Dossier Fall 2014

dossier fall 2014 | 1

DOSSIERFall 2014


A LETTER FROM DOSSIERDossier: a French word meaning a bundle of documents.

That’s what this little booklet is — a collection of works created by students and published for the students of Carnegue Mellon University.

Carnegie Mellon is the home to talented writers and illustrators, designers and musicians, and Dossier is our humble attempt to share some of their work with the students of our community.

Dossier was a biannual publication until several years ago, when it mystiously disappeared in 2011. This issue will be Dossier’s first issue in three years.

We are accepting submissions at ALL TIMES. If you want a chance to show your work to the Carnegie Mellon community, please send your work to [email protected], and we will notify you if we plan on using your work. Dossier accepts all forms of art that can be printed, be it prose, artwork, photography, architechture, product designs, and even code!

We know there are many shy people who are fansastic closet writers or illus-trators out there. Remember, your artwork is meant to be shared — and even critisized — in order for you to develop and grow as an artist! Be fearless and support Dossier by submitting your work!

We’d like to formally thank Jennifer Coloma, who unfortunately had to gradu-ate before the publication of our comeback issue. We hope this is what you’ve envisioned Dossier to be and we wish you all the best. Thank you so much for you dedication to writing and to Dossier.

To everyone else: Enjoy!

Sincerely,Benjamin Chang

Dossier Coordinators Jennifer Coloma, Benjamin Chang, Mark Dyehouse,

Kaytie Nelson

Design Staff Jennifer ColomaBenjamin Chang

Cover Image Gabe Vidal-Hallett

Contact Us! [email protected]

Visit our Facebook page for updates at

https://www.facebook.com/cmudossier

Carngue Mellon University Dossier

Photos courtesy of p19: brokinhrt2, p22:Scott Tid-lund, p22:Ralph Arvesen,

pg30:~BostonBill~, and p32:Dale via Flickr

p14:Posh Little Tutus

p26: Total Sports Complex

p5: Teach Thought


TesT - alex lee ..........................................................................5

NighT reNderiNg - gabe Vidal-halleT .......................................10

VariaTioNs oN a Theme by larry leVis - michael miNgo ...............13

fiNal fridays aT scheNley Plaza - michael miNgo...........................14

how The PuriTaNs did iT - michael miNgo ................................ 15

ausTiN - gabe Vidal-halleT ....................................................16

axoN - gabe Vidal-halleT....................................................... 17

deer - JacqueliNe James .......................................................... 18

chuck’s boys - Tyler rice......................................................... 22

7336 - JacqueliNe James ...................................................... 28

carambola - gabe Vidal-halleT............................................... 33

TABLE OF CONTENTS



TesTby Alex [email protected]

This is a standardized test. Read and follow the instruc-tions below.

This test measures your proficiency in mathematics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and self-delusion. It also evaluates your perseverance in the face of contempt: ignore the stares of the other students, all younger than your daughter. Do not be engulfed in their amusement and their embarrassment.

A standardized test is administered in the same manner for all students. Do not threaten the test proctor. Unlike those who allow you to debase them, this test cares nothing for your cru-elty.

The following items are not permit-ted within the testing area:

• Pen(s)• Cellphone• Libido• Undeserved confidence• Programmable calculator • Shelved letter to your first wife• Textbook(s) and/or marked

paper• Reconciliation

This test requires a #2 pencil. The yellow shell of the Ticonderoga may arouse slivers of childhood: beige smears on your aunt’s apron, sour honey leaking from the firs behind

your temporary home, a golden re-triever shimmering in the path of a cracked windowpane. Do not blame your uncle for not mending the crack, not once offering in the nine years you lived there. Think only of these years as a prelude, a period of incu-bation. Interpret the lazy circles you drew on your desk as metaphors for cocoons.

The results of this standardized test may be used in consideration for applications to colleges and/or uni-versities, in conjunction with your previous history and extracurricular activities. Your academic history, for reference:

He finds solace at the rear of the class, amongst the wreckage of the drunks, the junkies, the outcasts who stumble out of their childhoods. He manhandles smaller boys. He doesn’t taunt them, however — his wit won’t surface until he’s nineteen, romping with rich girls on the cusp of adulthood, learning their manner-isms and easy needs. He gives them desperation and daydreams of East Coast diners and the residual odors of gasoline. He drops out of school fast. He begins part time at a cannery and listens to tales of Vietnam from either side of the assembly line.


The results of your standardized test will be mailed to you three weeks after the date of the testing session. Resist the nascent smile as you slide your in-dex finger along the inner lining of the envelope. Resist the familial pride that the impossibly large score, nine percent above the national average, evokes in you. Your uncle, riddled with Alzheimer’s, remembers noth-ing of the derision with which he had repudiated you and your life. And do not, even in the agonizing hours be-fore dawn, call your daughter with the number you scrounged from a Michi-gan phone book. Crumple the num-ber, scribbled in pen on the back of a 7-11 receipt, and discard it forever.

The circumstances of this test may remind you of a girl from your ado-lescence, the one you liked best, blew a month’s salary on to impress, an upper-class blond as simple as her name: Anne. Anne was the only girl to return after the languid summer in which you did nothing but ball girls, bearing a pregnancy test marked with the fatal perpendicular lines. You told her to marry you. Your fear died in this ostentatious display of your ma-turity, your image of a fruitful life far removed from your childhood. You convinced Anne to skip her col-lege entrance exams, to bind herself to you. She agreed out of doubt. Anne’s mother, much younger than her plump father, tentatively con-sented to your offer, having reared a child at an early age, and discovering in you a wildness she craved and had been denied. The child — a girl — was born. The stock-broker-father demanded she be named Rodine, af-ter his deceased sister, a Germanic

name. At first you thought it dull, but then you revered it, needed it, those two dense syllables that contradicted your daughter’s airiness, that alone grounded her to this world.

