MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT

ISSUE03.10

WORDS+IMAGESM U S E I S T H E Q U A R T E R L Y J O U R N A L P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E L I T

MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT

ARTCRAFT BUILDING 2570 SUPERIOR AVENUE SUITE 203 CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114

WWW.THE-LIT.ORG

NONPROFIT ORG.US POSTAGE

PAIDPERMIT #4248

CLEVELAND, OH

9 771942 275009

07

ISSN 1942-275X

34th cleveland international film festivalmarch 18–28, 2010 tower city cinemas let’s go. clevelandfilm.org

0310

M

U

S

E

1

M

Founded in 1987 as Ohio Writer, MUSE is the quarterly journal published by The LIT, a nonprofit literary arts organization. No part of this journal may be reproduced without written consent of the publisher.

JUDITH [email protected]

TIM LACHINADesign [email protected]

RAY MCNIECEPoetry [email protected]

ROB JACKSONFiction [email protected]

ALENK A BANCOArt [email protected]

BONNIE JACOBSONDAVID MEGENHARDTContributing [email protected]

KELLY K . BIRDAdvertising Account [email protected]

THELITCLEVELAND’S LITERARY CENTER

ARTCRAFT BUILDING 2570 SUPERIOR AVENUE SUITE 203 CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114

216 694.0000 WWW.THE-LIT.ORG

MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT

SUBMISSIONS(Content evident) may be sent electronically to [email protected]. We prefer electronic submis-sions. MUSE publishes all genres of creative writing — including but not limited to poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, humor, lyrics, and drama. Preference is given Ohio-based authors.

V O L U M E 3 , I S S U E 1 M A R 2 0 1 0

IT’S ONLY MARCH, AND ALREADY 2010 HAS BEEN A PRETTY

SPECTACULAR YEAR FOR LITERATURE IN CLEVELAND.

In January, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, with the support of

Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, announced the

individual artists who were each awarded $20,000 in grant

support for the 2010 Creative Workforce Development Program.

Of the 20 artist recipients, 7 are writers: Congratulations to

former LIT board president Gail Bellamy, and to Sarah Willis,

Charlie Oberndorf, Kristin Ohlson, David Hansen, Sarah Gridley,

and Eric Coble. Each of these writers has demonstrated deftness

of craft, originality of voice, and plays a vital role in our literary

landscape.

In this issue of MUSE, my co-editors and I, along with our three

very generous judges, Karen Long, Kristin Ohlson, and Phil

Metres, are equally thrilled to present the winners of the second

annual Literary Competition. We worked long and hard to distill

only a first and second place winner in the areas of Fiction,

Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry from a pool of over 200 entries.

Choosing merely a handful was no small task. I am constantly

and happily reminded how rich the writing community is.

Congratulations to first place winners: Toni K. Thayer (fiction),

Heather Madden Bentoske (creative nonfiction), and Mark

Yasenchack (poetry). Coming in a very close second place are

Scott Lax (fiction), Amei Wallach (creative nonfiction), and

Thomas Dukes—who also swept the category of poetry last

year. May their pens and minds never run low.

Judith

7.5 in × 10 in

April 13, 2010 Poet Mary Oliver (born in Maple Heights, Ohio) is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including American Primitive (winner of a Pulitzer Prize), New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award winner) and House of Light (winner of the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award). Her most recent poetry collection, Evidence, was released in April of 2009.

May 11, 2010 JhuMpa lahiri, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Namesake, an international bestseller. Lahiri’s second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and earned the author the prestigious 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book.

WRITERS CENTER STAGE SEASON SIX

2009- 2010 SERIES

THE WILLIAM N. SKIRBALL

WRITERS CENTERSTAGE PROGRAMIS EXCITED TOBRING YOU:

The WilliaM N. SKirBall WriTerS CeNTer STaGe prOGraM IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION AND CLEVELAND MAGAZINE.

BEST SEATS GO QUICKLY, RESERVE TODAY! To purchase Single Author Program tickets, call 216.241.6000 or visit writerscenterstage.org. All programs will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Ohio Theatre at PlayhouseSquare, 1511 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115. Each program will be followed by a book signing in the lobby.

SPONSORS: Cuyahoga County Public Library; Bostwick Design Partnership; Dominion Foundation; Eaton Corporation; Margaret Wong & Assoc. CO., LPA; Roetzel & Andress; The LIT: Cleveland’s Literary Center; Ulmer & Berne LLP

PARTNERS: Joseph-Beth Booksellers; PlayhouseSquare and The Ritz-Carlton, Cleveland

ALL IMAGES BY BILLY DELFS, WWW.BILLYDELFS.COM

COVER: COFFEE, TEA, SALT AND PEPPER, 2009 - 8X10

0310

M

U

S

E

4

M

0310

M

U

S

E

5

M

contents

hungry ghosts, failed utopias, and the recent

economic collapse. She has a day job in repro-

ductive rights and environmental education,

sometimes teaches, and rarely cleans. Toni is

also an occasional playwright and journalist;

her short play “Kali’s Beautiful Secret” was

presented in September 09 at Cleveland Pub-

lic Theater’s Pandemonium. She has an MA

in Literature from Cleveland State University

and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from

Goddard College. Her favorite novel persists

in being Middlemarch, which might seem at

odds with her love of all things fantastical.

She thanks David Hansen for his constancy

and unfailing support.

AMEI WALLACH is an art critic, filmmaker,

and commentator. She was for many years

on-air Arts Essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer

Newshour and chief art critic for New York

Newsday and Newsday. The current essay is

from a memoir-in-progress. Her articles have

appeared in The New York Times, New York

Times Magazine, Art in America, ArtNews, The

Nation, Elle, Vanity Fair and the Smithsonian.

Among the books she has written or contrib-

uted to are: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never

Threw Anything Away, Gees Bend: The Archi-

tecture of the Quilt, and Crossroads: Art and

Religion In American Life. She is president

emeritus of the International Art Critics Asso-

ciation and a frequent lecturer at museums

around the world. She co-directed, with the

late Marion Cajori, the internationally ac-

claimed 2008 documentary, Louise Bourgeois:

The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.

Sample reviews: “A remarkable achievement!

As intimate a portrait of a living artist as one

could ask for,” The Houston Chronicle, “Superb

documentary portrait,” The New York Times;

“a work of art in its own right,” Artforum. She

is currently making a feature-length film on

the Soviet-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

MARK YASENCHACK was born in Parma,

Ohio and is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace

College, where he majored in biology with a

concentration in creative writing. He under-

took the challenge to balance written art and

the visual. Originally he made large tiles with

images and stories painted on the surface.

Gradually the images won out as his experi-

ments with surface texture and color became

more involved. More recently, he began to

working with encaustic wax, encasing photo-

graphs in a semi-transparent layer, and fi-

nally, discovered a way to include words in his

work and a reason to dissect an old typewriter

(thank-you Patti Fields). For material, he

plundered a long-kept notebook of ideas and

began writing prose fragments and poems.

He is grateful to have found his way back to

writing, through an encaustic wax technique

where he stamps the letters with typebars re-

moved from a typewriter. In much the same

way pictures had replaced words, now words

are essential and the images cannot keep up.trib

con

utorsHEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE has an MA in

English from Cleveland State University, has

studied creative writing at Oberlin College,

and was in the poetry program at the Iowa

Writer’s Workshop. She’s been a copywriter

for over 16 years and is a writer with Doner

Advertising. She lives in Lakewood, Ohio

with an unruly menagerie of dogs, cats, and

60s furniture.

BILLY DELFS Was recently awarded the 2009 Press Club of Cleveland's Excellence in Journalism Award (2nd Place Portraiture). He continues to work for regional/national magazines, advertising agencies, and design firms. His main focus is portraiture, but he explores the medium through personal projects and travel.

THOMAS DUKES is professor of English at The

University of Akron. He is the author of an

award-winning collection of poems, Baptist

Confidential, and Sugar Blood Jesus: A Memoir

of Faith, Madness, and Cream Gravy. His

writing has appeared in a variety of journals

including Poetry, New Orleans Review, South

Carolina Review, The Plain Dealer, Jelly

Bucket, etc. He lives in an Akron/Cleveland

suburb with his partner, their six cats, and a

poodle, Princess Diana.

SCOTT LAX Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Scott

Lax is a fiction writer, nonfiction writer and

playwright. After graduating from Hiram

College, he spent 15 years as a salesman and

drummer. The Denver Post called his first

novel, The Year That Trembled, one of 1998’s

“milestones in fiction.” Lax then produced it

as an award-winning feature film and

adapted it as a produced stage-play. The re-

cipient of numerous awards from the Ohio

Professional Writers and Cleveland Press

Club, Lax is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Nonfiction Scholar and Sewanee Writers’

Conference Fiction Fellow. He founded The

Chagrin Valley Writers’ Workshop, where he

teaches.

KAREN R. LONG has been book editor of The

Plain Dealer since 2005. She currently serves

on the board of the National Book Critics

Circle, which gives out an annual prize for

best book in fiction, biography, poetry, non-

fiction, criticism and autobiography.

PHILIP METRES is the author of numerous

books, including To See the Earth (poetry,

2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (a co-

edited anthology of peace poems, 2008),

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the

American Homefront since 1941 (criticism,

2007), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties:

Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). His

poetry has appeared in numerous journals

and anthologies, including Best American

Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary

Arab American Poetry. He teaches literature

and creative writing at John Carroll Univer-

sity in Cleveland, Ohio.

KRISTIN OHLSON is author of the award-win-

ning memoir, Stalking the Divine, and co-au-

thor of New York Times bestselling Kabul

Beauty School. A freelance writer, her articles

and essays have been published in The New

York Times (newspaper and magazine),

Salon, Gourmet, Discover, Oprah, and many

others. One of her articles was featured in

Best American Travel Writing 2008.

TONI K. THAYER lives in Cleveland Heights,

where she is raising two wild and beautiful

children and working on a rangy novel about

SURFER, LAKE ERIE, 2009 - 11X17

06 OAR, MARK YASENCHAK

07 TURBINE, CLEVELAND, BILLY DELFS

08 BERNARD, NYC, BILLY DELFS

09 GUYS WITH THEIR HANDS IN THEIR POCKETS, THOMAS DUKE

10 I AM WHAT I PLAY, TONI K. THAYER

11 EMMY, BILLY DELFS

14 SALES CALL, SCOTT LAX

15 PARKED, DUMBO NYC, BILLY DELFS

21 NORTH AFRICA, HEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE

23 HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, BILLY DELFS

24 THE COUNTERFEIT KILLER: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER, AMEI WALLACH

25 SHASHA, WINTER, BILLY DELFS

27 BOOK ARCHAEOLOGY, ROB JACKSON

0310

M

U

S

E

4

M

0310

M

U

S

E

5

M

contents

hungry ghosts, failed utopias, and the recent

economic collapse. She has a day job in repro-

ductive rights and environmental education,

sometimes teaches, and rarely cleans. Toni is

also an occasional playwright and journalist;

her short play “Kali’s Beautiful Secret” was

presented in September 09 at Cleveland Pub-

lic Theater’s Pandemonium. She has an MA

in Literature from Cleveland State University

and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from

Goddard College. Her favorite novel persists

in being Middlemarch, which might seem at

odds with her love of all things fantastical.

She thanks David Hansen for his constancy

and unfailing support.

