The hot and sweaty south. Their faces glisten with the dispassionate love and bliss and drunken lethargy. It is energizing and disheartening.

The kids smoke cigarettes to look busy, occupied. It isn’t sadness. This is not Faulkner’s southern Gothic — nor is it a romantic scene. This is something different — a modern romantic syntheti-topia.

People here survive without watches, with a beer in hand, content to stay where they are.

I am becoming one of them. And it’s not so bad. I wipe the sweat off my brow and say, “Yes sah, it sure is a hotton’.”

I sleep with them, I drink with them — but my dreams, my dreams live elsewhere. They are in impossible places where the sunsets are long and sad and warm and fade into star-filled skies — a surreality filled with my sins and savings.

There are buttermilk consequences here with comfortable admonishments for the colorful, catastrophic life that I have led.

This is not Faulkner’s South. This is my South, where short memories and long nights contrast humanity and something greater and less than.

I am waiting, waiting for the sound of the sirens to arrive at my door. To draw me out of this warm coma will take a kind voice or a police boot to the back of the head.

I wore a green hat. I wrote words on toilet paper. And now, in the distance, the future is calling. If this whiskey-soaked diary is proof of nothing else, it’s time for a change.

Standing on Moira’s back porch, I saw the lovingly maintained buildings of a pre-war America. My hand trembled in the January air as I took a long drag of a cigarette — a habit I should have given up months ago. Somewhere, echoing between brownstone and brick, I could hear the faint call of a future here. The South had been kind to me, but the North was where I belonged.

Will Montserrat, clothed in the wrinkled vestments of the previous evening, joined me.

“How’re you feeling Dan?” Will asked while rubbing his forehead.

“You know me, Will — I can get piss-drunk on a boat in a storm, and still wake up ready for work,” I said, which was more or less the truth.

“So Sarah’s coming in today with Erik. Are you going to be alright?”

“Talk to me after I’ve had a bloody mary or two at brunch.”

“You can’t still be hung up on her after all these years,” Will said as he lit up a cigarillo. “Are you telling me that there hasn’t been anyone else since?”

“‘Course there has, Will. But I haven’t seen or talked to her since… the thing. My last memory of her was a sweaty encounter in a janitor’s closet after the banquet,” I said, knocking the ash from my spent cigarette.

I fished another out of the pack, and flicked my lighter. The Observer awards banquet, which had begun with Grace and ended in Sarah, was a fitting end to my college experience. With half of the paper’s staff retiring, the senior staff decided to get lit before the event. Dressed in a tuxedo, I rode to the banquet with my date for the evening. Grace was sufficiently amused by attire, and a little confused by the invitation.

“Will, what the hell happened that night?” I asked, mid-remembrance.

“The banquet? Heck, Prickle ate seven salads, you and Howard stood at the podium for nearly twenty minutes doing vaudeville, somebody stole the Observer banner, and Al lit a bale of hay on fire. I can’t imagine what the wait staff thought of the entire thing.”

What a mess. We were dressed to the nines, eating on the company dime, and drunk on nostalgia and malt liquor. After the dinner, we went back to the news room for a nip of whiskey. John Fairbanks, Prickle, Al Dunne, Remi, Howard, Molly, Will, Moira, Grace, Sarah and I sipped at plastic cups of the cheap stuff. And then the thing happened.

“Will, I think I’ll be okay. We survived college, I think I can survive seeing my ex-girlfriend,” I said. I hadn’t thought about that night in nearly two years.

I had asked to talk to Sarah alone.

“You once told me that I’d never get the Editor in Chief slot if I didn’t step up my game,” I’d said, almost in a dream. “You’re why I’m here today. You did this as much as me.”

I wasn’t around when Grace disappeared that night and met up with Christie. We saw them later at a house party, and I was a bit red-faced.

“Dan, we’re getting old,” said Will. “The older we get, the more ex-girlfriends we’re going to have. I think it might be time to start being happy for them and forgive them and ourselves for all the crap we’ve been through.”

The sun broke over the apartment building in front of us. Brooklyn was awake.

“Will, you’re right — and I think I’ve decided something,” I said.

“What’s that?”

Staring into the sun, I replied, “I’m moving to the city.”