Do not speak during the duration of the test. Raise your hand if you re-quire the assistance of the test proc-tor. Do not curse or snarl as you did with the lanky doctor who told you Rodine was deaf, ten months after she was born. A rare complication whose name didn’t concern you. You understood her symptoms only in retrospect: preternaturally quiet, un-able to reciprocate your rough play, Rodine did not laugh or cry. She slept sixteen hours a day. You started to get angry at her and at Anne. She wasn’t breast-fed long enough; her room was too dark; she wasn’t held enough. Your child didn’t fit into the life you had imagined, turbulent and cheery, like the previous summer in which you had gorged yourself on lust. She could clap, at least, mimicking her mother, but without rhythm, lost out-side the progress of time.

Anne came home the day after the diagnosis with a stack of volumes on American Sign Language. You hated her complicity. You learned how quickly a family could sour, lives desynchronize. Rodine became the subject of every argument. Little of your youth remained in you, embers smothered in silence. Anne rarely sought out your heat – your young marriage became sexless, motionless.

You attempted to staunch the flow of inertia, like seeping molasses, from every wall of Rodine’s bedroom. Her presence was a void, emanating


negation, annihilation; the air in her room sat sealed and stale like the in-terior of a submarine. Even the walls, painted Iguana Cerulean, appeared nautical, lazy. Anne begged you to practice the hand signs and you man-aged a week before you began ripping pages from The A.S.L. Handbook. You despised the sign for no, the in-dex and middle fingers clamped over the thumb like a vice. You started us-ing this sign in place of words. The perfect answer to every instance of Anne’s pleading.

You never learned Rodine’s routines. You overlooked her allergies and fed her a daub of peanut butter that sent her to the hospital. The purple blotch on her leg thrived and multiplied, the result of your argument with Anne. You were mismatched with Rodine’s fragility, her need for familiar land-marks, lodestars in the infinite dark-ness of her deafness.

If you have difficulty with the for-mat or content of this test, contact your test proctor. Ignore her wari-ness as she approaches your desk. Surely you’re used to it by now. The following topics may provoke some confusion:

• In the Vocabulary section, you may encounter unfamiliar words. Compare them to more recogniz-able ones by examining their pre-fixes and suffixes. Also try placing the unfamiliar word in different contexts, to determine whether it loses its monstrousness.

• Ignore instances of the word you, a word you have heard in too many contexts. You is a compli-

cated word, weighted by conno-tations of fascination, lust, exas-peration, finality, as if shouted across a huge distance, a child’s misshapen cry for her father. Replace you with I. The limited perspective, the scarcity of em-pathy, comforts you.

• If you encounter the word redemption, call the test proc-tor immediately. Redemption is not authorized by the testing board — it is too often mired in superficiality, in specious resolutions. Nothing remains for which you may atone: your misdeeds spill into the riverbed where fervor cools and lies dor-mant forever. The contour of your mouth as it forms a scream is now but the outline of your daughter’s occasional bad dream, and even those die in the dawn, in her husband’s quiet touch.

• If you come across references to fatherhood, think in gener-alities. Draw from media. Bury your recent dreams in which you catch orange dragonflies in a bed sheet, the other end held by a young woman whose name you admire.

• The number 8 is not a symbol denoting eternity.

You may encounter a problem you cannot solve. Mark these and return to them later. Unlike your history, you may abandon these questions with no consequence. Do not make the inevi-table comparison to the morning in which you left three year-old Rodine stranded in her dark blue bed. You ignored the silence rumbling in your


ears, punctured only by Anne’s small hopeless cries for acquiescence, pull-ing yourself through the master bed-room, and the hall, and the anteroom, and the front door of your rigid and illustrious house provided by Anne’s parents. You slammed the front door hard enough to make it rattle — to leave quietly would be to surrender to Rodine’s condition. You drank prodi-giously. A decade later, you knocked on that door again to find Anne stunt-ed from years of heartache, willing but ultimately unable to harbor you. Two decades later, you did an online search to see if Anne had remarried, already jealous of her new life, and found she died of uterine cancer.

Ignore the words of this page mud-dying and tearing in your vision. Con-centrate on the tactility of the card-stock. Do not accept that you sought this test on a whim.

You built small worlds with married women and returned them damaged to their homes. You rarely dined alone; you knew the wine selection of every restaurant within ten miles of your apartment. The dance of thighs and motel-room keys bored you. You briefly married again. You tried a cou-ple sessions of AA and find too much to empathize with. One evening, you encountered a poster stapled to the bulletin board of an adjacent con-ference room. APPLY FOR COL-LEGE printed in bulky sans-serif, huge and commanding.

You could not comfort Rodine when she returned from preschool that first day, wholly incompatible with the other students. You could not greet

the teacher who saved her curiosity at thirteen, nor her first boyfriend at nineteen. You could not embrace her during her graduations, one tum-bling after another, far too fast. These milestones were raindrops in a distant pond. But you could take this test, this small act of solidarity.

You are a staunch naturalist. You un-derstand only the reality of things, the calcified calculus of grotesque lives and deformed love. Without imagina-tion, you rely on wit and wickedness culled from hundreds of unresolved relationships. Never before did you consider the purity of academics, its loose relationship to life. Each beauti-ful child you notice on the street de-molishes you. This opportunity for redemption fascinates you in your old age. Your hair is greying, becoming dust, saltpeter.