AMEI WALLACH is an art critic, filmmaker,

and commentator. She was for many years

on-air Arts Essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer

Newshour and chief art critic for New York

Newsday and Newsday. The current essay is

from a memoir-in-progress. Her articles have

appeared in The New York Times, New York

Times Magazine, Art in America, ArtNews, The

Nation, Elle, Vanity Fair and the Smithsonian.

Among the books she has written or contrib-

uted to are: Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never

Threw Anything Away, Gees Bend: The Archi-

tecture of the Quilt, and Crossroads: Art and

Religion In American Life. She is president

emeritus of the International Art Critics Asso-

ciation and a frequent lecturer at museums

around the world. She co-directed, with the

late Marion Cajori, the internationally ac-

claimed 2008 documentary, Louise Bourgeois:

The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.

Sample reviews: “A remarkable achievement!

As intimate a portrait of a living artist as one

could ask for,” The Houston Chronicle, “Superb

documentary portrait,” The New York Times;

“a work of art in its own right,” Artforum. She

is currently making a feature-length film on

the Soviet-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

MARK YASENCHACK was born in Parma,

Ohio and is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace

College, where he majored in biology with a

concentration in creative writing. He under-

took the challenge to balance written art and

the visual. Originally he made large tiles with

images and stories painted on the surface.

Gradually the images won out as his experi-

ments with surface texture and color became

more involved. More recently, he began to

working with encaustic wax, encasing photo-

graphs in a semi-transparent layer, and fi-

nally, discovered a way to include words in his

work and a reason to dissect an old typewriter

(thank-you Patti Fields). For material, he

plundered a long-kept notebook of ideas and

began writing prose fragments and poems.

He is grateful to have found his way back to

writing, through an encaustic wax technique

where he stamps the letters with typebars re-

moved from a typewriter. In much the same

way pictures had replaced words, now words

are essential and the images cannot keep up.trib

con

utorsHEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE has an MA in

English from Cleveland State University, has

studied creative writing at Oberlin College,

and was in the poetry program at the Iowa

Writer’s Workshop. She’s been a copywriter

for over 16 years and is a writer with Doner

Advertising. She lives in Lakewood, Ohio

with an unruly menagerie of dogs, cats, and

60s furniture.

BILLY DELFS Was recently awarded the 2009 Press Club of Cleveland's Excellence in Journalism Award (2nd Place Portraiture). He continues to work for regional/national magazines, advertising agencies, and design firms. His main focus is portraiture, but he explores the medium through personal projects and travel.

THOMAS DUKES is professor of English at The

University of Akron. He is the author of an

award-winning collection of poems, Baptist

Confidential, and Sugar Blood Jesus: A Memoir

of Faith, Madness, and Cream Gravy. His

writing has appeared in a variety of journals

including Poetry, New Orleans Review, South

Carolina Review, The Plain Dealer, Jelly

Bucket, etc. He lives in an Akron/Cleveland

suburb with his partner, their six cats, and a

poodle, Princess Diana.

SCOTT LAX Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Scott

Lax is a fiction writer, nonfiction writer and

playwright. After graduating from Hiram

College, he spent 15 years as a salesman and

drummer. The Denver Post called his first

novel, The Year That Trembled, one of 1998’s

“milestones in fiction.” Lax then produced it

as an award-winning feature film and

adapted it as a produced stage-play. The re-

cipient of numerous awards from the Ohio

Professional Writers and Cleveland Press

Club, Lax is a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Nonfiction Scholar and Sewanee Writers’

Conference Fiction Fellow. He founded The

Chagrin Valley Writers’ Workshop, where he

teaches.

KAREN R. LONG has been book editor of The

Plain Dealer since 2005. She currently serves

on the board of the National Book Critics

Circle, which gives out an annual prize for

best book in fiction, biography, poetry, non-

fiction, criticism and autobiography.

PHILIP METRES is the author of numerous

books, including To See the Earth (poetry,

2008), Come Together: Imagine Peace (a co-

edited anthology of peace poems, 2008),

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the

American Homefront since 1941 (criticism,

2007), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties:

Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004). His

poetry has appeared in numerous journals

and anthologies, including Best American

Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary

Arab American Poetry. He teaches literature

and creative writing at John Carroll Univer-

sity in Cleveland, Ohio.

KRISTIN OHLSON is author of the award-win-

ning memoir, Stalking the Divine, and co-au-

thor of New York Times bestselling Kabul

Beauty School. A freelance writer, her articles

and essays have been published in The New

York Times (newspaper and magazine),

Salon, Gourmet, Discover, Oprah, and many

others. One of her articles was featured in

Best American Travel Writing 2008.

TONI K. THAYER lives in Cleveland Heights,

where she is raising two wild and beautiful

children and working on a rangy novel about

SURFER, LAKE ERIE, 2009 - 11X17

06 OAR, MARK YASENCHAK

07 TURBINE, CLEVELAND, BILLY DELFS

08 BERNARD, NYC, BILLY DELFS

09 GUYS WITH THEIR HANDS IN THEIR POCKETS, THOMAS DUKE

10 I AM WHAT I PLAY, TONI K. THAYER

11 EMMY, BILLY DELFS

14 SALES CALL, SCOTT LAX

15 PARKED, DUMBO NYC, BILLY DELFS

21 NORTH AFRICA, HEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE

23 HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, BILLY DELFS

24 THE COUNTERFEIT KILLER: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER, AMEI WALLACH

25 SHASHA, WINTER, BILLY DELFS

27 BOOK ARCHAEOLOGY, ROB JACKSON

0310

M

U

S

E

6

M

0310

M

U

S

E

7

M

OARThese surrounding days and hours, perhaps we shape them

.

If we do it is in the way an oar shapes the lake,

the way a w

ing shapes the sky. MA

RK YASEN

CHA

K

POETRY

T H E L I T A W A R D W I N N E R

“Oar” is a deceptively plain poem which grapples with one of the

eternal existential problems – the so-called “wreck of time.” What

can we make of our days and hours, and do they matter at all? The

poem’s imagistic answer is at once consolingly beautiful and brac-

ingly humbling. ~ PHIL METRES

TURBINE, CLEVELAND, 2007 - 11X14

0310

M

U

S

E

6

M

0310

M

U

S

E

7

M

OARThese surrounding days and hours, perhaps we shape them

.

If we do it is in the way an oar shapes the lake,

the way a w

ing shapes the sky. MA

RK YASEN

CHA

K

POETRY


“Oar” is a deceptively plain poem which grapples with one of the

eternal existential problems – the so-called “wreck of time.” What

can we make of our days and hours, and do they matter at all? The

poem’s imagistic answer is at once consolingly beautiful and brac-

ingly humbling. ~ PHIL METRES

TURBINE, CLEVELAND, 2007 - 11X14

0310

M

U

S

E

8

M

0310

M

U

S

E

9

M

Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets THOMAS DUKES

Mansfield, Ohio

Carl Lee and his buddies stand like trees listening to the pick-up engine idle as they idle on Sunday afternoon: no Steelers, or maybe the women ran them out of the triple-wides and the houses Paw-paw built himselfwith black lung.

As if he’d found love for the first time, L. W. leans his hard-case body over the motor. Hank and Lucaswait for the law and child support warrantscoming Monday, although the Honda plantlaid off Jesus Christ and everybody else. Carl Lee would tell the lawlaid off means you can’t get your own grits, let alone baby formula, but he knows no law listens to him.

The others Yeah and Good job, you cuss. L.W. nods with the country cool of a man who beat up an honors kid senior year and did time for it. The others shuffle in Meemaw’s raked dirt: maybe they’ll sniff out a six pack, smokes, and a trio of bored Wandas, or Merle will haul up with a notion.

But as they wait for the world to crank, Carl Lee slips away like a possum to listen for a dog barking, a train, some church organ left to hum, anything with a heart, singing.


POETRY

“Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets” deftly brings us into a

world that poetry has too rarely visited without condescension – the

world of workers and the out-of-work, of men who admire and puzzle

over the poetics of an engine, and worry over child support payments.

Carl Lee is poetry! ~ PHIL METRES

BERNARD, NYC 2004 - 8X10

0310

M

U

S

E

8

M

0310

M

U

S

E

9

M

Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets THOMAS DUKES

Mansfield, Ohio

Carl Lee and his buddies stand like trees listening to the pick-up engine idle as they idle on Sunday afternoon: no Steelers, or maybe the women ran them out of the triple-wides and the houses Paw-paw built himselfwith black lung.

As if he’d found love for the first time, L. W. leans his hard-case body over the motor. Hank and Lucaswait for the law and child support warrantscoming Monday, although the Honda plantlaid off Jesus Christ and everybody else. Carl Lee would tell the lawlaid off means you can’t get your own grits, let alone baby formula, but he knows no law listens to him.

The others Yeah and Good job, you cuss. L.W. nods with the country cool of a man who beat up an honors kid senior year and did time for it. The others shuffle in Meemaw’s raked dirt: maybe they’ll sniff out a six pack, smokes, and a trio of bored Wandas, or Merle will haul up with a notion.

But as they wait for the world to crank, Carl Lee slips away like a possum to listen for a dog barking, a train, some church organ left to hum, anything with a heart, singing.


POETRY

“Guys with Their Hands in Their Pockets” deftly brings us into a

world that poetry has too rarely visited without condescension – the

world of workers and the out-of-work, of men who admire and puzzle

over the poetics of an engine, and worry over child support payments.

Carl Lee is poetry! ~ PHIL METRES

BERNARD, NYC 2004 - 8X10

0310

M

U

S

E

10

M

0310

M

U

S

E

11

M

He reached and wiped her chin.

“I only had sound,” she told him.

He clucked again and looked a little disappointed. “Well, that

makes the training exercises easier, I guess.”

An hour later, she was dressed and armed with a copy of the in-

struction manual. The nurse had gone over the basic storage and re-

call functions. It felt weird, like trying to type with six fingers on each

hand. This sensation didn't help the queasiness. On the way back to

her dormitory, she had to sit down on the moving sidewalk and put

her head between her knees. She noticed a pleasant, quiet flapping of

rubber over rollers that she had never heard from a standing height.

People giggled as they trooped past her.

The worst part was the hook-up jack behind her left ear. She

ended up allergic to something in the alloy and her flesh got oozy and

infected. She was in bed with flu symptoms for a week. She had to

cancel work for several nights.

It was worth it, though, once she was back in the sound cage. She

plugged herself into the deck and tried using the implant surrepti-

tiously at first, slipping in the odd sound sequence as a segue or filler.

The cat purring. The slow tick of a heating duct cooling. Chess pieces

clacking on the boards in the dormitory common. It worked—only

she knew where music stopped and the sounds of the world began.

Like Duchamp’s toilet, it was music because she said it was. She called

it brain spin. The beat sats ate it up.

At a private party in the trendiest beat room, Indra made a whole

night of brain spins. She’d been collecting, starting with the sounds of

the recovery room. A mix called “The Upgrade Suite” combined the

humming lights and the distant ukulele, punctuated with the cluck-

ing tongue of the nurse, and in the background an eerie refrain that

only Indra knew was sound of her “emesis.” It was a huge hit with the

crowd, and a dance music feed picked up a recording of it for regular

transmission. Suddenly, Indra was making royalties.