The spotlight hit center stage. A lone actor, a boy dressed loosely in a man’s suit, stares out at the crowd. His eyes gleam with the innocence of infinitely corruptible youth. Filler lights come up. Stagehands and extras move around a city street. The boy drinks a beer and smokes a cigarette, still staring at the crowd. His eyes glaze, return. He grows pale. He laughs, cries, smiles, and shouts. He doesn’t blink. Men and women move toward his spotlight halo now and again, glancing at tangent to the boy’s artificial radiance. A girl, also fettered by adult clothes, moves into the harsh light. She touches his face gently, but meaningfully. And sensing the toxicity of this scene, she flees toward stage right.

The boy follows her with his eyes, but does not move. His eyes do not return to the crowd, but remain at stage right. The spotlight shifts in that direction. We find the girl at a table with two friends. The three sit in chairs, upright, and share a meal. The fourth chair lies upturned on the floor.

The boy, sensing rightness in his actions, runs toward the table. He bends down and, before touching the upturned chair, speaks:

BOY: Is this seat taken?

GIRL: All you had to do was ask.

The boy rights the chair and takes a seat. His back to the audience, the boy holds the girl’s hand. The filler lights fade to black. The spotlight remains on the four children at the table. The spotlight blinks out. The curtain falls.

The city loomed large as the China Bus rolled toward the Lincoln Tunnel. Sitting awkwardly in my cramped bus seat, I fingered my camera’s on switch nervously. Fairbanks and his girlfriend Cassidy McLeod sat a few seats away talking nonsense at each other.

We were on our way to a reunion of The Observer. Remi, Moira my old boss, Will Montserrat, and the rest would be there. I couldn’t wait to see the faces of the boys and girls who wrote words and made love at the magazine.

“Cassy, you see that?” I said, pointing to the skyline. “That there is the center of American culture — 9 million lost souls stumbling around in ecstasy and remorse. Drunk, stoned or sober, New York City is the beginning and the end of every great love story or murder mystery.”

Cass had never been above the Mason-Dixon line and shivered at the thought of a below-32 winter day. New York was as cold and strange a place for that southern girl as the moon was for the human race.

“I don’t see what’s so great about it,” Cass said. “I can see skyscrapers in Richmond. New York just seems like a bigger place to get lost in the fire.”

The bus entered the tunnel and drove on through to China Town. As we exited the oversized rickshaw, a blast of wind shot down the avenue and gave us a reminder of our winters at LOPI. I smiled.

We collected our bags and took the subway to Moira’s apartment in Park Slope. To this day, despite the year I lived in Brooklyn, I still can’t figure out the City’s mass transit system. Moira lived a few blocks away from the 7th ave stop, and we managed to brave the January chill — with Fairbanks acting as a windshield for his romantic confederate.

We knocked on the door and were greeted with the sort of welcome that only accompanies a long separation: glasses of whiskey and long hugs. We were back.

Gwen, who was the editor of The Observer when I first started, pulled me aside.

“So, Sarah’s coming tomorrow with her fiance,” she said with a half laugh. “Just thought you should know.”

Sarah Cardiff was engaged. I finished my whiskey in one large gulp. With a cough, I managed to say, “Awesome. I didn’t know she was affianced.”

“She didn’t tell you?” Gwen asked. “Woof, I didn’t mean to break the news to you that way.”

Somewhere inside of me, gears that I assumed had stopped whirling started up again and then broke. And it hurt. We are not toasters. Our elements don’t just turn off when the bread is scorched.

“Yeah, Erik left the seminary for her.”

“Good for them. Guess I shouldn’t be expecting a wedding invite.”

“For what it’s worth, I wish I had a chance at her.”

“Not helping, Gwen.”

And then we drank. Whiskey and wine went from bottles to cups to livers. And we were a family again. Happily drunk, we swapped war stories of life and love and heartache. Will was getting his medical degree, Gwen was programming business card websites, Moira was dating Remi, and we were all getting deliciously old with nothing to show for it.

The next morning, I woke up and found our fantastic little family sprawled on the floor in various states of undress. I took a piss and had a smoke. This was going to be a good weekend.