This test consists of thirty-six multi-ple-choice questions and eight short-answer questions. Resist your refusal to comply; do not claim that multi-ple-choice delineates your individual experience into brutal minimalism. Without your excuses and exigent circumstances the fantasy of your life easily sloughs away. When asked to re-spond to a prompt with a paragraph, do not transcribe your recollection of Anne’s face, particularly her lips and/or jawline, nor the prim V of a chin that first attracted you.

This is a sample multiple-choice question:

How many opportunities are left in your life?

A. Zero


B. OneC. TwoD. Impossible to determine

This is a sample short-essay question:

Rodine, a newlywed, locates her father’s telephone number in the Yellow Pages. She wants to reconcile with him. She is willing to ignore that mistake in which he tried to reinsert himself in her life, thirteen years too late, wedging himself in the irreparable family dy-namic. She remembers that she tolerated him for two days be-fore pointing a .357 Magnum at his torso and mouthing get out, get out, never saying the words aloud. Her mother had purchased the pistol years ago from some unknown despera-tion. Now, Rodine wants her father to meet her husband at a coffee shop that afternoon. How does the father respond? (Note: this question is a hypo-thetical and will not appear on the test.)

Consider why you are taking this stan-dardized test. Consider what meaning this gesture might have, at this late stage, when your verdict has already been decided and meted out.

The San Francisco apartment is the smallest world you’ve built yet. Moths rotate like planets on the ceiling. They patiently watch you disintegrate. Of-ten you lie awake in the deep dark and wonder how many opportunities are left in your life. You stumble on all fours pursuing thick-necked bottles in the murk of the carpet. You ig-

nore your alcoholism. You are swept outside by anguish, heaved from the house’s accusatory silence into the ambience of the night, still too uni-form, too tamed — you seek a cat’s screech, a breaking wave, any unfa-miliar cadence to fracture the castle of your horrendous solitude. A low vibration, the sensation you imagine Rodine feels in the place of sound, rattles through your body, refusing to abate, coalescing into a phrase: “Hey, you fuck – you can’t sleep there,” the policeman shaking you into the next afternoon, pushing you onto the side-walk, to your home, vomit sloughing from you, spattering on the white concrete, and only then do you realize Rodine is no longer in the next room. She isn’t calling for you.

Do not acknowledge the dampness in your eyes. Do not allow tears to in-exorably pull themselves from your soul and break apart on the instruc-tion sheet. Do not watch the blue ink smudge, disfigure, surrender mean-ing, now mere undulating lines on a sea of white, rows of hands clap-ping without rhythm, surf smashing soundlessly against the shore.

Do not allow yourself the enormous agony of regret — that opportunity has passed.

You maY now begin the test.


nighT rendering

ArTwork: nighT rendering - gAbe VidAl-hAlleT



FEATURING

three Poems bY

Michael [email protected]


1.I love youthe way I loved the baseball cards

I bought with my lunch money

and won in bets with schoolmates.I kept themin my pockets, under plastic.

2.I love youthe way Mom loves her Cavalier

as it sputters down the parkway,

breaks churning like my stomach.I flinch.“Don’t worry,” she says, “It just needs gas.”

3.I love youthe way Harold Lloyd loves

the clock hands as he hangs

seven stories above the street.Watching, I think,“So this is how it ends.”

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY LARRY LEVIS

ArTwork: ArTisT’s lofT - gAbe VidAl-hAlleT


fiNal fridays aT scheNley Plaza

A brown-haired girl,seven-years-old,dressed in pink bowand matching skirt

prances, pirouettes,stumbles in stepwith the BastardBearded Irishmen,

who sing of spendingquality timewith their fathersover whiskey.

I see her fathersunk in a lawn chaircheering her on,and wince because

from a distancehe looks like Dad.I wonder howhe would react

if I were the girldancing to drinking songs.He wouldn’t cheer.He would dance along.


Absolutely still,the canopy concealsthe lovers completely.

She brushes off the mossand reaches for his cheek.Her fingers are like silk

pulled from a spider web.He believes this is howthe Puritans did it:

after Sunday service,they’d sneak past the jailhouseto some remote thicket

beneath a new moon.Only the pill bugs,too indifferent to look up,

could see them in the moss.He tells her so. She laughs,but counters: the Puritans

were sailors. Their first lovewas the beach, and on the beachthey made friends with seagulls

surveying the sand. They sleptwith no trees overhead,just endless open space.

How THe PuriTans DiD iT


FEATURING

artwork bYGabe [email protected]

Check out more of Gabe’s work at http://www.gvhallett.com

AusTin


ArTwork: Axon - gAbe VidAl-hAlleT

Axon


deerby JAcqueline [email protected]

I’ve been watching a snapping turtle cross the road for the past seven minutes.

Its eyes are mean, its mouth turned down in a hard sharp line. It has a long, thick tail. Longer than I thought turtle tails are supposed to be. When I saw it, I stopped my car and walked over to move it out of the way, but I’m not about to touch something that looks like it can bite my hand off with apparent ease. It can move itself. I have nowhere to be.

I shift from my spot on the roof of my car. The trees are pressing in around me, very green. Cicadas are rasping and buzzing and they are very loud. The moment is very. Which sounds stupid but if I want to be a poet which I do want to do then I’ll have to start coming up with more shit like that. Very moments. Big eyes and no teeth. A man watches a light bulb flicker and then cut out and all he can hear is the snow.

This turtle is taking forever. I hop off the car and walk around to the edge of the road. I pick up a stick and poke the thing with it. The creature. The turtle. I knock the stick against its mouth, teasing it. Turtle snaps, hisses, wiggles its legs faster. Good. I thought snapping turtles were sup-posed to be the fast ones.