Other sounds that appealed to her in the first phase were slippers

on carpet, her own teeth chewing, doors and dishes and running

water, and last-century songs recorded on antique vinyl. She plugged

ndra would have told you she

was a visual artist, but no one

else saw what she saw. To her,

music had its own terrain—

color and distance, density and

duration. She could close her

eyes and isolate each element of

the landscape. She could stop

the flow of rhythm, hold it

steady in her mind and walk

through it. She could mix tracks

in her mind’s eye before she ever

got near a deck. Modern Bali-

nese tech-hop had the perfect

negative space, like a hollow

under a hill, in which to fit a

Bach violin phrase. She could

just see it.

In her teens, she’d discovered that the dance floor had an ener-

getic landscape of its own. Being a wallflower gave her the chance to

observe the overlay of the dancers' vibe on the musical terrain. A good

track mixer could match the two a majority of the time—that was

their job. In her experience, most weren't all that good. She dropped

out of her recycling-tech program to start mixing tracks profession-

ally when she was 18. It was like daydreaming for pay—synapses blaz-

ing with the intricate pictures of one imagined world syncing with the

other. Vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral.

Even London had started to seem like a backwater once so many

people were spacebound. She took the first off-world opportunity that

came her way, but being a track mixer on the far side of the moon isn't

as glamorous as it might sound.

Indra was good—in her first year

or two she was something of a

sensation among hardcore beat-

sats, the trendy demilune of

techies, miners, engineers, and

their servicers who orbited the

beat room dance floors. But now

that she supported herself, she

realized the credit was abysmal. She still lived in a standard-assign-

ment dormitory. Free sound files were a nice perk, but she scraped to

get all the new tracks she needed.

So Indra was first in line when she saw the adverts for the new

memory chip implants. She knew instantly what she could do with one

at the deck. She would be able to sample anything she ever heard for

the dance floor. She could solve her sound budget problems and trans-

form track mixing into sound sculpture. She was a genuine visionary.

The procedure was much more unpleasant than she anticipated.

Indra had been too excited to take the time to read the fine print, the

part about how the mem chips weren't really chips at all but polymer

nanofilament data storage woven into the sensory centers of the dien-

cephalon. She had told them she only needed sound, so it wasn't as in-

volved as a full set (which were marketed to admin assists as data

organization lifesavers). But they still had to drill into her skull and

laser knife her cerebellum.

She woke up in the recovery room in a panic. The pinky orange

walls looked like the inside of a body cavity. The lights hummed. Her

head hurt. Her mouth was painfully dry. She couldn’t remember what

was going on. She sat up quickly and immediately retched, puking

down the front of her crinkly paper surgical gown. A crepe-soled nurse

stepped so quietly out of nowhere and surprised her with his clucking.

“Careful or you won't be able to forget the taste,” he said wryly.

“Huh?”

“The implants. The flavor. Don’t send it to long term storage,” he said.

Indra stared at him. He was wearing a sound pod on him some-

where. She could hear the faint plinking of a ukulele now, on top of

the humming lights. Pseudo-Hawaiian was way too popular these

days, but this combination was interesting, like emerald geodes lit-

tered on the stubbly yellow remains of a cornfield.

After moment, she asked,

“What are you talking

about?” Then suppressed an-

other retch.

He smiled a little conde-

scendingly. “You just had the

mem chip put in. I was trying

to warn you not to bank the

aftertaste of your, um, emesis.”

I Am What I PlayTONI K. THAYER

FICTION


“I Am What I Play” is a striking, original story. Indra, the title character,

mixes dance music somewhere in the future. She describes this work

as “vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral,” a description that is

two-thirds accurate for the story itself. This unexpected and well-

imagined tale is vibrant and vivid, but not ephemeral. By the end, its

power detonates like a depth charge, as the consequences of Indra’s

gifts at her work take an unanticipated turn. Like the best science fic-

tion, “I am What I Play” speaks to us as moral creatures. ~ KAREN LONG

EMMY, 2003 - 5.5 X 6 7/8

0310

M

U

S

E

10

M

0310

M

U

S

E

11

M

He reached and wiped her chin.

“I only had sound,” she told him.

He clucked again and looked a little disappointed. “Well, that

makes the training exercises easier, I guess.”

An hour later, she was dressed and armed with a copy of the in-

struction manual. The nurse had gone over the basic storage and re-

call functions. It felt weird, like trying to type with six fingers on each

hand. This sensation didn't help the queasiness. On the way back to

her dormitory, she had to sit down on the moving sidewalk and put

her head between her knees. She noticed a pleasant, quiet flapping of

rubber over rollers that she had never heard from a standing height.

People giggled as they trooped past her.

The worst part was the hook-up jack behind her left ear. She

ended up allergic to something in the alloy and her flesh got oozy and

infected. She was in bed with flu symptoms for a week. She had to

cancel work for several nights.

It was worth it, though, once she was back in the sound cage. She

plugged herself into the deck and tried using the implant surrepti-

tiously at first, slipping in the odd sound sequence as a segue or filler.

The cat purring. The slow tick of a heating duct cooling. Chess pieces

clacking on the boards in the dormitory common. It worked—only

she knew where music stopped and the sounds of the world began.

Like Duchamp’s toilet, it was music because she said it was. She called

it brain spin. The beat sats ate it up.

At a private party in the trendiest beat room, Indra made a whole

night of brain spins. She’d been collecting, starting with the sounds of

the recovery room. A mix called “The Upgrade Suite” combined the

humming lights and the distant ukulele, punctuated with the cluck-

ing tongue of the nurse, and in the background an eerie refrain that

only Indra knew was sound of her “emesis.” It was a huge hit with the

crowd, and a dance music feed picked up a recording of it for regular

transmission. Suddenly, Indra was making royalties.

Other sounds that appealed to her in the first phase were slippers

on carpet, her own teeth chewing, doors and dishes and running

water, and last-century songs recorded on antique vinyl. She plugged

ndra would have told you she

was a visual artist, but no one

else saw what she saw. To her,

music had its own terrain—

color and distance, density and

duration. She could close her

eyes and isolate each element of

the landscape. She could stop

the flow of rhythm, hold it

steady in her mind and walk

through it. She could mix tracks

in her mind’s eye before she ever

got near a deck. Modern Bali-

nese tech-hop had the perfect

negative space, like a hollow

under a hill, in which to fit a

Bach violin phrase. She could

just see it.

In her teens, she’d discovered that the dance floor had an ener-

getic landscape of its own. Being a wallflower gave her the chance to

observe the overlay of the dancers' vibe on the musical terrain. A good

track mixer could match the two a majority of the time—that was

their job. In her experience, most weren't all that good. She dropped

out of her recycling-tech program to start mixing tracks profession-

ally when she was 18. It was like daydreaming for pay—synapses blaz-

ing with the intricate pictures of one imagined world syncing with the

other. Vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral.

Even London had started to seem like a backwater once so many

people were spacebound. She took the first off-world opportunity that

came her way, but being a track mixer on the far side of the moon isn't

as glamorous as it might sound.

Indra was good—in her first year

or two she was something of a

sensation among hardcore beat-

sats, the trendy demilune of

techies, miners, engineers, and

their servicers who orbited the

beat room dance floors. But now

that she supported herself, she

realized the credit was abysmal. She still lived in a standard-assign-

ment dormitory. Free sound files were a nice perk, but she scraped to

get all the new tracks she needed.

So Indra was first in line when she saw the adverts for the new

memory chip implants. She knew instantly what she could do with one

at the deck. She would be able to sample anything she ever heard for

the dance floor. She could solve her sound budget problems and trans-

form track mixing into sound sculpture. She was a genuine visionary.

The procedure was much more unpleasant than she anticipated.

Indra had been too excited to take the time to read the fine print, the

part about how the mem chips weren't really chips at all but polymer

nanofilament data storage woven into the sensory centers of the dien-

cephalon. She had told them she only needed sound, so it wasn't as in-

volved as a full set (which were marketed to admin assists as data

organization lifesavers). But they still had to drill into her skull and

laser knife her cerebellum.

She woke up in the recovery room in a panic. The pinky orange

walls looked like the inside of a body cavity. The lights hummed. Her

head hurt. Her mouth was painfully dry. She couldn’t remember what

was going on. She sat up quickly and immediately retched, puking

down the front of her crinkly paper surgical gown. A crepe-soled nurse

stepped so quietly out of nowhere and surprised her with his clucking.

“Careful or you won't be able to forget the taste,” he said wryly.

“Huh?”

“The implants. The flavor. Don’t send it to long term storage,” he said.

Indra stared at him. He was wearing a sound pod on him some-

where. She could hear the faint plinking of a ukulele now, on top of

the humming lights. Pseudo-Hawaiian was way too popular these

days, but this combination was interesting, like emerald geodes lit-

tered on the stubbly yellow remains of a cornfield.

After moment, she asked,

“What are you talking

about?” Then suppressed an-

other retch.

He smiled a little conde-

scendingly. “You just had the

mem chip put in. I was trying

to warn you not to bank the

aftertaste of your, um, emesis.”

I Am What I PlayTONI K. THAYER

FICTION


“I Am What I Play” is a striking, original story. Indra, the title character,

mixes dance music somewhere in the future. She describes this work

as “vibrant, vivid, and completely ephemeral,” a description that is

two-thirds accurate for the story itself. This unexpected and well-

imagined tale is vibrant and vivid, but not ephemeral. By the end, its

power detonates like a depth charge, as the consequences of Indra’s

gifts at her work take an unanticipated turn. Like the best science fic-

tion, “I am What I Play” speaks to us as moral creatures. ~ KAREN LONG

EMMY, 2003 - 5.5 X 6 7/8

0310

M

U

S

E

12

M

0310

M

U

S

E

13

M

at Main Library

Sara Wolfe, celloworks by J.S. Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich,and George CrumbSaturday, March 20

George Foley, pianist and singerJazz standards from the 20s-50sSaturday, April 17

Cleveland Public Library presents an afternoon of music. Both programs begin promptly at 2 p.m. and will be held on the 3rd floor of the Main Library building.

For more information call 216.623.2848 Free and open to all ages.

MUSIC

325 Superior Avenue | Cleveland, Ohio 44114 | www.cpl.org

in, called up the sound mems, mixed them together with snatches of

song on the palette behind her eyes and let them spill out like neon,

like mercury, through the wire into the machine out the speakers and

across the dance floor.

As Indra adjusted to her new groove, she sought out more and

more sounds. Her days became a wandering quest for unusual and

unexpected noise. She started going places she wasn’t supposed to be.

Into the greenhouse at night for birdcalls. Behind restricted access

doors for new machines and the occasional overheard clandestine sex.

She mingled strangers’ sex sounds with the noises of filtration plants:

cum cries and draining tanks of human waste. Her sense of humor

was getting darker the more she searched, the more she heard. In the

beat rooms, the crowds danced and danced.

One morning, out trawling for sound, she heard four kids argu-

ing near the rec complex. Nothing special, until one punched another

with a wet thud. Three boys beat the fourth with hands and boots and

space hockey rackets until he mewled like an underfed kitten. Indra

had no idea why they did it. She preferred not to. She took the sounds

and sculpted them into something new. She called the mix “Force

Field.” The dancers went crazy for the primal energy. Indra tried to

find other sounds of violence, but ended up just smashing in her black

metal wastebasket with a pipe.

Then one evening, she went to lurk in the corner of a transport

hub, eyes closed, listening to all the sounds of the station, trying to

pick out each part individually so she could brain spin it however she

pleased. She particularly liked the echoes. A brief cry and a muffled

whimper from down an empty hallway attracted her attention. She

opened her eyes and turned. A man was attacking a woman. Instinc-

tively, Indra turned her face away, then thought to cry out, to some-

how interfere, but she only stood.