My grandfather stepped out of the car, dressed in the same suit he wore to his father’s funeral. The old man still looked out at the world with an engineer’s marvel. He watched his inventions sail into space, and now he was burying his wife. Sixty-four years together, Clark and Alaire survived the formative decades of America’s teenage years. And on a hill-top on a February afternoon, my grandfather sat silently as his wife’s ashes were committed to the earth of a small New England town.

What was supposed to be a snowy day in late winter transformed on that hill-top. As the priest bore the urn into the mausoleum, the dark clouds of that cursed month parted. They all turned from the ceremony. My aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my sister, my parents — and lastly my grandfather  — watched as a grateful sun shone upon the gilded box that held the remains. Then the priest said his peace and we went our separate ways, all of us secure in the sense that Grandma was proud of us — if not for our accomplishments, but for our sins. My grandfather would go home to an empty house for the first time in over sixty years. He loved her. And that’s all that’s worth saying about it.

After a beer with my dad, I climbed in my car and headed for Brooklyn. I shed a few tears on the steering wheel, but it was a petty offering. I could only imagine the great-grandchildren she would never see and the wedding toasts she would never give. A woman of ninety, my grandmother had seen the depths of human sadness and the heights of human kindness. So as I drove down I-95, I cried. Not for the loss of a great soul in the world, but for the fact that I couldn’t share all of the happiness of my life with her. I could never again watch her face light up when I told her about the next best thing.

She would never see all the good she had wrought in the world.

—

[Events removed]

Grace and I stood outside a bar in Brooklyn. I had taken off my black suit and changed into something approaching normal. We lit up a cigarette.

“Remember when you didn’t drink and smoke?” she asked.

“Yeah, and I don’t think I was more or less happy,” I replied.

More to follow. Apologies for the hiatus, motherfuckers.

Oh the Humanity!

(AP) RICHMOND — Burning buildings, looters, and rubble could be seen all around on Tuesday, as Richmond struggled to recover from the disastrous earthquake that struck earlier that day.

Said a Main St. resident of the destruction, “Actually, everything is pretty much where we left it – I think one of my lawn flamingos fell over, but that’s about it. Actually that might have been the wind.”

Clearly residents are struck by the horror of the situation. Everywhere, mass panic envelopes the streets. Even the firefighters struggle to cope with the mayhem.

“Yeah, we haven’t really had any calls about structure fires, or people hurt. Though, there was a pretty ornery cat stuck in a tree this morning,” said Capt. Norman McCarthy, of the second district station. “But I think that was before the earthquake, I think, it’s kind of hard to remember.”

Andy Rees contributed to this reporting. This story was last updated at 4:24 p.m.
—-

So I got to leave the office early today due to the earthquake. My co-workers wanted us to email them an update when I got home about the damage in the city… so I wrote this for them.

As a few of you may know, I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut since I started working. It’s amazing how copy-editing brochures and guides can create an utter hatred of the written word. So I’m trying something new, a little angry, a little dark, and a little pornographic. I figured it couldn’t hurt to post a few excerpts from this new manuscript. The premise of the story is this: a washed up romance novelist falls into bed with a widow — the widow of a man the writer helped kill. It’s an experiment with a guilty narrator. Let me know what you think. Here are a few bits from the first couple of pages.

“I have never been to war, but I have killed a man. It wasn’t by poison or sword. It wasn’t anything that I could ever be arrested for. I killed a man with bad advice. I wrote words. His wife read them. He killed himself.

I stood on the edge a balcony fourteen stories up, wearing a three piece suit, and staring down into the dark abyss of the Arlington night. I was on the edge of the world, lost and alive with chemicals coursing through my brain and heart. My dick was hard. I was still young at this point, still numb to the possibility of happiness. I still smoked. I still fucked like a drunken sailor on his first shore leave.

A girl snored in my bed.”

…

“The night swirled underneath me, the sound of cars on the interstate mixed with the lapping of the Potomac, and for longer than I care to remember, I forgot where I was. I was ready to jump.

I mention this now, at the beginning, so that you can understand why I’m writing this story. You see, like any good confession, I expect punishment for my crime. I killed a man, I fucked his wife, I have to die.