I crush it after starting up the car anyways.

I regret it but then I really don’t.

I need to get home.

*

My car makes this ticking noise and it drives me crazy. Tick tick tick. But it’s irregular, arrhythmic, so I’m con-stantly waiting on a tick that drops the moment after my brain decides when it should have been. I tried to fix it a while ago, but I don’t know anything about cars. It doesn’t matter but it drives me crazy. Through my windshield I can see the fog seeping out of the pores of the woods. Slip-ping out from underneath the soggy leaves and the patchy fur stuck to the rotted skins of dead animals. I speed past a bloated deer corpse with its legs tied up in a knot.

I said I would be home for dinner, and I will be. My mom is apparently mak-ing a special dinner for me. Which is nice and I appreciate, so I’m getting home on time. I stare at the herd of deer that lives in my front yard as I turn in. I hate deer. I have nightmares about them.

I drop the keys on the front seat, slam the car door, open the garage door, slam the door, walk into the house.

“I’m home!”

I hear my mother bustling around somewhere, crumpling papers and coughing.

“In the kitchen!”

I turn the corner and see my mother,


standing in the kitchen with a smile.

“Ta-da!”

I sit down at the table next to my younger brother. My dad looks up from his newspaper.

Mom sets down the pot. We eat it.

*

My room never gets completely dark. It just gets bluer and bluer until it is the deepest of blues even when the moon is new and just a dark nothing in the black sky. Back when I used to have really weird nightmares I used to think that a girl with long hair was pressing through the membrane of my ceiling, struggling, like a fetus in the womb. I laid there and watched her try and claw her way through, pinned to the spot. Waiting for her to drop and smother me with thick fluid and hair down my throat. She never made it, but her friend was usually in my bathroom jiggling the handle and sometimes she managed to get the door open.

I pad up the stairs and drop on my bed. I’m ready to leave. Just a night and then I’m gone. I hardly miss any-thing from this place.

From my spot on the bed I can see the edge of the lawn, where it meets the street. The moon streams through my window and I feel like just anoth-er blue thing. I push up to the win-dow and look out. There’s deer on the lawn. One looks up, but doesn’t see me.

I shrug my coat on and creep down to the garage. I stand before my dad’s extensive tool collection and pluck


away the standard carpenter hammer. Left behind is the dusty outline of the hammer against the wall. I turn and slink out the side door, twisting the grip in the palm of my hand.

The deer are pale against the moonlit vegetation of the yard. The biggest one, a female, dips her head to work at the grass. I walk slowly, a painful crook in my knees, keeping low to the ground, as if that will make less noise.

And I get close.

I feel cold and liberated. It is the summer but it seems like my breath should be fogging in the clear air, a film separating me from space and watchful eyes. The grass is slippery under my sneakered feet. But I ex-hale too loudly and a small one cocks its black eyes right at me. It doesn’t move though, in a trance, and I’m only about ten feet away. I know I could spring forward and break its leg with a quick smash.

My muscles quiver. I’m ready.

A sharp bark cracks across the yard, and all the deer are gone. In their wake they leave a soft fluttering noise, their hooves against the soft earth.

A dog.

I pop up and start my march over to the neighbor’s back yard, around the garage and through the tree line that divides our properties. The sky bleeds red.

The Foleys have a pit bull prime for euthanization. It bit the old woman across the street once, and it barks incessantly. My parents have called the police several times to file a com-

plaint, but police like dogs and people who like dogs, so it still lays in the corner of its chain-link cage. By the mercy of the neighborhood.

I press up against the link, rattle it a bit. The dog is a bunched muscle with skin thin like latex. It growls low in its throat and releases a bark, like some-one will come.

The boy who cried wolf, though.

I jam my fingers through a diamond in the fence and the dog lurches at them, teeth individual and shining, but I’m fast and I yank my hand away as it crashes with a musical jangle. It scrabbles nails against mud for pur-chase. I pull my arm back, eye the head of the hammer, hooked end out, and swing it forward. I aim for the dog’s head but I hit its neck instead.

Slow then, I twist the hammer and pull it out. The bull falls uncon-scious with fair speed, its brain de-nied oxygen. There’s a lot of blood, I’m not surprised that it’s red, but it seems human in quality, thicker than I expected.

A dog is not a deer. A dog’s eyes have whites that expose themselves in death. I turn the hammer in my hand, and idly wonder if I should be worried about a forensic investiga-tion. Dogs have DNA. Over the weak wheezing, I decide that I don’t care. Besides, this was only the first. I slip through the trees back to my glowing square window. There will be plenty of clear nights this summer.


Allegheny b

AzAAr


chuck’s boysby Tyler rice

On October 24th, 1993, Joe Carter hit a one-out, three-run walk-off home

run off a fastball slid low across the plate by Mitch “Wild Thing” Wil-liams. He connected with a honey-smooth swing and launched it clear over the 394 feet marker in left field, giving the city of Toronto its second straight World Series title.

“Touch ‘em all Joey, you’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life!” Tom Cheek’s hoarse voice roared over the radio, serenading the city’s hero as he rounded third and belly flopped into home with a choir of 49,000 chanting his name.

I watched all six games of that Se-ries on a pocket television in my top bunk. I yelled and spat at the first base umpire when our manager Cito Gaston was ejected from Game Two, and I tugged relentlessly at my rally cap as the Jays reeled off eight runs in the final three innings of Game Four. Everything about their streak through those playoffs was plain and simple, no-way-to-deny-it, magic. I bought my first mitt for six dollars the day after the Blue Jays won the title. Every boy in Toronto who knew a lick about baseball wanted to go pro because of Joe Carter and the rest of that team from ’93.

