short story

Teaching Science Fiction

The sun an unpeeled orange, cut in half, stooped behind a black and green hill. Parked my dark blue station wagon in the front lot, single piece of rust falling off the bumper as the hubcaps came to a full stop. Threw my cigarette out the window, rolled down by hand, before I turned onto the asphalt drive. Didn’t want to be making the wrong impressions.
Into the hospital bright hallway, smooth white winder block walls, white floors with some sort of embedded gold fleck, passing unfamiliar craggy faces with unshaved cheeks. My own mug was pristine, a narrow cut below my lip from a “just in case” shave at five in the morning.  Set my almost empty, battered, leather bag filled with empty manila folders on the desk, humming a twenty-year-old Wilco song to myself, “maybe all I need is a shot in the arm.”
I turned to the gleaming dry-erase board, brighter than my bare ass, wrote “Mr. Dooley” in big blue looping script, never quite settled the differences between upper and lower case, my father’s mild dyslexia in my blood. Then a numbered list:

1.    One person talks at a time
2.    No slurs, insults, or saying “shut up”
3.    The Golden Rule

They filtered in slowly, a full fifteen minutes before the first startling bell.  A blonde girl with sleepy blank grey eyes began putting on makeup. An olive skinned boy who looked older than me was text messaging on a phone that cost more than my rent that month. I sighed, pretending to drink my coffee, wishing I’d smoked another cigarette.
“Hi, um, Mr. Dooley”, it was the blonde, her hands were frightening, and they were flat on my desk.  Shallow cuts on every knuckle, a dark purple bruise on her left wrist.  “Is it okay if we eat in here?”
I didn’t know. I found out later that it was not allowed in any form. She looked hungry through, and it was no time to be making enemies, “yeah, just, um, clean up your mess.”
When did I start talking like that? My own teachers would never say things like that, they would either grunt, or just say yes. I was being motherly; it was foolish.  She sat down and pulled out a
waxpaper wrapped crust-less white bread peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cut down the middle twice, resigned her chapsticked lips to the triangles. She had just unveiled the classroom equivalent of an anthrax filled envelope and I didn’t even notice. I was too nervous.
The first ring came, like gravel in a church bell, and then another twenty filed in, skirts that were probably too short for the new rules, zebra print pants were way back, apparently, two pairs more than I planned on seeing. Sunglasses at seven o clock in the morning, a nice touch.
They chirped at one another, the Argentinean exchange students sat huddled, a tan quartet in the back left corner, saw their strangely punctuated names on my ten-point font list.
The bell went again, and something approaching silence. Heard the mouse squeak of weight shifting in a metal desk. The monologue I had prepared sitting heavy on my mind, something about my roommates from my freshman year of college, and the kind of person it is okay to be, but the sort of person you should want to be. Shit. I had no idea what I was doing there, should have been backpacking in Austria with Juliana.  But I summoned the courage to push myself back from the desk, standing from the cushioned office chair.
“Good morning everyone. I hope you all had a nice summer vacation. I am Mr. Dooley, you can call me Dooley, if that sort of thing…    suits you.” Dead silence. Crickets. Great.
“This is Freshman Composition, if you are looking for some sort of gym class, our textbook is pretty heavy. I recommend three sets of fifteen reps.” A single halting laugh, didn’t see where it came from. The blonde looked up from her sandwich with a crease in her forehead, looking like she had just seen a train crush a motorcycle.
Then a dark hand shot up in the back row. Scrawny Lebanese looking kid, a truly ridiculous crop of black hair crawling all over his arms, the back of his hands, and a nearly shaved head. “What is ‘the golden rule’?”
And for the first time in my life, I really felt old.

hush me up please

we can’t be the “new beat” generation. there are no trolleys on woodward, none of my friends would jump into a moving boxcar, not a cafeteria with terrible coffee in sight. we have jobs, cars, nice families that love us even if they don’t understand us. we’re not beat. we didn’t win the war or drop the bomb, we get abused by interest rates and shoddy foreign policy. but there is the same pulse

same sense of dis-ease. a fear of the evangelical furvor, the knowledge that everyone is drugged on something, over the counter cough syrup or red bull is our benzedrine, there are parallels, in our writing too, stream of consciousness, un-touched-up pictures of people making faces at themselves in the mirror. but we aren’t beat, there needs to be a different word. the second wave of beats were damned, billy burroughs jr. knew he was “cursed from birth.” there must be some adjective-noun-verb that sums it all up, in one or two syllables and i am still searching for it, maybe in vain.

branding something as a movement seems egomaniacal, but i don’t think this is. we are the grounds at the bottomn of the coffee cup and we are restless. i am ashamed to only speak one language but probably won’t learn more, our entitlements embarrass us, our classmates make us duck our heads and read poetry right through a lecture on global warming, we still probably absorb more.

there is no sense in emulating, i can’t grow a good beard anyways, i’ll never find comfort in fucking adolescent boys, i don’t want to be allen ginsberg when i grow up, and i’m pretty sure dan crowley can’t ever drink enough or put on enough weight to be jack kerouac, it is foolish to try. but we care enough, and might be humble enough that what we have to say carries importance. i think all writing is important, but people who think they are bad writers tend to be the best, and i have though myself absolutely shitty for about five years.

juji says things like “i think in fifty years people will wonder if we were lovers,” and i think it is silly and selfish to want to be famous, but maybe she has a point. it is hard to want to be sucessful and not feel like a complete fucking jackass, but i want people to read my stuff. maybe for my sake. maybe for their sake. mostly so they will start writing too, or atleast drawing, or maybe singing, but turn off the radio at least.

i don’t have anything to say for myself, but i do have stories, and i plan to keep on writing them down, and hope people will atleast try to follow the narrative thread, which leads nowhere but more poems. i only have poems, and a little bit of government subsidized debt, and a really amazing group of family and friends.

we might be the hush generation, that could work, that might work, i am not so sure.

i need to stop thinking and start writing, so i guess that is what i will do.

i am looking

for a couple things for my apartment/house next year.

a desk chair

a dresser with more than 2 drawers, not too huge, has to fit in a closet

any books anyone would like to give away

same with music

art supplies people are thinking of pitching

a bed frame

hugs

if anyone can supply any of these things, or knows where i can get them for cheapy cheap, lemme know

thank you

it just got too damn hot, from 50 to 90 in about two days, sweat dripping off my nose and hissing on just cut gears, time to lop off the best thing i have going for me, gold spun nest atop my slightly sunburnt head, so brett came over the the plastic boxed hairclippers jon never took back, and i sat in a wooden dinner chair in the downstairs bathroom feeling curls fall onto a towel wrapped about my neck, seeing my ears for the first time in six or seven years, wondering how long until i look like a weak boy again, seeing muscles in my neck, a solid line wrinkle in my forehead.

steve who helps me load machines got back a couple years ago from iraq. says he feels younger than 28, is saving up for motorcycle mechanic school in orlando, memory all fucked up from “the ptsd” he says with a laugh, rockets, IEDs, small arms fire off the windows of an armored humvee. and i bitch about a haircut.