—

This all started, innocently enough, with an idea for a novel. I started my adult life – and will end it – as a romance novelist of the worst kind. I wrote the kind of trash that only horned up old housewives read, the kind of trash that they sell in the ‘book’ aisles of a sad old grocery stores. I wrote about the sort of love that only exists in paperback novels. I wrote the phrase ‘throbbing member’ a few too many times. Then, the housing market went bust.

As I learned from my grandmother, housewives have one remarkable skill set. They can sell houses like nobody’s business. It’s a pretty easy job: take a young couple to a house, serve them some freshly baked cookies, and point out the breakfast nook where Mr. Newlywed can read the Post, and Mrs. Newlywed can sit pretty and wait for her husband to explain the news of the day. And when they weren’t selling houses or vacuuming the rug, they were reading my books. But it’s damned hard to be a housewife-real-estate-agent when nobody’s buying houses. So, housewives got real jobs, their husbands came home at the end of the day, and everyone was servicing everyone else. Nobody was paying for my smut.”

The roads were empty as I drove to the airport. It was nearly 5 in the morning, and I’d been awake since 9 the day before. I listened to some terrible suspense novel-on-tape, one filled with international politics and awkward descriptions of love making.

Like the roads, the airport was also deserted, staffed by a skeleton crew of airline representatives and security guards. I stuck my credit card in the automated check-in kiosk and was greeted with “You are too late to check in.” One of the airline folks gave me a reproachful look and in a southern accent said, “Looks like somebody has been a naughty boy.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”

He printed off the ticket and sent me off to security. I made it through the metal detector and avoided the awkward pat-down that the news had been squawking about for months. When I arrived at the gate, a few more airline personnel were standing around, staring at me.

“Seattle?” A bearded representative asked.

“That’s me.” I replied.

“We were reading your itinerary while we waited for you.” I didn’t realize I had become a minor celebrity in this airport terminal.

A lot has been written about air travel, about the people that are randomly thrown together in those flying buses, and the awkward conversations that inevitably occur. Business or pleasure? How long are you staying? Did I drool on you when I was sleeping? How about a quickie in the lavatory?

My seat companion was a 66-year-old welder from Upstate New York. He had flown before. He knew how to have plane conversations. And so I sat through 6 hours of short canned stories carefully crafted to make me laugh, or to think, or to expose some facet of this man’s life.

He was an army supply sergeant during the Vietnam War — stationed in Germany. His daughter worked at a prison. His ex-son-in-law went to prison. He was a grand-father, a husband, a high school graduate, and a member of a bowling team.

“My daughter just moved down to Charlotte,” he said. “And she insisted on driving her 28-foot U-Haul by herself.”

“Must’ve been quite an adventure, those things have absurd blind spots,” I tried.

“Nope, she made it down just fine,” he said. “And when we were unloading the truck, do you know who was helping me?”

“I couldn’t even imagine.”

“A guy with a PhD.”

“He’s working at a moving company now?” Maybe this was a story about the bad economy.

“No, he’s just a friend of my daughter.”

He didn’t know that I was a writer, his potential biographer. I sat and listened and determined that I could not bring his story to a publisher. He had barely passed high school, joined the army, came home and got married, sent his kid off to college and grad-school, retired, and was taking a cruise of the Pacific North West.  How can you sell the story of the American dream that came true? Nobody wants to read stories about hope.

“So why are you headed out to Seattle?” he asked.

“Visiting a friend for the weekend.”

“No kidding, any particular reason?”

“I don’t know, I just felt like going, so I went.”

While all of this engaging conversation was going on, I could hear the sound of mechanical dogs barking beneath my feet. As the pilot would eventually explain, a triple redundant hydraulic system had malfunctioned redundantly, and there was nothing to worry about. The end result was just a 6-hour chorus of dog barks. Bark bark bark.

I got a free glass of scotch for “the inconvenience.”

Between the barking and the talking, I didn’t get any sleep.

After we landed, I shook his hand and wished him a nice trip. I didn’t know his name, and he didn’t ask for mine.

Walking up the jetway, the fatigue hit me. By my own bleary-eyed sleep-deprived calculations, I’d been awake for 30 hours. Without even knowing it, I had checked off “Be sleepless in Seattle” from my bucket list. Then I went to go find the smoking section.