Six months later, the magic wore off. The J’s had the worst championship


hangover in baseball history. They limped to a record of 55-60 for their first losing season in a dozen years. They entered the 1994 campaign with seven All-Stars and the best bullpen in the game, and they fell flat on their faces.

That July, my little brother Benji and I left our seats on the third base line after the Jays were shellacked 12-1, just days before the Major League Baseball Players’ Association went on strike and ended the ’94 season with half the games left.

We met our dad at Harley’s, a clammy tavern two blocks from the ballpark, where men would stumble from the games and argue baseball until the neon signs were turned off and the beer maidens stopped handing out free shots of whiskey. Dad never liked to go to the games with us. He said baseball was something that brothers should share alone.

Before we got past the first row of crimson-tinted leather booths, he spotted us, stood up from his stool at the bar and shuttled us back through the door. We walked toward our car without speaking. I hung my head and stared at the pavement as we went.

“What’s the matter, sportsfan?” Dad said. He called everyone in my fam-ily sportsfan. It was like a catchphrase that he thought we all loved.

“I’m not going to root for the Jays anymore,” I told him.

“Oh, and do they know that?” Dad joked as he ripped open a fresh pack of Skoal and stuffed a wad of the minty tobacco into his cheek.

“I can’t root for a team that doesn’t win games. They stink.”

Dad clapped me softly on the neck and combed his fingers through my hair, as if to say stop being so dra-matic. But then he looked down at me, and I looked up at him, and he noticed the tears that had started to well at the corners of my eyes and we stopped walking. He stretched out his thick hands and grabbed each of my shoulders, then crouched into a catcher’s squat in the middle of the street. As frustrated drivers pounded on their steering wheels, the long vertical creases on either side of his mouth settled and his eyes focused only on mine.

“Listen, you can’t stop rooting for the Blue Jays. You’re a fan now, and you are going to stay a fan. Until the day you stop loving the game. And even then, you don’t change your loyalty. A man who changes his loyalty is a coward.”

He stood again and continued to walk.

A week later, my parents were hosting some friends from out of town and they took them to a diner down the road from our house. I’m told that in the middle of the meal Dad dragged my mother through the front door and he slapped her around in the parking lot until her chest and neck were purple and yellow and green.

I’m not sure what she said or did to deserve it. But an hour before we had to get up for summer camp, my mother nudged Benji and me awake, kissed us on our foreheads, and said she had to leave. She’d made our


lunches and they were on the coun-ter. We’d have to catch a ride with the kids next door. Through wet sobs, she told us that her brother Charlie would be staying with us to keep an eye on Dad while she figured some things out. She must have already had the car packed because only seconds after walking out of our bedroom I heard the engine of her Wagoneer squeal to life.

Apparently I’d met Uncle Charlie a year earlier at my cousin’s wedding in Nova Scotia, though I didn’t rec-ognize him when he came through our front door like a man on fire. He pulled up in a yellow cab and swung two bags from the trunk, one a green alligator skin case squeezing out on all sides with loose sleeves and under-wear, and the other a drooping duffel bag swollen with wooden and metal baseball bats and an assortment of jerseys with yellowed armpits and to-bacco juice stains on the bellies. He set his bags on the ground and pulled each of us into a bear hug with a hearty laugh.

In the kitchen, he grabbed the duf-fel bag by the bottom and dumped it onto the linoleum floor. Gear and uni-forms spilled out and clanked against the drawers and the refrigerator and the oven. With his muscly, vein-lined forearms crossed against his chest, he leaned on a counter and declared proudly that Benji and I could have whatever we wanted.

“I’m too fat for most of it now.” He chuckled and slapped his stomach.

Charlie Wyndam played sixteen years of professional ball as a utility fielder

for teams in the United States. He sported the white and orange of the Ft. Lauderdale Bolts, the Tar Heel blue of the Reno Raging Rhinos and the electric yellow of the Whitmans of Fargo. For a short time, he was a legend of double-A baseball. He was a heavy hitter, a massive chunk of a man carved from marble, with thick thighs that jiggled and tightened when he walked. He maintained a per-fect set of jet-black muttonchops and wore a silver cross on a shiny chain around his neck. Managers of most of the teams he played for – some-times a couple years, other times just a game – called him a “fierce com-petitor”, and they said they would have killed to have four of him on their roster. That was until he threw a half-full water cooler at an opposing fan who heckled his teammate and the league commissioner told him he would never play professionally again.

A minor setback, he called it.

I was obsessed from the moment he walked in. I crawled on the floor in the kitchen, dived into the pile of rank, unwashed uniforms and pulled from it an extra-large Birmingham Honey Bees jersey. I swam in the folds and layers of the shirt, rolled the sleeves four times and tucked the tail into my waistband so it seeped through the bottom of my shorts.

For the first few weeks that Uncle Charlie lived with us, I wore a differ-ent one of his jerseys to every bat-ting practice. Uncle Charlie loved that I wanted to be a ballplayer. He would come with me to the field and stand on the other side of the chain-


metal fence, taking swigs from a can of Jolt Cola, cooing whenever I made perfect contact with a ball and bang-ing his boots against the fence when I was on a roll.

“Tiger Woods’s daddy used to holler through a bullhorn when he was in the middle of his back swing. Taught him concentration. Fans are gonna try to get in your head, so you have to be prepared,” He said and then mooed like a cow as I took my big-gest windup and whiffed, clobbering myself in the shins with an aluminum bat.