The man was saying, “This is mine. This is mine. This is mine.

This is mine,” as he pinned the woman to the floor. Indra had regis-

tered the sight of the woman's fountain of golden braids before turn-

ing away. Now she talked herself into imagining his fingers picking up

a rope of hair with each utterance.

The rape was a dark symphony: a belt clanking against the floor,

shoes scrabbling for purchase, fabric rasping fabric, flesh slapping

flesh, various guttural sounds of pain and fear and satisfaction. It was

fascinating, electrifying, too powerful to let go of.

That night at the deck, she mixed the sounds of the attack into an

hour-long percussive, retro-synthfunk blend that mesmerized the

dancers. The manager complained because the beat room didn’t sell

enough bevs, but Indra went home feeling like a superhero. She woke

up the next morning wanting to kill herself, thinking she had raped

the woman again to make music. The shame lasted only as long as it

took for the recording of last night’s mix, just called “Mine,” to be-

come the most popular on the music feeds. She had to admit, her per-

formance was like nothing anyone had ever done.

For two nights Indra used her new prestige to justify calling off

work. Ignoring the occasional nauseous regret, she stayed up all night

searching for the colony’s darkest corners—dogfights and sex rentals.

When she returned to the sound cage, her mixes were nothing but a

collage pulled from her mem chip, with no music to get in the way.

Sometimes she mixed according to a plan; sometimes she improvised

in response to the energy of the dancers, the shakers, the writhers.

What they were doing down there was bizarre.

After she picked a fight with a drug dealer just to hear a body

pummeled from the inside, Indra realized she missed music and her

innocent toying with its structural clarity. But she missed it like she

missed the neighborhood she had grown up in. The longing felt senti-

mental. She indulged it privately, but didn’t let herself take it seriously.

This new thing was too big. She was making something entirely her

own. She was booked two months out, for crazy amounts of credit.

Then, suddenly, she was sick of it. She woke up one morning with

no desire to search for new sound. Maybe the chip was malfunction-

ing. The night before she had watched a woman on the dance floor

yanking at her golden braids, yanking and yanking in ecstasy or an-

guish while Indra shot sounds from that first rape out into the room.

“This is mine” pulsed through the air at 100 different frequencies. In-

dra’s whole body tensed. It couldn’t be the same woman. It couldn’t

be. The brain spin hiccupped and missed a beat, and the dancers

jerked unwittingly to get back in the groove. The woman with the

braids stood dazed for a second. Who else could it be? Indra didn't

have the strength that morning to do anything but lie in bed and stare

at a shadowy stain on her wall. The only sounds she was collecting

were the whir of the exhaust fan and the rustle of sheets. That wasn’t

worth much, a paltry deposit into the memory bank.

That night she didn’t even want to be at the deck. She spun to-

gether some old favorite sounds, but she was bored of them. Looking

out from the sound cage, she let herself be lulled by the motion on the

floor. She listened to the people themselves, their breathing, their mo-

tion, their propulsive energy. There were no longer two landscapes to

meld together, but one continuous loop—from the crowd to her,

through her mind and the jack and the deck, and back out to the

crowd. A huge room full of people was animated by the regurgitated

sound of their own bodies, and they loved it. Indra didn't have to mix

anything. She was a conduit, a nothing, a star.

on view through may 9, 2010

from then to nowmasterworks of Contemporary african american art

iona rozeal brown: all falls down2009 Joyce award for visual art

muSeum of ContemPorary art CLEVELAND

iona

roz

eal br

own,

kin

g ka

ta #

3:

peel

out

(af

ter

Yosh

itosh

i’s “

Inco

mpa

rabl

e W

arrio

rs:

Wom

an H

an G

aku”

), 2

007.

gou

ache

and

acr

ylic

on

pape

r. 62 x

50 inc

hes.

Cou

rtes

y of

tar

a San

dron

i an

d eric

hirs

hber

g, L

os a

ngel

es

0310

M

U

S

E

14

M

0310

M

U

S

E

15

M

e were sitting at the

bar at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska. Snow fell in heavy

wet sheets and the motel had filled up for the night. Cars were

skidding all over the highway and even the truckers pulled off

and rented rooms. The bartender told us that every hotel in

town was booked.

I’d reserved my room a few weeks earlier. I made the once a

year trip to Lincoln since graduating from college and going to

work for a manufacturers’ representative firm. This was the

time in America when salespeople sold lots of things to compa-

nies that made products. Lincoln was a good place to sell fasten-

ers. The buyers I called on liked to talk football, which was fine

with me. They were all Cornhuskers football fanatics, but I

managed to fake it, being a Cleveland Browns fan myself,

because football is football.

The guy sitting next to me at the bar lit one cigarette after

another. He turned to me and said, “What’s your trade?”

“Manufacturers’ rep,” I said. Usually when someone asked

me what I did, the questioner often didn’t know what that was.

“Do you make things?” he

might then ask. “No; I sell one

company’s products to other

companies,” I’d reply. Some-

times my answer would be met

with silence or another ques-

tion. But this guy nodded his

head up and down. He consid-

ered it for a while.

“I make rubber car mats. My problem is that I need to run

my plant. If I’m not there they tend to horse around and I get

behind on my orders. I could use a young fellow like you to sell

for me, a self-starter, a commissioned guy. What kind of

percentages do you boys make?”

I assumed the “they” he lamented were his current workers

that were probably from generations of working men and

women.

“Your generation,” – he smiled – “present company excluded,

is filled with spoiled brats that don’t have a sound work ethic.”

I figured his workers got stoned a lot, but didn’t want to say

something that might ruin his night. Instead I asked him his

name. Harry was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Business was

decent, he said, but profit margins were so low that it was hard

to justify a full-time salesman. I told him that our company

didn’t sell finished products, but “components and packaging

for O.E.Ms.”

Harry shook his head up and down again and said, “Uh

huh. And we’re a finished product. I get it. No problem, my

young friend.”

He took a long drink of whiskey. “I’ll just stay on the road

until I figure it out. I really do need to fire Rich. I promoted the

son of a bitch from salesman to sales manager to help his – what

do you call it? Self esteem. He’s my only salesman and now he

shows up drunk at sales calls. Can’t have that. We all like our

libations” – he held up his golden glass – “but not between eight

AM and five PM. Am I right?”

I nodded yes. I was encour-

aged that he knew that O.E.M.

stood for original equipment

manufacturer, and that I was

with one of my tribe; my tribe,

I suppose, being lonely men

out on the road trying to sell

something they didn’t really

Sales CallSCOTT LAX

FICTION


At its best, “Sales Call” works like an update on “Death of a Salesman”

as it explores a wintry Nebraska encounter between two salesmen, the

narrator and “Harry,” who peddles rubber car floor mats. As the

evening wears on, Harry is astute in sizing up the young narrator, and

a kind of decency is attained. “Sales Call” holds the reader’s interest

throughout. ~ KAREN LONG

PARKED, DUMBO NYC, 2004 - 8X13

0310

M

U

S

E

14

M

0310

M

U

S

E

15

M

e were sitting at the

bar at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska. Snow fell in heavy

wet sheets and the motel had filled up for the night. Cars were

skidding all over the highway and even the truckers pulled off

and rented rooms. The bartender told us that every hotel in

town was booked.

I’d reserved my room a few weeks earlier. I made the once a

year trip to Lincoln since graduating from college and going to

work for a manufacturers’ representative firm. This was the

time in America when salespeople sold lots of things to compa-

nies that made products. Lincoln was a good place to sell fasten-

ers. The buyers I called on liked to talk football, which was fine

with me. They were all Cornhuskers football fanatics, but I

managed to fake it, being a Cleveland Browns fan myself,

because football is football.

The guy sitting next to me at the bar lit one cigarette after

another. He turned to me and said, “What’s your trade?”

“Manufacturers’ rep,” I said. Usually when someone asked

me what I did, the questioner often didn’t know what that was.

“Do you make things?” he

might then ask. “No; I sell one

company’s products to other

companies,” I’d reply. Some-

times my answer would be met

with silence or another ques-

tion. But this guy nodded his

head up and down. He consid-

ered it for a while.

“I make rubber car mats. My problem is that I need to run

my plant. If I’m not there they tend to horse around and I get

behind on my orders. I could use a young fellow like you to sell

for me, a self-starter, a commissioned guy. What kind of

percentages do you boys make?”

I assumed the “they” he lamented were his current workers

that were probably from generations of working men and

women.

“Your generation,” – he smiled – “present company excluded,

is filled with spoiled brats that don’t have a sound work ethic.”

I figured his workers got stoned a lot, but didn’t want to say

something that might ruin his night. Instead I asked him his

name. Harry was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Business was

decent, he said, but profit margins were so low that it was hard

to justify a full-time salesman. I told him that our company

didn’t sell finished products, but “components and packaging

for O.E.Ms.”

Harry shook his head up and down again and said, “Uh

huh. And we’re a finished product. I get it. No problem, my

young friend.”

He took a long drink of whiskey. “I’ll just stay on the road

until I figure it out. I really do need to fire Rich. I promoted the

son of a bitch from salesman to sales manager to help his – what

do you call it? Self esteem. He’s my only salesman and now he

shows up drunk at sales calls. Can’t have that. We all like our

libations” – he held up his golden glass – “but not between eight

AM and five PM. Am I right?”

I nodded yes. I was encour-

aged that he knew that O.E.M.

stood for original equipment

manufacturer, and that I was

with one of my tribe; my tribe,

I suppose, being lonely men

out on the road trying to sell

something they didn’t really

Sales CallSCOTT LAX

FICTION


At its best, “Sales Call” works like an update on “Death of a Salesman”

as it explores a wintry Nebraska encounter between two salesmen, the

narrator and “Harry,” who peddles rubber car floor mats. As the

evening wears on, Harry is astute in sizing up the young narrator, and

a kind of decency is attained. “Sales Call” holds the reader’s interest

throughout. ~ KAREN LONG

PARKED, DUMBO NYC, 2004 - 8X13

0310

M

U

S

E

16

M

0310

M

U

S

E

17

M

care about and ending up snowed in at a Holiday Inn in

Nebraska in the middle of winter.

Harry insisted on buying us another round.

“Good man,” he said, as I drank. “You’re not one of those

Chardonnay drinkers. I don’t trust them fellows. That there’s a

little light in the loafers for my taste, if you know what I mean.”

I told him I did. While I’d heard the term and knew he was

talking about homosexuals, I had no idea if they drank Char-

donnay. I didn’t feel like questioning Harry about it.

He smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, I bummed

one from him. “You want to stay off them cancer sticks,” he said

as I lit up with his Zippo.

I told him I was a social smoker.

“Well, don’t get started. Stick to the hooch.”

Harry looked like he’d never seen the inside of a gym or put

on a jogging suit and he had a lot of dandruff around his shoul-

ders. Both of us were wearing suits. My suitcase was sitting on

my bed, where I’d tossed it before I came down to the bar. Harry

wore a gray pinstripe that looked like he’d had it on for a week. I

wore a new tan corduroy suit. I figured I needed a warm suit for

Nebraska, and I’d been right. There’s no cold like prairie cold,

when the wind is a knife blade sharpened by a medieval crafts-

man. No matter what you’re wearing, you’re an olive with no pit

when you go outside and that knife cuts through you.

