Category: My stories

When you live on a ranch near the border, you get a lot of unexpected visitors.
They will try to take things.
Some of leave enough out to help them to get down the road without breaking in to take more.
We open our doors every night and hold a dinner for everyone coming here.
Plenty of bunk beds in the barn.
The next morning, after the poison’s done its work, we bury the bodies out back.
The sheriff comes by now and then.
All he wants is his share of the money we find.
It pays for more poison.

Early Hollywood was pretty racy.
Lots of violence and nudity in movies.
So, the Catholic Leagues would produce lists of movies with ratings of each.
Some were safe, that their parishioners shouldn’t see.
Others weren’t safe.
And then some they said if you saw them, you’d go straight to Hell.
Sure enough, people used the lists.
They skipped the safe movies and went to the naughty nasty smut shows.
When the Hayes Production Code arrived, nudity and violence were curtailed and censored everywhere.
And the churches stop publishing the lists.
But people still went to Hell for their earlier transgressions.

My first pizza was Barnaby’s thin crust in Northbrook.
Their sign had a brown potion bottle, but I always thought of it as a bowling pin.
We also went to the original Uno’s for deep dish.
Greasy thick dough pies.
Same with Godfather’s. Gross.
When we moved, a local joint called Rufini’s got me back to thin crust.
Until Little Caesar’s and their Detroit casseroles turned me off.
Abortion-soaked spongy toast.
And I choked down Sbarro’s only because they were free.
These days, it’s wood-fired brick oven.
And a crust so thin, I can cut my wrists with it.

Why didn’t I make perfect grades in school?
The work was boring.
And my parents thought I wasn’t emotionally capable of handling skipping grades.
Except that I wasn’t emotionally capable of dealing with being bored, either.
Check my juvenile rap sheet.
Eventually, I got a scholarship to a private school.
And did college-level physics and math there.
So, academically, I was ready for college. Except they required four years of English.
Yet, when I graduated, a Junior was allowed to attend summer School English to replace a year.
I tried to ram the headmaster’s car.
(Also on the rap sheet.)

When I was little, my parents compiled a baby book.
It had photographs and report cards and vaccination records.
And some Bank of Israel bonds from a rich uncle that would mature when it was time for college.
Both were for ten dollars.
Two pizzas on a weekend. Gee, thanks.
But the page with the gift list mentioned three bonds, not two.
So, I dug around the closet and found the third one.
It was for a hundred thousand dollars.
My parents had tried to swindle it.
So, I swindled it back
And it paid for a lot of pizza.

I worked at a place that offered free lunches, free snacks, a free gym, and free power charging for electric cars.
Oh, and free cheap cell phones.
They didn’t pay great, but with these perks, they added enough to the compensation to make it worth staying.
When the pandemic hit, they didn’t offer a lunch stipend, sent out three small boxes of snacks over two years, and that’s it.
People who asked about the perks were made to feel like shit by management, so they left.
They tossed their free cheap cell phones into the gym.
And went to lunch.

You know, I used to bite my nails.
Don’t remember a time when I didn’t.
Therapists told me that it was a form of self destruction.
I said the suicide attempts were more important signs of that.
I stopped biting my nails after Piper died.
For some reason, promising a cat that I’d stop biting my nails worked.
Aside from a rare pruning when I don’t have a kit nearby, every few months or so, I’ve stopped.
Of course, the cat’s death provoked the last suicide attempt, but the gun jammed.
Probably on a fingernail clipping, knowing how karma works.

When Bobby Brown died, he went to Hell.
No waiting in line for Bobby.
A bodyguard at the gates with a clipboard, unclipping a velvet rope gate and saying “This way, sir.”
A line of gorgeous women waited for him. With baseball bats.
Bobby staggered along the line, suffering blow after blow, feeling bones crack, skin split, muscles tear, and blood flow and spurt and ooze.
And at the end of the line, Whitney watched. And waited.
At first, she enjoyed the spectacle. She knew Bobby was suffering.
But she wanted her chance at revenge.
Waiting. Waiting.
And suffering, too.

It’s a sad thing when you have to bury your own child.
The last time, I got a sore back, using a shovel in the back yard.
So, that’s why I called around and the neighborhood showed up with shovels.
One guy got a backhoe from a nearby road construction crew.
That was nice of him.
We made a block party out of it.
With lemonade and cookies and music and a volleyball net.
Everyone had a blast.
“Same time next week?” I asked.
The crowd cheered, and I patted the dirt down.
And called the foster agency for another.