Sometimes Dad and Benji would come along to the field, and on the hottest summer weekends when the sun was directly over our heads, we would open the doors to the pickup truck and blare Michael Jackson. Un-cle Charlie made me throw hundreds of pitches. Benji danced and kicked in the bed of the truck in nothing but a bathing suit and white tube socks. Dad relaxed in the dugout with his feet propped up on a clay-covered bucket of balls. He clapped proudly. I think watching me took his mind off of my mother.

He called her on the phone most nights, waiting the full seven rings be-fore the answering machine prompt-ed him to either leave a message or hang up. He’d always slam the phone down on the receiver and look at us and smile as if nothing was wrong. Then after dinner one evening, he called and got no answer again. He said under his breath that that was it, and he went to see my mother at her sister Clara’s house. He told her it was

time for her to come home, that they needed to raise their children togeth-er and that we missed her. He said he regretted what he did and he prom-ised it would never happen again.

But she said that he embarrassed her and frankly she was scared. So to work on regaining her trust, Dad took a few weeks off from work, packed a bag and went to stay at Aunt Clara’s. Aunt Clara lived by herself in Belleville, two hours away. Her hus-band died long before I was born and she worked the graveyard shift at the hospital.

While they were gone, Benji and I were left under Uncle Charlie’s super-vision, which meant fried foods and sweets for all our meals and TV late into the night. We laughed hysterical-ly at midnight reruns of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and built Lego towers until our fingers were numb.

Every Saturday that Dad was gone, Uncle Charlie would march into our bedroom at 7 o’clock in the morning with cups of coffee and a plate of cinnamon scones that he made from scratch, riding a sugar rush that start-ed around 5:30. He’d struggle to sit still in a miniature beanbag chair, and he’d let out booming laughs as Benji tried to dress himself and I hollered from the shower the names and bat-ting averages of my favorite players.

“You guys are too much, you know that? This is a great thing we got to-gether,” Uncle Charlie would say.

When we were ready, Uncle Charlie would let us apply a few dabs of his sweet-smelling cologne to our wrists,


and we’d line up in front of the house from tallest to shortest. Then we’d jog in a line to my little league game. Ben-ji and I looked like little village people chasing an ogre down the street.

During my games, Uncle Charlie shouted from the top bleacher.

The players’ parents loved him. When he started chants, they joined in. When “O Canada” was played over a little stereo before the game, Uncle Charlie stood at attention underneath the flag and the kids in the stands froze like statues at his feet with their hands over their chests, peeking up to see if he noticed and giggling when he winked at them.

He was a little league groupie. He knew the first and last names of all my teammates and rooted for each one of them individually, howling when they got on base and booing the umpire when they got a bad call.

In my second game, I went all four innings without giving up a run and Uncle Charlie was so happy that he left Benji at a friend’s house and he took me out to Fuddruckers in Sas-katoon City. We scarfed down Buf-falo wings and chugged Mountain Dew, and he told me that he was so proud of the way I handled myself

on the mound. He said he saw great potential for a career in pro ball. And really, he was the reason I got good at baseball so fast. He worked with me for countless hours, telling me to hit just one more when all I wanted to do was crash on the couch and play Nintendo 64, so his opinion was my religion. He cared more than anyone else. Some people would say it made him wild.

In the final game of my seven-game season, my team went up by three runs. We scored in the first inning when a player on the opposing team dropped a pop fly and accidentally stepped on the ball and rolled his ankle. The umpire didn’t know what to do, so he gave us a run. We scored again in the second and once more in the fourth. I’d pitched a shutout into the last inning when a kid dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt with his number drawn on the back wiggled his way into an awkward batting stance, his butt poked out high like a proud puppy. His mom, with frizzy hair and a Styrofoam visor, had to kneel behind him and hold his elbows up so he didn’t hit himself in the face when he swung.

I stared him down for a few seconds, looking deep into his sunscreen-smeared face, then wound up, drag-ging my left knee across my body and pinning it tight against my chest. I sucked in air and exhaled quickly as I shot my leg out in front of me and released the ball. It slipped from my hand and flew into the boy’s cheek-bone, hitting him hard enough to knock his huge plastic helmet clean


off. He dropped to the dirt, shriek-ing and stretching out his hands for support. His mom dived on top of him as if more baseballs would rain from the sky like heat-seeking mis-siles. Everyone in the stands cringed and held their breaths. An infant moaned in empathy. I hid my face in my mitt.

The umpire called time, coaches from both teams hovered over the boy, and all of the infielders wore their mitts on their heads and spun around in circles. While the boy’s coach car-ried him to a medical tent behind the backstop, his mother paced towards me with giant steps, pointing her fin-ger and puffing out her chest. She turned me around and smacked me hard on my ass.

“You’re a brat for throwing a ball like that in soft pitch!” she shouted. She was cocking back to swing again and I started to turn away when a strong hand snatched her wrist. Uncle Char-lie threw her arm away and shoved her to the ground with a flattened palm. She landed with a thud and a thin cloud of dirt puffed up around her head.

“You keep your fucking hands off that boy,” he said.

My uncle, at least a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, stood over the boy’s mother with his fists clenched and his eyes bulging. I imag-ined him doing awful things to this woman. He could reduce her to ash with a squeeze of his fingertips, and yet he just stood there, breathing in and out, the veins in his neck pulsing and growing. He looked for several

seconds into the face of speechless terror. I heard the woman whimper, less of a plea for him to stand down and more of a sounding of disbelief.

He finally relaxed his shoulders and faced me.