“Look here,” Harry said, ordering another Jameson’s. “You

want to grab dinner in the dining room? They serve a hell of a

sirloin. Nothing better than Nebraska beef. Neither one of us is

going anywhere tonight.”

he bar was busy. Truck-

ers were drinking shots

and beers and getting

hammered fast. The

cocktail waitresses

looked horrified at what

the prairie storm had

blown in. One had red

hair stacked high on her

head and green eye

shadow. She kept saying

to the truckers and

salesmen, “Easy, there,

fellahs, or I’ll call your

wives.” She laughed

after she said it, but I

could tell she wasn’t

happy about working

through a blizzard. It was only eight o’clock and she had a long

night ahead of her with a bunch of drunken salesmen and

truckers.

After a couple of Jameson’s, the idea of trying to tune my

hotel room television in to one of the two stations that Lincoln

had wasn’t attractive. I’d left my book, a Tom Clancy paper-

back, on the airplane, which annoyed me because I was two-

thirds of the way through it. I had been looking forward to

maybe taking a bath and reading the book, then watching some

Johnny Carson and turning in. I had an eight o’clock the next

morning with a company that made industrial shelving. They

bought a lot of expensive screws that were made in Elk Grove

Village near Chicago, where the company I worked for got our

fasteners. Getting that account would be a real coup for me

around the Friday morning sales meeting table.

Over dinner Harry showed me his left hand, which I hadn’t

noticed at the bar. He was missing the tips of his little and ring

fingers.

“Let me tell you about cold,” he said, holding them up like a

trophy. “I lost these babies when my car conked out on my way

home from work one night. No gloves. Six miles of walking

through a blizzard. Can you believe that? Frostbite.”

“Man,” I said. I didn’t want to stare at his tip-less fingers.

“Where you from?”

“Cleveland,” I said.

“Then you know cold. But not northern Wisconsin cold.

I’m talking twenty below and wind. I was lucky. Up where I live

you see guys with missing feet, hands… those boys are usually

the drunks that roll out of taverns thinking they’re warm. They

wake up in snowdrifts – if they wake up – and they’re blue.

They’re lucky if they keep their limbs. If not….”

He held up his hand again. “Like I say, I’ve always been

lucky. At least I’m alive.”

The bar and restaurant was filled with smoke. There were

arguments and apologies and laughing and shouting around us.

Hanging out with Harry made me feel a little better about my

life. At twenty-eight years old, I’d been divorced for a year. I still

got carded at bars but I felt old. I thought Harry might have

worse stories than I did.

“Not married?” he said, glancing at my naked ring finger.

“Good-looking young fellow like you? You’ve got a good

job. Sales is a solid occupation. People will always need to buy

goods and you have to have salesmen to sell them goods. I’d

think the ladies are knocking down your door. Am I right?

“I had some bad luck a while back,” I replied. “I made a bad

choice. It’s over and done. I guess you could say I’m gun-shy.”

“Ah, well. I guess you young folks are different from my

generation,” he said. “We hang in there through thick and thin.

But things change. Hell, the wife and I do the disco every now

and then.”

Harry was about six inches shorter than I, and the way he

slouched in his chair made him seem even shorter. He'd

combed what remained of his hair from one ear to just over the

other ear.

ur steaks

arrived and

Harry was

right; they

were out-

standing. I ate

slowly, and

drank my

third whiskey

even slower. I

realized I

couldn’t hang

in with Harry,

who had a hollow leg. I hoped he wasn’t one of those drinkers

that suddenly turned crazy or violent. But he just kept drinking

and talking, mostly about the rubber car mat business and how

he started it in his twenties, and how the Japanese were destroy-

ing the American car market. He told me about his wife and

kids and how they were “the best family a fellow could have.”

“What do you drive?” he finally asked, not unpleasantly.

“An Olds Omega.”

“American.” he said. “Then you have one of my car mats.”

He looked proud. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had carpet

car mats.

“I’m sure I do,” I said. “It’s a very good mat. Never falls apart.”

Harry looked at me like I’d somehow made his life better, if

only for the night.

“See? This is why I do what I do. Every now and then you

meet someone who drives American, and knows quality. A rub-

ber mat gets dirty, you wash it off. Am I right?”

I felt ashamed that I’d lied to Harry. But he seemed so

happy. Dear Jesus, I thought. Rubber mats. This is my life.

“So you’re a peddler,” he said. He smiled and wrapped his

hand with the missing fingertips around his glass. He’d finally

slowed down on the Jameson’s. “Is this where you saw yourself

ten years ago?”

I began to answer without knowing what I was going to say.

But my voice had suddenly gone hoarse. It happened to me on

sales calls; now it was happening to me with Harry, who made

rubber mats for American cars.

“I…”

“Are you alright?”

I pointed to my throat. It was closing, constricting, and I was

having a hard time breathing or swallowing. I began to panic.

“Drink some water,” he said. “Do you want me to get a doc-

tor?” Harry seemed suddenly sober and concerned. “You chok-

ing? Maybe someone knows the Einstein maneuver.”

I tried to smile and nod and let him know I was okay. But it

was a bad choke up – the worst I’d ever had. I couldn’t swallow,

couldn’t breathe very well, and couldn’t talk to save my life. I

thought I might die at twenty-eight years old in a Holiday Inn in

Nebraska, sitting with a guy with two bum fingers and who

made car mats for shitty American cars like my Olds.

After a few minutes and making sure to breathe through

my diaphragm and drink more water, I could finally speak. The

Jameson’s had kicked in, late, but hard.

“I hate it,” Harry,” I said. “I have no idea why I do what I do.”

Our waitress – she wasn’t the one with the piled up hair and

green eye shadow – came over. “Looks like you boys were hun-

gry. Can I get you some dessert, another drink? I don’t think

anyone’s going anywhere tonight. The highway patrol closed

down the highway. We’re socked in for the night, at least.”

Harry ended up paying the bill. I protested, but he kept

apologizing for me choking.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I get hoarse sometimes and

have a hard time breathing. And talking.”

We left the restaurant. The bar was going into overdrive.

Some of the truckers were arguing about something with a cou-

ple of traveling salesmen. Harry and I stood in the lobby.

“Look here,” Harry said. “I didn’t want to say anything in

the restaurant, but I want you to consider something.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re too young to give up. That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?

Given up? You had a bad marriage. But you’re what, twenty-five

years old?”

“Twenty-eight,” I said.

“Good lord,” Harry said. “Twenty-eight years old. Now lis-

ten to me. You need to do what you need to do. You can’t talk

about your job and you can’t make sales calls, because this isn’t

who you are.”

I stood there and looked at the tile floor of the Holiday Inn.

Then I looked at Harry.

“What should I do?”

“You should go home and quit, and then do something you

want to do. What do you like to do?”

“I was a guitarist in a band,” I said.

“Did you like it?”

0310

M

U

S

E

16

M

0310

M

U

S

E

17

M

care about and ending up snowed in at a Holiday Inn in

Nebraska in the middle of winter.

Harry insisted on buying us another round.

“Good man,” he said, as I drank. “You’re not one of those

Chardonnay drinkers. I don’t trust them fellows. That there’s a

little light in the loafers for my taste, if you know what I mean.”

I told him I did. While I’d heard the term and knew he was

talking about homosexuals, I had no idea if they drank Char-

donnay. I didn’t feel like questioning Harry about it.

He smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, I bummed

one from him. “You want to stay off them cancer sticks,” he said

as I lit up with his Zippo.

I told him I was a social smoker.

“Well, don’t get started. Stick to the hooch.”

Harry looked like he’d never seen the inside of a gym or put

on a jogging suit and he had a lot of dandruff around his shoul-

ders. Both of us were wearing suits. My suitcase was sitting on

my bed, where I’d tossed it before I came down to the bar. Harry

wore a gray pinstripe that looked like he’d had it on for a week. I

wore a new tan corduroy suit. I figured I needed a warm suit for

Nebraska, and I’d been right. There’s no cold like prairie cold,

when the wind is a knife blade sharpened by a medieval crafts-

man. No matter what you’re wearing, you’re an olive with no pit

when you go outside and that knife cuts through you.

“Look here,” Harry said, ordering another Jameson’s. “You

want to grab dinner in the dining room? They serve a hell of a

sirloin. Nothing better than Nebraska beef. Neither one of us is

going anywhere tonight.”

he bar was busy. Truck-

ers were drinking shots

and beers and getting

hammered fast. The

cocktail waitresses

looked horrified at what

the prairie storm had

blown in. One had red

hair stacked high on her

head and green eye

shadow. She kept saying

to the truckers and

salesmen, “Easy, there,

fellahs, or I’ll call your

wives.” She laughed

after she said it, but I

could tell she wasn’t

happy about working

through a blizzard. It was only eight o’clock and she had a long

night ahead of her with a bunch of drunken salesmen and

truckers.

After a couple of Jameson’s, the idea of trying to tune my

hotel room television in to one of the two stations that Lincoln

had wasn’t attractive. I’d left my book, a Tom Clancy paper-

back, on the airplane, which annoyed me because I was two-

thirds of the way through it. I had been looking forward to

maybe taking a bath and reading the book, then watching some

Johnny Carson and turning in. I had an eight o’clock the next

morning with a company that made industrial shelving. They

bought a lot of expensive screws that were made in Elk Grove

Village near Chicago, where the company I worked for got our

fasteners. Getting that account would be a real coup for me

around the Friday morning sales meeting table.

Over dinner Harry showed me his left hand, which I hadn’t

noticed at the bar. He was missing the tips of his little and ring

fingers.

“Let me tell you about cold,” he said, holding them up like a

trophy. “I lost these babies when my car conked out on my way

home from work one night. No gloves. Six miles of walking

through a blizzard. Can you believe that? Frostbite.”

“Man,” I said. I didn’t want to stare at his tip-less fingers.

“Where you from?”

“Cleveland,” I said.

“Then you know cold. But not northern Wisconsin cold.

I’m talking twenty below and wind. I was lucky. Up where I live

you see guys with missing feet, hands… those boys are usually

the drunks that roll out of taverns thinking they’re warm. They

wake up in snowdrifts – if they wake up – and they’re blue.

They’re lucky if they keep their limbs. If not….”

He held up his hand again. “Like I say, I’ve always been

lucky. At least I’m alive.”

The bar and restaurant was filled with smoke. There were

arguments and apologies and laughing and shouting around us.

Hanging out with Harry made me feel a little better about my

life. At twenty-eight years old, I’d been divorced for a year. I still

got carded at bars but I felt old. I thought Harry might have

worse stories than I did.

“Not married?” he said, glancing at my naked ring finger.

“Good-looking young fellow like you? You’ve got a good

job. Sales is a solid occupation. People will always need to buy

goods and you have to have salesmen to sell them goods. I’d

think the ladies are knocking down your door. Am I right?

“I had some bad luck a while back,” I replied. “I made a bad

choice. It’s over and done. I guess you could say I’m gun-shy.”

“Ah, well. I guess you young folks are different from my

generation,” he said. “We hang in there through thick and thin.

But things change. Hell, the wife and I do the disco every now

and then.”

Harry was about six inches shorter than I, and the way he

slouched in his chair made him seem even shorter. He'd

combed what remained of his hair from one ear to just over the

other ear.

ur steaks

arrived and

Harry was

right; they

were out-

standing. I ate

slowly, and

drank my

third whiskey

even slower. I

realized I

couldn’t hang

in with Harry,

who had a hollow leg. I hoped he wasn’t one of those drinkers

that suddenly turned crazy or violent. But he just kept drinking

and talking, mostly about the rubber car mat business and how

he started it in his twenties, and how the Japanese were destroy-

ing the American car market. He told me about his wife and

kids and how they were “the best family a fellow could have.”

