl wasn’t surprised. Of course her sister would want pierced ears. They were ladylike.

Her little sister got her ears pierced and proclaimed herself pleased with the results. Their parents asked the girl several times if she didn’t want her ears pierced too. The girl was emphatic that she didn’t. It didn’t even have anything to do with not feeling like a girl. Primarily, she despised needles in any form. So she really couldn’t see the point of having instruments of torture applied to her head in order to become more of something she wasn’t in the first place.

Her little sister had her pierced ears for a few months, long enough that she could take out the gold piercing earrings and wear whatever kind of earrings that she wanted. Their parents kept asking the girl if she didn’t really want pierced ears. The girl kept telling her parents she really didn’t want pierced ears. She didn’t care for jewelry, and she didn’t need one more thing to clean. She was, overall, scared of the process. She was not interested in suffering for beauty.

Her parents decided she would get her ears pierced.

She resisted, argued, complained, screamed. She tried logic and she tried volume. They took her to the mall anyway. She fought them all the way to the booth where they pierced ears. She cried.

Her parents said, “Don’t be a baby.” They compared her, unfavorably, to her little sister. They said even a first-grader could do it; there was nothing for her to fear. The girl repeated her objections: she didn’t want pierced ears, she didn’t like needles. Her parents reiterated their argument: she was a big girl and she needed to act like one.

They pierced her ears.

Coda: When the girl got to be a teenager, she horrified her parents by adding six more piercings, five on the left ear and one on the right, using the post of the piercing earring that had inflicted the original insult. She spaced them out over a period of years, snickering to herself as their horror mounted with each new hole.

Aftercare

It happened on October 17, across the street from a haunted house, which meant I couldn’t enjoy Halloween anymore. I had screamed and screamed myself hoarse, and later, the police said they had even heard me screaming, but it was October 17, across the street from a haunted house. Screams filled the air.

Then again, I’m still here, so maybe that means I’m lucky?

Bad enough to give up horror movies, the superior thrill of autumn leaves skittering down the street in a gust of wind, the wearing of short skirts. The real tragedy, though, is giving up that youthful sense of invulnerability, the security that comes from knowing terror is something that happens to other people. Terror happened to me.

That was all more than a decade ago, and I can finally watch scary movies again: a Korean ghost tale, an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, some stupid modern slasher flick where gore replaces suspense and character development. Took a while to get over it, but I did. Because, seriously, what’s scary is reality. You want to scare me? Give me a Holocaust memoir. Or how about that scene in the Will Smith movie where he’s newly homeless and he and his kid are sleeping in a public bathroom? Or how about the news?

It was a mistake when I stopped loving Halloween because a crazy man did a crazy thing to me. Halloween is the antidote.

Deadly Sins

The day after his thirty-ninth birthday, Louis decided to give up vice, cold turkey. How long could a man go on tempting fate? His youth had ended; mortality loomed. His bad habits were many, his indulgences excessive: a pack of cigarettes a day, an eighth of marijuana a week. Liquor was his particular weakness. It made him boisterous and funny, popular with his coworkers and women he met in bars, which resulted in frequent promiscuous sexual encounters, despite the potbelly he wore as a result of his love for fried food, sweets, and that most lethal combination of the two, doughnuts.

He would die, soon, and with agony, at this rate. It snuck up on you and—bam!—you were forty. But he wasn’t forty yet. If he could wipe the slate clean, perhaps he could elude the specter of death for a while longer.

Cigarettes were out completely, as was the weed, and the occasional hit of X or bag of mushrooms. Hard liquor was out, and he would limit himself to a single glass of wine or beer a day. Fornication was out. He would not sleep with any woman until he had dated her exclusively for at least a month, and then he would wear a condom every time. He would become a health nut, and join a gym.

For two solid weeks, he remained faithful to his new regime. Mornings, he experienced a clear-headed lack of regret he had not known since before college. Seven pounds dropped from his waist and breathing came easier. With the time and energy he used to spend in bars pursuing women, he cleaned and painted the house, repaired windows and refinished woodwork, even changed the oil and sparkplugs on the car. He felt great; he would live forever.

On the fifteenth day, Jim from accounting persuaded him to take a single hit off a joint. Louis thought, one toke won’t hurt. Just on the weekends. The next weekend he smoked two joints, one each day, and went to Dunkin’ Donuts after the second time.

After a month, his exercise schedule became sporadic. He still worked out, sometimes. Sometimes he had a second drink with the guys from the office. At the same time, he discovered a bakery that specialized in vegan cakes, and enrolled in a healthy vegetarian cooking class at the recreation center. There, he met Joann, a willowy blonde who whispered to him that she still, sometimes, ate red meat. With great restraint, he managed to wait ten entire days before seducing her.

Waiting was a good idea, he thought. Things with Joann heated up. He abandoned his resolutions, sort of. He ate whatever junk food he wanted, and smoked and drank whatever anyone offered him, but only when she wasn’t around. After they got married and had a baby, he didn’t indulge around his daughter, either. Louis became a secret vector of vice. He sinned only on the occasional Sunday afternoon, or when Joann took the baby to her mother’s. He made the most of the occasions, and threw the evidence in other people’s trash.

Louis lived thirty more years. At sixty-nine, he was diagnosed with cancer, terminal. Hereditary. Genetic, the doctor said. “There’s nothing you could have done differently,” the doctor assured as Louis numbered his weak resolve and his many transgressions. “It was in your DNA.”

Townhouse

When I first met Ty, he lived in a little row of townhouses, the first in a block of four, not far from the university. He shared the place with an alcoholic old English teacher who went around quoting Shakespeare as if he didn’t expect anyone else to understand, and smelling of piss. Everyone else in the building was a kid, early twenties max.

Ty and I took to each other like an electric cord to a wall socket. I liked his fit, and he seemed to like the way I made him feel. He got to sample all kinds of new sensations and found them agreeable. He liked my world.

His world didn’t suit me too much. The English teacher stank, and the kids in the other units threw loud parties. Plus, one night, we heard gunshots over the noise of his computer speakers. Ty and the English teacher prowled around the parking lot, but they didn’t see anything. They even called the cops, who poked around too, but they didn’t see anything either.

But then later this girl came around looking for her boyfriend. She was in tears, Ty said. She was sure something bad happened to him. And sure enough, when Ty and the English teacher went around the fence, they found a dead guy in the alley. So they were up all night with the police after all. I had already gone home, before the cops turned up the first time.

That night Ty found out from the guy in the second unit, right next to his, that we could buy weed cheap from the guy in the fourth unit, all the way at the end. It was a sweet connection, for a while. But then unit-two guy, Chad, said that unit-four guy was tweaking, and he wasn’t going to deal with him anymore. He was a disaster waiting for his fifteen minutes, Chad said, and he was going to end up dead, or in jail, or both. He didn’t want to get anywhere near unit-four guy anymore. “I think that meth-head might have shot that dude in the alley,” he said. “The dude was trying to rob him, I bet.” From the outside, you'd never guess what a skeevy place those townhouses were.

After that, Ty was persuaded to move into my place. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not bullet-proof. And anyway, I hated those townhouses.

And sure enough, a couple weeks later, we saw it on the news. Eight police cruisers outside the place, two dead bodies. “Couldn't be Chad, could it?” Ty worried, and texted him.

Chad called right back. “It wasn’t us,” he said. “It was meth-head and his girlfriend.”

“You’re gonna move out now, right?” Ty asked him.

“Hey, maybe it’s gonna be safe around here, now that he’s gone.”

He invited us to a party on Friday, but we ended up not going. We were kind of too old for that sort of thing.