“Great pitch, kid.” Uncle Charlie squeezed my neck, and the sharp pink shade of his own softened. I followed him off the field with every pair of eyes burning against me. They didn’t stare at the aggressor. They stared at me, as if I was the one who lev-eled that kid’s mom. Without a sound from parents or coaches, I gathered my bat and water jug from the dug-out and walked home behind Uncle Charlie.

We sat at the dinner table that night, thanked God for our meals and chewed in silence. Uncle Charlie kept his eyes fixed on the TV behind Benji’s head. He laughed quietly and breathed loudly through his nose. Benji pushed his food from corner to corner on his plate, oblivious to what he had witnessed that day. And I watched my uncle. Iw ate without looking down. The longer I looked, the more I saw. In his thick fists I saw my own hands. In his smile I imag-ined a temper that I would one day develop. I felt the heat of his skin on my cheeks. I figured that we both knew what the other was thinking, but he never said a word about it, and so neither did I. I’m certain now that the way he saw his response that day is much different from the way I saw it. I think he was proud of himself, and I wonder if he has any idea how scared it made me.


7336by JAcqueline [email protected]

I can’t stand most songs bY bruce Springsteen. I know this fact will alienate me from the crowd, but

he garbles his words and bangs out his power cords and my dad leans back in his lawn chair, sucking cigar smoke deep into his belly and exhal-ing, leaning forward and opening his eyes, reverent, he says “That’s the boss.” Can’t stand the Boss. Every summer of the useful years of my life I’ve spend dragging my 90s Toyota Camry from house to house, deliver-ing pizzas and hoping people choke. I don’t like when their hands brush mine as they pass the money. I don’t like the feeling of most things chaf-ing on my skin, especially in the sum-mer when it’s constantly hot and my head is pounding. I wish I could be naked, like when I was born, writhing in a doctor’s hands. But that’s against the rules and regulations, so I am al-ways up to my teeth in a black col-lared shirt, (short sleeves thank god or I would do something nasty to the manager, maybe involving bleach, maybe involving long term damage) and khakis and a fucking visor that makes me look like a goddamn Lab-rador retriever, I swear.

My father is a former academic for-mer writer turned gardening enthu-siast. He stays up all night planting bulb after bulb for next spring, even though it’s the beginning of the sum-

mer and the old ones have hardly stated to wilt yet, always something clenched between his teeth. Lately a spade, which frankly has been getting him to looking ridiculous. I am also constantly outside gardening and I hate that too. My father has the radio tuned to 106.4 fm, which is a station that plays a lot of the Boss among other things that set me on my edge. I like the way the earth smells when it’s wet, and sometimes it’s hot enough that I can take my shirt off and roll up my jeans and let myself breathe a little more than usual. But Spring-steen usually ruins those moments and my father does too, asking me about my future. When he starts get-ting to that I will head inside to talk with my mother, who normally pro-vides a glass of water and some talk about the neighbors. I click my nails against the granite and when she is done I put my cup in the sink, always. I head upstairs after all that, and it’s a good day when I can get upstairs be-fore seven-thirty when the sun goes down. Upstairs I alternate between pretending to do math practice and pretending to write.

Summers are the worst time for me. In the summer I’m home, away from the place I’ve carved for myself at school, away from friends that high five and the dark room I’ve learned is good for being alone and for devel-oping pictures and thinking. Anyway, my parents are like aliens who have slipped into the wrinkled skin of a quiet suburban couple. Like some-one has stretched their skin over a generic taxidermy model. It creeps me out to think that in the night they


might have to pee or get some food and walk around the house while I’m asleep. So the pizza job isn’t so bad if you take into account that it gets me away from the eager piles of wrinkle and smile. I do most things you might think a guy who hates his parents might do. I yell at them and I make my mother cry over buying the wrong type of jam. I think about jamming the spade down my father’s throat, into the soft flesh of his mouth. I bal-ance on train tracks and stroll around with my friends from high school until far after curfew, I stand on the neighbor’s lawns at night until they call and complain nervously to my mother.

When my father steps a little too far over the line I push him back in place. I’ve broken his favorite records in descending order and poured lemon juice in his whiskey a few times. I am not a child. I thought about Windex in the food but decided against it. I get to thinking sometimes that I am a bad person, or a bad son. When I dig in that further I’m not sure the bad label sticks. Maybe just stifled, to be introspective. I think every son con-siders murdering his father.

I’m on the last delivery of my shift, and then I can head over to the tracks to meet my friends. I walk up some slate path up to a red front door with a brass knocker, which I use to be of-ficial. The house number reads 7336. The door swings open and there’s a youngish housewife standing there, blinking at me and ghosting a smile.

“Benecio’s pizza. Two large pepperoni and a small caesar salad.” This is the chant. Hardly changes house to house.

The housewife is wearing a thin cot-ton top and red lipstick that’s worn in the middle, like she’s been eating. A pair of pink flip-flops is wedged be-tween her toes, and she leans forward on the balls of her feet, a hand on the doorframe. She’s got on those capris that moms wear, with pockets on the side and strings hanging down from places where they might cinch. I real-ize slowly that she might have been very attractive before she squeezed out some kids and started wearing mom capris. I watch her mouth as it opens to speak.

“Yes, that’s my order.” She doesn’t reach to take it from my hands.

“Well that’ll be $17.95.”

Her lips pucker and her nose wrinkles a bit, like maybe she’s about to laugh.

“Keeps getting more and more ex-pensive, doesn’t it?” She grins and slaps her right flip-flop repeatedly against the hardwood floor inside the door. She flips some blonde hair over her shoulder. My fingers are getting tired of gripping the greasy boxes.

“Well that’s the price.”

She stares at me sideways and contin-ues slapping her flip-flop. I’m about to open my mouth to ask for money again, but she interrupts me.