“What do you drive?” he finally asked, not unpleasantly.

“An Olds Omega.”

“American.” he said. “Then you have one of my car mats.”

He looked proud. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had carpet

car mats.

“I’m sure I do,” I said. “It’s a very good mat. Never falls apart.”

Harry looked at me like I’d somehow made his life better, if

only for the night.

“See? This is why I do what I do. Every now and then you

meet someone who drives American, and knows quality. A rub-

ber mat gets dirty, you wash it off. Am I right?”

I felt ashamed that I’d lied to Harry. But he seemed so

happy. Dear Jesus, I thought. Rubber mats. This is my life.

“So you’re a peddler,” he said. He smiled and wrapped his

hand with the missing fingertips around his glass. He’d finally

slowed down on the Jameson’s. “Is this where you saw yourself

ten years ago?”

I began to answer without knowing what I was going to say.

But my voice had suddenly gone hoarse. It happened to me on

sales calls; now it was happening to me with Harry, who made

rubber mats for American cars.

“I…”

“Are you alright?”

I pointed to my throat. It was closing, constricting, and I was

having a hard time breathing or swallowing. I began to panic.

“Drink some water,” he said. “Do you want me to get a doc-

tor?” Harry seemed suddenly sober and concerned. “You chok-

ing? Maybe someone knows the Einstein maneuver.”

I tried to smile and nod and let him know I was okay. But it

was a bad choke up – the worst I’d ever had. I couldn’t swallow,

couldn’t breathe very well, and couldn’t talk to save my life. I

thought I might die at twenty-eight years old in a Holiday Inn in

Nebraska, sitting with a guy with two bum fingers and who

made car mats for shitty American cars like my Olds.

After a few minutes and making sure to breathe through

my diaphragm and drink more water, I could finally speak. The

Jameson’s had kicked in, late, but hard.

“I hate it,” Harry,” I said. “I have no idea why I do what I do.”

Our waitress – she wasn’t the one with the piled up hair and

green eye shadow – came over. “Looks like you boys were hun-

gry. Can I get you some dessert, another drink? I don’t think

anyone’s going anywhere tonight. The highway patrol closed

down the highway. We’re socked in for the night, at least.”

Harry ended up paying the bill. I protested, but he kept

apologizing for me choking.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I get hoarse sometimes and

have a hard time breathing. And talking.”

We left the restaurant. The bar was going into overdrive.

Some of the truckers were arguing about something with a cou-

ple of traveling salesmen. Harry and I stood in the lobby.

“Look here,” Harry said. “I didn’t want to say anything in

the restaurant, but I want you to consider something.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re too young to give up. That’s what you’ve done, isn’t it?

Given up? You had a bad marriage. But you’re what, twenty-five

years old?”

“Twenty-eight,” I said.

“Good lord,” Harry said. “Twenty-eight years old. Now lis-

ten to me. You need to do what you need to do. You can’t talk

about your job and you can’t make sales calls, because this isn’t

who you are.”

I stood there and looked at the tile floor of the Holiday Inn.

Then I looked at Harry.

“What should I do?”

“You should go home and quit, and then do something you

want to do. What do you like to do?”

“I was a guitarist in a band,” I said.

“Did you like it?”

0310

M

U

S

E

18

M

0310

M

U

S

E

19

M

“Sure. I loved it. But you can’t make a decent living at that.”

Harry looked at me. “When you lose your voice, it’s be-

cause you’ve lost your heart for what you’re doing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve never lost my voice. I love what I do.” Harry

smiled.

I’d told Harry over dinner that I’d left my Clancy novel in

the plane. “Done it myself many times,” he’d replied. I assumed

he’d forgotten it as small talk.

Harry said, “I’ve got a Newsweek I picked up at the airport.

You want it?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But what are you going to read?”

“I’m whipped,” he said. “I’m hitting the hay. Early day

tomorrow.”

We walked to Harry’s room, which was close to the lobby. I

glanced in at his room. It was a mess and stunk of cigarettes and

dirty socks. Outside the snow was coming down so hard it

looked like a white curtain had been drawn across the window.

He isn’t going anywhere tomorrow, I thought.

“Here you go,” he said. He gave me the magazine. John

Lennon, who’d been shot two weeks earlier, was on the cover.

“One of your guys. I think you’ll enjoy this more than me.

Shame about him, though.”

We shook hands and said goodnight. I didn’t think to ask

him his last name.

ack in my

room, I drew a

bath. While I

lay in the tub I

kept using my

big toe to add

hot water. I

could hear the

TV in the

other room.

Listening to

the local Lin-

coln, Nebraska

news, like lis-

tening to the

news in any

other city than

Cleveland,

seemed exotic.

I still felt the effects of the whiskey. I read through the News-

week and fell asleep a few times in the tub.

After my bath, I dried off and got in my pajamas, which I

always brought with me on overnight sales calls. I walked over

and opened the curtains, which were made of vinyl. It was

snowing hard outside. You could see the highway from my

room, and there wasn’t a single car or truck light. The only

lights were snowplows, with spinning yellow lights. I sat down

on the one of the chairs at the little round table by the window

and watched them on the highway, passing each other in both

directions.

The next morning I got up at six, saw that the roads and

airports were still closed and digging out of the snowstorm,

even though it was bright outside. I called the company I had an

appointment with, and left a message on their answering ma-

chine. I cancelled my sales call and went back to sleep.

At about ten-thirty I went down to the restaurant and fig-

ured I’d see Harry. I wanted to give his Newsweek back to him.

But he wasn’t there. I asked one of the waiters if he’d seen him. I

gave his description. “You mean Harry? He was out of here first

thing this morning. Nothing stops that guy. He’s a true

salesman.”

I checked out and caught a cab back to the Lincoln airport.

When I got back to Cleveland, I gave notice. My boss told me

he’d had great hopes for me. “You’re a natural at the sales

game,” he said. “Sorry to lose you.”

Harry and I never crossed paths again. I ended up in a dif-

ferent world than him, thanks to him. What I remember most

about Harry is the look on his face when I was choking. You

don’t forget someone who actually gets as concerned about you

as Harry was that night.

I figure Harry would be in his eighties by now, but I doubt

if he made it this long. With all his smoking and drinking and

extra weight – life in general – I’m not sure I want to know what

happened to him. I prefer to think of him as a guy who loves his

job, a guy I met at a Holiday Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I

was young; a manufacturer of rubber mats for American cars,

which, I’ve always believed, is an honorable profession.

One of Ohio’s foremost publishers of literature. Bottom Dog Press/ Bird Dog Publishing PO Box 425/ Huron, OH 44839 http://smithdocs.net (Free shipping)

Riders on the Storm Strangers in America by Erika Meyers

Winner of the Great Lakes Novel PrizeA realistic novel set in Northeast Ohio

25th Anniversary Poetry Anthology66 Poets from 91 of Our Books

Edited by Laura Smith and Allen Frost156 pages $16.00

by Susan StreeterCarpenter

“Free of caricature, Strangers in Americais peopled with individuals rich in humancomplexity ....When you finish Strangers inAmerica, the main character Helena Adamzikwill still be there: tough, dead-pan funny,proud and enduring.” -Robert Flanagan

“Riders on the Storm explores and explodes theshallow stereotypes and hollow myths about theSixties and Cleveland’s young radicals whodreamed of, and sometimes fought for, atransformed world. Compassionate but exacting,she creates unforgettable characters, and theirpolitical, personal, and sexual ideals andpassions are completely human and entirelycompelling.” -Jeff Gundy

388 pages $17.00Working Lives Series 152 pages $16.00

0310

M

U

S

E

20

M

0310

M

U

S

E

21

M

o we went to

Tangier, went to

Tangier, down lots

and lots of differ-

ent roads to get

there, and then we

had to take a ferry.

People stood in

lines. I wore a

scarf Anna Mag-

ninied around my

head. I wanted it

to be the forties,

be the sixties, be

something else.

Can I make it hap-

pen when some-

thing else is

happening, and the boat went over the strait, over and over this divided

and coming together of water, and Gibraltor was behind us, and it was a

clear dusk that exhausted itself quickly, and we didn’t know anyone except

each other. It was now Thursday night, and there was a chill but it was

welcome. The Mediterranean and the Atlantic were Herculean around us,

and nobody seemed to care, they were getting drinks, and stamping pass-

ports, and sitting on parcels and the guy from San Francisco said he was

never going home, he was on a travel that started 14 months ago but he

looked too clean not to go home, and then suddenly I was too aware of my

red sweater, and it smelled of my

core, and I wanted to shrink, every-

one could smell the stink of me then

and I was foreign in the same clothes

I’d been wearing for two weeks, and

the steward spoke French over the

microphone and Arabic right after

and we drank coffee con leches be-

cause we were coming from Spain,

and no one got sick because we’re good on boats, our feet know where they

are. And the men, and the men played a game with coins, and wanted to

buy my cigarettes, no one wanted my scarf, and three Canadian women

turned their backs, and before the back-turning one was my size and we

recognized that the other was tall, and a red Australian couple drank from

a flask and talked about driving down to Fez and oh it was something,

they’d retired to do this, as long as no one put drugs in their car for the

ferry ride back, that’s what they say, and people were running!

The boat lazed into the harbor, bumping against the water, and

then everything was happening at once, and disembarkation took a long

time time time as suitcases were checked, and families with a thousand

paper bags and tired looking food pushed past, they obviously knew the

drill, and the Canadian women turned left, and the Australian couple ig-

nored everyone, even the little boys trying to carry their bags, and what’s a

few dirhams, it’s a living, at seven, eight, nine and noon, but they were

firm, no one would glom on to them, and the guy from SF was cheerful,

but he kept his pack to himself, and we chuffed to keep up with the crowd,

and everyone moved at once, and the line swelled into these two green-

brown glass tubes, and then we were spit out into the port authority. And

men in white in white men in white were everywhere running and they

said come with us we’re from government come with us, only for a couple

dirhams, and you are the American couple, and Hamad will take you to

the El Minzah, and come with us come with us. And we took a petit

taxi and the taxi driver’s wife studied her long frosted fingernails

and looked pissed-off—why should she be in a taxi when every-

one was out, it was Thursday night, and it was past 30 for both

of us and we both knew it and neither of us wanted to be in a

taxi and going the long way to

a hotel and the numbers kept

clocking.