Now, if you don’t know if you’re physically addicted to something, try taking a long flight. When you land after 6 or 7 hours of not getting a fix, take a look at your hands. If they’re shaking, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re not “doing it casually.” You’re a professional.

After a good 10 minutes of following signs to the smoking section, I began to wonder if this was an elaborate trick to lure me toward an anti-smoking advertisement. A minute later, I realized it was, in a way.

Twenty or so passengers, TSA guards, and flight attendants sat in a 40-by-40 section of a parking lot, cordoned off with cement barriers. If there were troughs and some hay, this may as well have been an animal pen. I checked myself in to this disgusting-habit-prison, and gave Grace a call.

“I’m here,” I said.

Some time before this all started, I used to only have one pillow. At the time, it was the only pillow I needed. I was single, and whomever I decided to share my bed with never complained about the fact that I never planned for them. Then things changed.

Suddenly, I wasn’t single anymore — through no fault of my own. I shared a bed. My covers became her covers. Legs and arms now fought for space in my full-size appointment on a regular basis. It became a comfortable conflict.

Then one morning, as we were both putting our clothes on, my girlfriend looked at me and said: “Dan, you need to buy a second pillow.”

Now, there are a thousand little things that end a relationship. Disagreements about future plans, other men and women, conflicts of professional interest, and sex — regardless of your gender, sex always finds itself at the table where relationships are concerned. But, despite those thousand things, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had bought that pillow. It’s been years since that train wreck found a section of tracks to jump, but I still think about that pillow.

She left me a couple of weeks after that innocuous request for a pillow. I got myself good and drunk for a week after that happened. Drinking is a fantastic way to stop your thoughts from racing, but if I knew a better way to shut the noise off — one without the other side-effects — I don’t know if I would make the switch. Then I bought a pillow. And then a pillow case. Somewhere, down in the depths of hope, I imagined that a new pillow would bring her back.

It didn’t. There are no light switches where boys and girls are concerned. If there were, there would be no excuse to write books. But in the absence of a light switch, I will take a symbol. Two pillows for two heads.

Now, I use that second pillow in back of the first when I’m watching TV in bed. Now, she’s engaged to a guy named Erik. I’ve never met him, but I hear he’s nice (we tend to villainize the men women love after they’re done with us). I think they’re happy. I just hope he bought a second pillow.

“We’re moving too fast,” she said on a cold night in October. Sarah Cardiff sat on the edge of my bed, staring intently at my fingers. I was finishing up some copy for next week’s magazine.

As she stared at them, they froze. A one night stand had turned into a relationship quicker than I cared to admit. I was busy with work.

“I think we need to slow it down, maybe just go back to hanging out.” She spoke quietly, with a rehearsed sense of confidence.

I kept on typing.

The door to my room opened. Hal Holiday, a forty of malt in his hand, stumbled in. “Daniel!” he shouted. “Time to open up the bar.”

“Mr. Holiday, this is not a great time,” I replied. We were throwing a Columbus Day party down stairs. I was in charge of the bar. Hal stumbled out, cursing as he went. Sarah stared at me with her piercing brown eyes.

“It’s not another guy, I promise. It’s not about Chad.”

Chad was the third baseman on the LOPI baseball team. I wouldn’t have even know his name had she not turned in a profile on him last week. Until this very moment, I hadn’t even considered Chad. I turned away from the screen, toward her. “Yeah? Great, wonderful.”

Ten days ago, Sarah had invited my sister up from Connecticut for the weekend. Kelsey was waiting down stairs to meet a girlfriend I would never see again.

I was still silent, aghast and completely aware of what was going on. Sarah tried again, “Danny, I want the world.”

Time stopped and I was suddenly confronted with it. The comedy and tragedy. God, in his infinite wisdom, had given me a punchline to the entire affair.

“Sarah.” I took God’s punchline and ran with it. “I don’t want the world. I just want your half.”

We talked for a few minutes, and I stayed as quiet as circumstances allowed. She left when she was done talking. Shortly after, I went down stairs in a daze. I poured drinks for the rest of the night, but never took one for myself. My sister asked me where my girlfriend was, and I didn’t have a good answer. She wanted to meet her, but never did.

I woke up the next morning alone. There was no Sarah to hog the sheets or kiss me good morning.

“Great. Wonderful,” I muttered to the empty room.