“Say, you used to go to Glenbriar High, right?” She twirls some of that hair between her pointer and middle finger.

“Yeah, now I’m out though. Why?” It’s hot. It’s only seven and my visor is not doing much in way of blocking the sinking sun.


“Oh, I used to see you around. My one son goes to Glenbriar, he must be a couple years below you. But my other son, he’s the handful. Pre-schooler.” I shift forward, the pizzas still in my arms.

“Yeah. So $17.95?” She starts and looks at the pizza like she’s forgotten she ordered it in the first place.

“Oh, yes. My son’s name is Robbie, do you know him?” She leans forward some more but doesn’t take the pizza. Soon I’ll be late for the next delivery.

“Robbie who?”

“Robbie Fitz? Strike a bell?”

I have never heard of Robbie Fitz in my life.

“Maybe, a sophomore now, right?”

I don’t know. The last thing I need is for this lady to be pestering me more about maybe perhaps seeing her son once.

“Mm, no, a junior.”

I adjust my hold on the pizzas. “Oh, that makes sense.”

She smiles with a tight closed mouth

and juts her hip out, like she might place a child on it. She turns and reaches into the house, to the right of the door, as if she’s searching for the money to pay me. When she retracts her hand after a few long moments, there’s no money. She shoves a ciga-rette in her mouth and digs a lighter out of her pocket. “Smoke?” she asks? She lights.

“Um, no. If you could just takes these,” I say, still polite, because the sight of her smoking a cigarette is strange. She jerks the hand wielding the cigarette behind her, into the dark of the house. It looks cool, out of the sun.

“Put them on the kitchen table, sweet. I’ll make you up a glass of lemonade. I can only relax when my husband has got the kids out of the house.” She takes a deep drag and blows the smoke in my face. I notice, absently, that there are no toys rising from the darkness of the house that a child might play with. It’s all very neat.

“That’s alright, if you would just take them. I have to get to the next house, the pizzas are getting cold.”

She taps red fingernails against the doorframe. I swallow. “Don’t be so serious, sweet.”

“It’ll just take a moment. My wallet is in the kitchen anyway, and it’s the hottest day of the year so far. I’m sure you’re thirsty.”

My feet are starting to ache, vaguely, from the standing. “No thank you—”

“Mrs. Fitz.” I wasn’t planning on say-ing her name.


“No thank you Mrs. Fitz. If I’m late to the next house my boss will defi-nitely fire me, I’ve already been late three times since I got the job. I really can’t.”

She laughs, smoke puffing out from her nose in bursts. “Your boss? Aren’t you a college boy now? Why do you care about bosses? Now come on in, I have lemonade in the fridge.” She doesn’t turn to move inside. I need the money for the pizzas or it’ll come out of my paycheck, basically it will be my whole paycheck.

Behind her, I hear the scrape of a chair against the floor.

She keeps on that puzzling smile. “Come on now. Just some lemonade, then you’ll be on your way. I just want to help you cool off.”

My palms are sweating against the box. One of the house numbers, the second 3 in the 7336, pitches forward from where it was leaned against the clapboards next to the red door. “Oh, my husband has been needing to fix those for weeks. The lemonade?”

There are two cars in the driveway. I can’t hear the idling of my car any-more.

Her smile has turned down in the corners and her eyes have taken on an intimidating edge.

There’s the noise of someone filling a glass from the dark of the house. “The lemonades ready, hon. Just come inside for a glass, what do you say?” The heat has caused her make-up to melt a bit, so that it settles in the wrinkles of her face. She looks old, maybe not a youngish housewife.

“I really can’t—”

“But we’re the last of your shift! You got the time. Come on now.”

“No it isn’t. I need to get on to the next house.”

“No you don’t, sweet. Your shift ends at seven. Don’t be a stick in the mud, my son always said you were one of the fun ones.”

“How do you know that?”

“Know what?”

I swallow. I can hear someone walk-ing around the house. “Know my shift ends at seven.”

“My son has told me all about you. Now come one. Nothing is going to happen if you walk in and have some lemonade. Don’t be silly.”

“Fine, lady.” I turn around and start walking to my car, but it’s not on the street where I left it. There’s noth-ing but pavement and the deafening sound of the crickets.

“Where are you going now Ben? You can’t leave yet!”

I turn back, my mouth dry. “I—how do you know my name? Where’s my car?”

“Well I don’t know where your car went, but you definitely can’t leave now.”

“But—who told you my name?”

She laughs and flicks what’s left of her cigarette to the ground. The or-ange tip winks out after hitting the porch. “I told you that, my son. Are you coming in or not? No car, you can’t leave. You left your phone in


there too, didn’t you?”

I bend and put the pizzas down, breathing heavily. I can feel sweat dripping down my back, soaking my socks. “No, I have it.” I don’t.

“You can use our phone. It’s in the kitchen. And the lemonade.”

I stumble back, off the porch, and stand on the lawn. It looks very green to me.

“Hey!” She sounds angry. “Don’t you—” she breaks into a cough, long and hacking. “Don’t you walk on my lawn. Get back up here.”

All I can hear are the crickets. They’re swelling in my ears. making my mus-cles shake and my skin cold. I walk back up to the porch and take the steps one by one.

“That’s right. Easy. Now come on in, there’s the lemonade and the phone.” I hear a cough from the house, and see a man cross a doorway, silhouett-ed. I take off my hat and put it on top of the stacked pizza boxes.

“Come on, just inside. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

I shift my weight back and forth for a moment, overwhelmed by the heavy quiet of the night, heated, stifling, and cross inside.



Documents

Dossier Fall 2014