And wouldn’t we rather be

dancing and flinging the long

bones of our arms into the air

and wearing clothes as airy as

sheets and feeling a freedom

somewhere, certainly the air is

North AfricaHEATHER MADDEN BENTOSKE

CREATIVENON

FICTION


order by phone 216.795.7000 x4order online clevelandplayhouse.com

FeBRuaRy 26 - maRch 21

a soldieR’s Talewith Cleveland OrChestra and GrOundwOrks April 22-25

one-man loRd oF The RingsstarrinG Charles rOss April 14-18

convicTionPresented BY the Cleveland PlaY hOuse April 15-17

doRoThy silveR playwRiTing winneRPresented BY Mandel Jewish COMMunitY Center April 25

staGed readinG OF FRom canceR To BRoadway Presented BY karaMu hOuse April 24

Full conTacT schools new play FesTivalPresented BY the Cleveland PlaY hOuse April 15-18

new play Readings Presented BY the Cleveland PlaY hOuse DAtes tBA

A CELEBRATION OF NEW WORKSIN MUSIC, DANCE AND THEATREAT THE CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE

I love the way the language in [North Africa] swirls and eddies with

visual details and snatches of dialog and the narrator's thoughts. Such

a true impression of the process of arriving in a place unknown to you,

with companions unknown a few hours before and gone from your life

a few hours hence, and then the final place of momentary resting—so

often not what you'd come to expect. ~ KRISTIN OHLSON

Present this ad and save $5

on any purchase of $25 or more!Offer valid only on merchandise and until 6/30/10

1023 Kenilworth, in Tremont216.961.0084

www.visiblevoicebooks.com

0310

M

U

S

E

22

M

0310

M

U

S

E

23

M

ood for that here, and the wife just continued to look bothered and we were going oh and suddenly the Grand Socco and sheer

numbers of people. And we knew no one, and we were very aware

of the ground when we stood on it because it had swirling pat-

terns carved into it and it would be the envy of any patio-monger

back home, and everything smelled blue and the smoke of meat

rose into the air and there were lots and lots of people walking

slowly around and men and men smoking outside cafes and the

French Consulate was dark, and the Casbah started unwinding

its ropes and snakes and many many goods at the top of the street

which had one French name and another in Arabic, so we didn’t

know where we were, and it was pleasant, and our hotel ended

there, and there were only men at the desk, and I wondered would

the guy from SF keep going, and how were the three Canadian

women faring, and did the Australian couple get away, and would

they come back without drugs because it seemed to be a concern,

and my husband inquired about rates and the freshness of the

fish, so the waiter brought it out intact on a plate, and its belly

looked full of itself, and finally in the morning I saw a woman

and she made up our beds shyly bending away from me because

Americanism might be catching, and who wants it.

HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, 2008 - 8.5 11

0310

M

U

S

E

22

M

0310

M

U

S

E

23

M

ood for that here, and the wife just continued to look bothered and we were going oh and suddenly the Grand Socco and sheer

numbers of people. And we knew no one, and we were very aware

of the ground when we stood on it because it had swirling pat-

terns carved into it and it would be the envy of any patio-monger

back home, and everything smelled blue and the smoke of meat

rose into the air and there were lots and lots of people walking

slowly around and men and men smoking outside cafes and the

French Consulate was dark, and the Casbah started unwinding

its ropes and snakes and many many goods at the top of the street

which had one French name and another in Arabic, so we didn’t

know where we were, and it was pleasant, and our hotel ended

there, and there were only men at the desk, and I wondered would

the guy from SF keep going, and how were the three Canadian

women faring, and did the Australian couple get away, and would

they come back without drugs because it seemed to be a concern,

and my husband inquired about rates and the freshness of the

fish, so the waiter brought it out intact on a plate, and its belly

looked full of itself, and finally in the morning I saw a woman

and she made up our beds shyly bending away from me because

Americanism might be catching, and who wants it.

HOLLY, CAMPFIRE, 2008 - 8.5 11

0310

M

U

S

E

24

M

0310

M

U

S

E

25

M

rom across the street Gert sees

sky. He sees gulls under-lit in

pink. Caterwauling geese

shred grey clouds that fray

into gold. Under the autumn

sky is the concert hall, stone

friezes and red brick. And in

front of the white columns,

chaos.

Everything is moving at

once: fists, umbrellas, stones,

clubs. Such a tangle of green

aprons, white collars, grey

vests, street conductors caps,

veterans' visors, even kerchiefs

and cloche hats. Even women.

Someone is shrieking, someone is shouting, a cacophony of

hatred, a howl such as Gert has only heard from a dog before,

from that loathsome dachshund Franz, when there were dogs

around and food enough to keep them. A howl as from every

dog that ever lived in Duisburg.

A new sound arrests the rest. Gunfire. A man in homburg

and white breast pocket handkerchief puts his hand to his eye,

teeters to the right, and Gert and everyone else thrusts forward.

The monstrous body of a hundred heads and two hundred

knees surges and subsides. Gert elbows a place for himself, be-

tween Loden green and scratchy tweed.

The howl has splintered

and multiplied. Gert is buf-

feted by noise, his ears bruised

with it. It is terrifying, this

noise, as if his head must burst

of it, but there is something

else, too. Some terrible exalta-

tion, to be so enraged—and

Gert is often enraged—to be deranged with rage, and no one,

nothing between him and it. Only this fury all around to herd

him forward.

Up stone steps the many-headed monster stampedes. Per-

haps Gert’s foot steps on flesh. Someone is down there, but the

monster cannot stop. Gert is pressed against a frock coat, let us

say it is black and shiny from too much brushing, and there,

where his nose touches, it is split at the seam. The back that

wears the coat is broad and Gert has to weave and crane, no easy

matter when you are jostled on every side, to catch a glimpse of

the other backs in front of him.

Abruptly the monster shifts and, there by the shattered

door, he sees torn cuffs, a raised arm, an elbow in grey worsted

flailing, and so many hands, so many clubs and stones and

umbrellas, so much blood, spraying the torn cuffs, the black

umbrellas, the hands and the heads they are pummeling and the

heads other hands are trying to cover. Blood drenches helmets

which fly through the air, roll on the floor. The helmets are

encrusted with bronze, they are embossed with eagles, they rise

at the crown to pointed pikes that once, perhaps, in Siegfried's

world of tournaments and dragon quests, might have had more

than honorary effectiveness.

These pickelhaukers are useless, however to the men beside

whom they come to rest, men in epaulettes, who lie bloody and

still, or twitch a little, or cover their heads and scream and

scream. And now Gert, too, is stomping and pummeling,

thrashing and kicking the men in epaulettes, feeling something

more gruesome than solid

flesh, something soft, and

pulpy and liquid.

“You mean you hit them?”

I ask my father.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Oh yes.”

“You mean you helped kill

them?”

The Counterfeit Killer:A Memoir of My Father

AMEI WALLACH

“At that time I was a wild boy.”

It is 1980. My father and I are standing in the very spot in

downtown Duisburg where he is saying that he became a part of

that mob and helped it commit murder. Only he doesn't call it

murder. Patriotic duty would be more like it. Hans Gert Max

Klaus Wallach has brought his daughter at last on a journey to

his boyhood streets in the port city where Ruhr River coal meets

Rhine River industry. His Germany. We are standing on fake

cobblestones where once there were real ones. The columned

gymnasium of his memory has been replaced with utilitarian

concrete.

Never mind, the sight has been enough to animate him into

a recreation of what is happening in his mind’s eye.

I take my time doing the arithmetic; something concrete

and comprehendible.

“That was 1923. You were 14.”

“It was one of the most terrible experiences in my life. “ he says.

“Did you see them die?”

“I did right.” His hand is raised, making his point, as it

always does.

“The people were so outraged, women and everything. A

popular uprising is the worst you can say. But,” It is like he was

explaining to a halfwit. “It is as Schiller says, ‘Germany cannot

be safe so long as her neighbor does not leave her in peace.’”

I am accustomed to my father's stories and how he tells

them, insistently, with eyes alert for reactions, with repetitions

for reassurance, with chortles to ensure an appreciation, he is

not in the least certain of. But I have never looked at him like

this, not just with disbelief and horror, but with the furtive thrill

of discovery, too. I cannot imagine the father I know bragging

about such a thing.

Funny, I am so aware of his eyes, his eyes gleaming, his eyes

checking, his eyes looking for what? Something I don’t want to

give. But I don't know what color they are. And the color mat-

ters. I think they are brown, like mine. But my mother says they

are blue. “Blonde and blue-eyed,” she says. German, she means.

CREATIVENON

FICTION


A father's secret rises to the surface like a boil and bursts; a daughter

realizes that it changes everything she thought she knew about him.

The writer expertly draws the reader in to share her horror and her pain,

and to wonder anew at the mysteries of family history. ~ KRISTIN OHLSON

SHASHA, WINTER, 2003 - 7X9

0310

M

U

S

E

24

M

0310

M

U

S

E

25

M

rom across the street Gert sees

sky. He sees gulls under-lit in

pink. Caterwauling geese

shred grey clouds that fray

into gold. Under the autumn

sky is the concert hall, stone

friezes and red brick. And in

front of the white columns,

chaos.

Everything is moving at

once: fists, umbrellas, stones,

clubs. Such a tangle of green

aprons, white collars, grey

vests, street conductors caps,

veterans' visors, even kerchiefs

and cloche hats. Even women.

Someone is shrieking, someone is shouting, a cacophony of

hatred, a howl such as Gert has only heard from a dog before,

from that loathsome dachshund Franz, when there were dogs

around and food enough to keep them. A howl as from every

dog that ever lived in Duisburg.

A new sound arrests the rest. Gunfire. A man in homburg

and white breast pocket handkerchief puts his hand to his eye,

teeters to the right, and Gert and everyone else thrusts forward.

The monstrous body of a hundred heads and two hundred

knees surges and subsides. Gert elbows a place for himself, be-

tween Loden green and scratchy tweed.

The howl has splintered

and multiplied. Gert is buf-

feted by noise, his ears bruised

with it. It is terrifying, this

noise, as if his head must burst

of it, but there is something

else, too. Some terrible exalta-

tion, to be so enraged—and

Gert is often enraged—to be deranged with rage, and no one,

nothing between him and it. Only this fury all around to herd

him forward.

Up stone steps the many-headed monster stampedes. Per-

haps Gert’s foot steps on flesh. Someone is down there, but the

monster cannot stop. Gert is pressed against a frock coat, let us

say it is black and shiny from too much brushing, and there,

where his nose touches, it is split at the seam. The back that

wears the coat is broad and Gert has to weave and crane, no easy

matter when you are jostled on every side, to catch a glimpse of

the other backs in front of him.

Abruptly the monster shifts and, there by the shattered

door, he sees torn cuffs, a raised arm, an elbow in grey worsted

flailing, and so many hands, so many clubs and stones and

umbrellas, so much blood, spraying the torn cuffs, the black

umbrellas, the hands and the heads they are pummeling and the

heads other hands are trying to cover. Blood drenches helmets

which fly through the air, roll on the floor. The helmets are

encrusted with bronze, they are embossed with eagles, they rise

at the crown to pointed pikes that once, perhaps, in Siegfried's

world of tournaments and dragon quests, might have had more

than honorary effectiveness.

These pickelhaukers are useless, however to the men beside

whom they come to rest, men in epaulettes, who lie bloody and

still, or twitch a little, or cover their heads and scream and

scream. And now Gert, too, is stomping and pummeling,

thrashing and kicking the men in epaulettes, feeling something

more gruesome than solid

flesh, something soft, and

pulpy and liquid.

“You mean you hit them?”

I ask my father.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Oh yes.”

“You mean you helped kill

them?”

The Counterfeit Killer:A Memoir of My Father

AMEI WALLACH

“At that time I was a wild boy.”

It is 1980. My father and I are standing in the very spot in

downtown Duisburg where he is saying that he became a part of

that mob and helped it commit murder. Only he doesn't call it

murder. Patriotic duty would be more like it. Hans Gert Max

Klaus Wallach has brought his daughter at last on a journey to

his boyhood streets in the port city where Ruhr River coal meets

Rhine River industry. His Germany. We are standing on fake

cobblestones where once there were real ones. The columned

gymnasium of his memory has been replaced with utilitarian

concrete.

Never mind, the sight has been enough to animate him into

a recreation of what is happening in his mind’s eye.

I take my time doing the arithmetic; something concrete

and comprehendible.

“That was 1923. You were 14.”

“It was one of the most terrible experiences in my life. “ he says.

“Did you see them die?”

“I did right.” His hand is raised, making his point, as it

always does.

“The people were so outraged, women and everything. A

popular uprising is the worst you can say. But,” It is like he was

explaining to a halfwit. “It is as Schiller says, ‘Germany cannot

be safe so long as her neighbor does not leave her in peace.’”

I am accustomed to my father's stories and how he tells

them, insistently, with eyes alert for reactions, with repetitions

for reassurance, with chortles to ensure an appreciation, he is

not in the least certain of. But I have never looked at him like

this, not just with disbelief and horror, but with the furtive thrill

of discovery, too. I cannot imagine the father I know bragging

about such a thing.

Funny, I am so aware of his eyes, his eyes gleaming, his eyes

checking, his eyes looking for what? Something I don’t want to

give. But I don't know what color they are. And the color mat-

ters. I think they are brown, like mine. But my mother says they

are blue. “Blonde and blue-eyed,” she says. German, she means.

CREATIVENON

FICTION


A father's secret rises to the surface like a boil and bursts; a daughter

realizes that it changes everything she thought she knew about him.

The writer expertly draws the reader in to share her horror and her pain,

and to wonder anew at the mysteries of family history. ~ KRISTIN OHLSON

SHASHA, WINTER, 2003 - 7X9

0310

M

U

S

E

26

M

0310

M

U

S

E

27

M

Book Archaeology ROB JACKSON

There are many “best of the decade” lists out now, so we thought we should add one of our own.

Usually the story-telling takes place at dinner, Sunday dinner,

perhaps, after the service in the white clapboard church on the

Green in our New England village.

They were never stories about why they had to leave, only

about what they left behind, on their wedding day, June 23, 1938.

They were married under a picture of Hitler. It was a damp day

that blurred the yellow and red ranunculus outside the City of

Hamburg Bureau of Records. The bride, Gerda Wilhelmina Le-

wenz, was pregnant. The groom had been told he was dying of

tuberculosis. After the champagne and prosits, the venison

steak and wild strawberries, he was so weak that my mother had

to carry his suitcase. They were traveling south, out of Germany

to a sanatorium in the Alps, and they did not know if they would

ever come back.

he train whistled as

it approached the

Swiss border, and

they leaned out the

window to glimpse

the last of the swas-

tikas, of women

hoeing kitchen gar-

dens, of the Rhine.

They showed their

German passports

for the last time. In a

few months the J

stamp for Jew would

be mandatory.

My father did not

want to be Jewish,

not in Germany, and

not in America,

where, “on the 19th

day of June in the

year of our Lord 1944, in the First Methodist Church Richmond

Hill, N.Y.,” Gert Max Klaus Wallach and I were “Baptized in the

Name of The Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The

words on the certificate are spelled out in church gothic letter-

ing, and below, in a more homely font: “He that believeth and is

baptized shall be saved. Mark 16:16.” It would not have saved

him in the Germany he left. And I think now it did not save him

in America, at least from himself.

The babel of my parent’s German past was the background

din of our growing up, my two brothers and I, like static on the

radio. Except that you could never turn it off, or get away from

it. And we tried. Maybe he didn’t tell these stories because we

didn’t want to listen. Maybe, I am thinking on this Duisburg

street, he had something to hide.

Who is this man, gesturing, pumping the air? This story,

for instance, is one that I have never heard before. My mother

has not heard it. Or my two brothers. This is the first time, on

September 3, 1980, the day after his 71rst birthday, that he tells

me how 57 years before, he helped club the men to death who

wanted to separate Duisburg, his hometown, from Germany,

his fatherland.

All up and down the Rhineland in that Fall of 1923, in Duis-

burg, in Dusseldorf, townspeople were erupting in rage at the

Separatists who had taken over their town halls, whose alle-

giance was not to Germany, on the right side of the Rhine, but to

France. And France, across the Rhine, was Germany's enemy of

the World War so recently ended.

Duisburg, where my father has not lived for more than half

a century now, is efficient and industrious. It is a port city at the

confluence of Rhine industry and Ruhr coal. Dumpy, business-

like boats ply dirty water between steeply sloping stone dikes.

the dour autumn light does nothing to relieve the ugliness that

has afflicted my father's hometown like a disease. So far, he’s

found nearly nothing the way he left it except the smokestacks,

and the business men’s lunches and the air of dogged utility.

Houses, streets, neighborhoods were all bombed in the war—

not the First World War, which he is remembering, but the

second, which he watched from an ocean away, in the green hills

of New England.

I understand why just being here has been enough to break

his long silence about the death of the Separatists. I don’t get at

all why he tells it so brazenly now. With pride, not as if there is

something to hide the way he has always failed to mention the

fact that he is Jewish. He is ashamed, I know, of being Jewish.

But he is not ashamed of murder.

We are in search of his boyhood, buried somewhere here,

under the drab utility of urban renewal. Downtown is one notch

up from a strip mall. For lunch, we settle for MacDonald’s.

We are at cross-purposes on this journey, though it is not

until long after my father has died that I understand this. We

may both want to blot out the signs of this new Germany, that

keeps interrupting our duel disguised as a pas de deux. But we

are here because I want to learn what it was like to be a Jew in

Hitler’s Germany. He is here, because he wants me to know what

it was like to be German.

To write about this will be to betray him. That much I know.

There are several reasons for making favorite lists of the year, decade, or for that matter – like so many a decade ago – a century, but a few come to mind. It serves as a recommendation to readers who may be interested in what they have missed in the first decade of the century. Second, lists can spark a good debate at a party, coffee shop, chat room, and so on. Finally, one is making a prediction about the future. What books from this decade will still be read in ten, twenty, fifty, or even 100 years? It was difficult to pick only 5 but the editors have given it a go.

JUDITH MANSOUREDITOR

The Reluctant Fundamen-talist, Mohsin Hamid

The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri

Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Ex-periments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

DAVE MEGENHARDT MANAGING EDITOR

2666, Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald & Anthea Bell

The Amazing Adventures Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

ROB JACKSON FICTION EDITOR


Season of Ash, Jorge Volpi

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Everyman, Philip Roth

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun

RAY MCNIECE POETRY EDITOR


No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens

Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race & Inheri-tance, Barack Obama

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, Chris Rose

0310

M

U

S

E

26

M

0310

M

U

S

E

27

M

Book Archaeology ROB JACKSON

There are many “best of the decade” lists out now, so we thought we should add one of our own.

Usually the story-telling takes place at dinner, Sunday dinner,

perhaps, after the service in the white clapboard church on the

Green in our New England village.

They were never stories about why they had to leave, only

about what they left behind, on their wedding day, June 23, 1938.

They were married under a picture of Hitler. It was a damp day

that blurred the yellow and red ranunculus outside the City of

Hamburg Bureau of Records. The bride, Gerda Wilhelmina Le-

wenz, was pregnant. The groom had been told he was dying of

tuberculosis. After the champagne and prosits, the venison

steak and wild strawberries, he was so weak that my mother had

to carry his suitcase. They were traveling south, out of Germany

to a sanatorium in the Alps, and they did not know if they would

ever come back.

he train whistled as

it approached the

Swiss border, and

they leaned out the

window to glimpse

the last of the swas-

tikas, of women

hoeing kitchen gar-

dens, of the Rhine.

They showed their

German passports

for the last time. In a

few months the J

stamp for Jew would

be mandatory.

My father did not

want to be Jewish,

not in Germany, and

not in America,

where, “on the 19th

day of June in the

year of our Lord 1944, in the First Methodist Church Richmond

Hill, N.Y.,” Gert Max Klaus Wallach and I were “Baptized in the

Name of The Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The

words on the certificate are spelled out in church gothic letter-

ing, and below, in a more homely font: “He that believeth and is

baptized shall be saved. Mark 16:16.” It would not have saved

him in the Germany he left. And I think now it did not save him

in America, at least from himself.

The babel of my parent’s German past was the background

din of our growing up, my two brothers and I, like static on the

radio. Except that you could never turn it off, or get away from

it. And we tried. Maybe he didn’t tell these stories because we

didn’t want to listen. Maybe, I am thinking on this Duisburg

street, he had something to hide.

Who is this man, gesturing, pumping the air? This story,

for instance, is one that I have never heard before. My mother

has not heard it. Or my two brothers. This is the first time, on

September 3, 1980, the day after his 71rst birthday, that he tells

me how 57 years before, he helped club the men to death who

wanted to separate Duisburg, his hometown, from Germany,

his fatherland.

All up and down the Rhineland in that Fall of 1923, in Duis-

burg, in Dusseldorf, townspeople were erupting in rage at the

Separatists who had taken over their town halls, whose alle-

giance was not to Germany, on the right side of the Rhine, but to

France. And France, across the Rhine, was Germany's enemy of

the World War so recently ended.

Duisburg, where my father has not lived for more than half

a century now, is efficient and industrious. It is a port city at the

confluence of Rhine industry and Ruhr coal. Dumpy, business-

like boats ply dirty water between steeply sloping stone dikes.

the dour autumn light does nothing to relieve the ugliness that

has afflicted my father's hometown like a disease. So far, he’s

found nearly nothing the way he left it except the smokestacks,

and the business men’s lunches and the air of dogged utility.

Houses, streets, neighborhoods were all bombed in the war—

not the First World War, which he is remembering, but the

second, which he watched from an ocean away, in the green hills

of New England.

I understand why just being here has been enough to break

his long silence about the death of the Separatists. I don’t get at

all why he tells it so brazenly now. With pride, not as if there is

something to hide the way he has always failed to mention the

fact that he is Jewish. He is ashamed, I know, of being Jewish.

But he is not ashamed of murder.

We are in search of his boyhood, buried somewhere here,

under the drab utility of urban renewal. Downtown is one notch

up from a strip mall. For lunch, we settle for MacDonald’s.

We are at cross-purposes on this journey, though it is not

until long after my father has died that I understand this. We

may both want to blot out the signs of this new Germany, that

keeps interrupting our duel disguised as a pas de deux. But we

are here because I want to learn what it was like to be a Jew in

Hitler’s Germany. He is here, because he wants me to know what

it was like to be German.

To write about this will be to betray him. That much I know.

There are several reasons for making favorite lists of the year, decade, or for that matter – like so many a decade ago – a century, but a few come to mind. It serves as a recommendation to readers who may be interested in what they have missed in the first decade of the century. Second, lists can spark a good debate at a party, coffee shop, chat room, and so on. Finally, one is making a prediction about the future. What books from this decade will still be read in ten, twenty, fifty, or even 100 years? It was difficult to pick only 5 but the editors have given it a go.

JUDITH MANSOUREDITOR

The Reluctant Fundamen-talist, Mohsin Hamid

The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri

Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Ex-periments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

DAVE MEGENHARDT MANAGING EDITOR


The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald & Anthea Bell

The Amazing Adventures Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon


ROB JACKSON FICTION EDITOR


Season of Ash, Jorge Volpi

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Everyman, Philip Roth

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun

RAY MCNIECE POETRY EDITOR


No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens

Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race & Inheri-tance, Barack Obama

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, Chris Rose

Documents

MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT