TOO EARLY FOR SCHOOL

The author and a painting of him and his mother

Stephen Poleskie

a short story

UNTIL HE WAS three years old, John’s mother had dressed him like the daughter she always wanted: long hair in curls, and white outfits with short pants, embroidered collars, and knee socks. But then, when his sister was born and shortly after his father was called up for military duty, John became his mother’s “little man,” wearing tiny versions of grown men’s suits that his mother made for him, and enormous, striped neckties that belonged to his father.

When it came time to enroll in first grade John went off to school by himself. His mother had to stay at home with his baby sister. As there were no school buses in his small town, John waited on the corner until a group of students passed by and followed them the mile or so to the school. John tagged along, carrying his lunch in a brown paper bag, lagging slightly behind the group as they seemed unwilling to let him join them. He had spent most of his first five years in their small, second floor apartment with his mother and sister, playing by himself, rarely going outside. The pages of John’s youth had not been filled with friends.

Waiting anxiously in line to register, John noticed that he was the only child there without a parent; some were even accompanied by both of their parents. When his turn came John stepped up and presented his documents to the lady seated behind the cluttered table. The woman looked down at his papers, frowned, and shook her head.

“You are only five years old, that’s too young,” she announced. “You can’t start first grade until you’re six.”

John was confused—he had not expected to be challenged. He had begged his mother to send him to school a year early, and she had consented. “Yes Ma’am, I know I am only five now, but I will be six before the school year is over,” John said, preparing his young self for the possibility of rejection. Pleading his case, he went on, “and I can already read and write, my mother taught me, and I really want to go to school so I can learn a lot of new things.”

“But you won’t be six until June third, and school ends on June ninth, you have got to be six for at least half of the year. Are you sure you’re supposed to be here? Where is your mother?” The woman behind the desk looked stern and intimidating. Even seated she was almost twice as tall as John was standing.

“She’s at home with my baby sister and can’t come. . . .”

“Then why didn’t you bring your father?”

 “He can’t come because . . . because. . . .”

John was positive that if he told them his father was away in the army serving his country they would let him in school, but his timid attempt to address this woman, who so towered over him, had caused his lips to quickly succumb to confusion. As a consequence, John was sent home from school on his very first day.

Once outside of the massive building John began to cry. Too embarrassed to go home and tell his mother what had happened, he decided to go to his grandmother’s house and spend the rest of the day with her.

John did not reveal to his granny that he had been to school and put out, but said his mother had made him a lunch and sent him over to visit, which she often did. His grandmother lived alone. A coal mine explosion had taken her husband from her six years ago. He had immigrated to America from Poland where he had worked in a shipyard and gone on strike, and not been rehired when the yard opened again.

The little boy passed most of the day talking and playing checkers with his grandmother in the shade of her grape arbor. The vines still bore fruit. The purple clusters hung down with a sweet ripeness, attracting the busyness of bees that swarmed in the warm September sun. Unable to concentrate on the game, John retreated into his thoughts. He was happy here. Why he had wanted so badly to start school after all?

When John saw the other children coming down the hill from school, he said goodbye to his grandmother and headed home.

“How was your first day at school my little man?” his mother asked, kissing John on the forehead as soon as he came in the door. “Didn’t they give you any books?” she asked noticing his empty hands.

“No.”

 “Did you meet any new friends?”

“No.”

                     
“Did you like school?”

                   
“No. It was boring. I already know all I have to know . . . I don’t think I want to go back again tomorrow . . . or ever.”

                   
After that brief display of lies and bravado, John broke down and cried, telling his mother all that had happened. How they told him he was too young to start school, and that he should first go to kindergarten. And how they thought he wasn’t supposed to be there because he didn’t have a mother or father with him, and all the other children had someone. And how he wished his father wasn’t away in the army.

                   
His mother cried because John was crying. She told him that he couldn’t go to kindergarten because this cost money, which she did not have, but she would go back with him tomorrow to the public school, which was free, and try to get him in.

                   
Standing in front of the desk, with the baby she had carried the mile up the hill on her arm, John’s mother begged to have her son enrolled even though he was too young. The principal, a large and kindly woman, was impressed that John could already read and write. His mother had also brought some of his drawings to show, which the principal said were very accomplished. After a short discussion with the first grade teacher, John was allowed in school. A little bird had fallen from its nest, and been picked up and put back.

                     
John’s mother walked down the hill carrying his baby sister, proud and happy for her son. But the damage already had been done. All through the boredom of that first year, which John spent mostly relearning things that he already knew, he would be taunted by his classmates as the little boy who had been sent home on his first day.

*   *   *

Biography

Stephen Poleskie is a writer and artist. His writing, fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in many journals in the USA and D'Ars, and Spazio Umano, in Italy, Himmelschrieber in Germany, In Other Voices: Merida in Mexico, The Criterion in India, and Imago in Australia. He also has short stories in two anthologies, Being Human, and The Book of Love from W. W. Norton, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  He has published six novels.  His artwork is in the collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery in London. He has taught, or been a visiting professor at twenty-seven colleges and art schools throughout the world, including: MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Art in New York and the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor emeritus at Cornell University. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his wife, the novelist, Jeanne Mackin. Web site: www.StephenPoleskie.com/

This story, Too Early for School, appeared in the June 2013 issue of The Criterion, an English language magazine published in India.

RIP PSH

a poem for Philip Seymour Hoffman

by Mike Foldes

All it gave, it took away.
Look what we have left,
ash of filmdom,
echo of smack,
a name, a face,
another day to think,
look back, and ask
“Could he have done
without it?” Or, “What
could he have done
without it?” All it gave
it took away and look,
look what we have left:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
off the hook.He’s not
the first, won’t be
the last, but fuck it all,
what’s the matter
that he couldn’t play
that out on camera,
instead of in a room --
alone, perhaps -- listening
to an inner voice declare,
“Cut! That’s a wrap.”

*  *  * 

Mike Foldes is the founder and managing editor of Ragazine, an online literary magazine.

editor@ ragazine.cc 
http://ragazine.cc
ragazinecc/Twitter
ragazineccblogging@blogspot.com
Join Mike on MySpace & Facebook
Mike is also the author of Sleeping Dogs, A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping
Download at www.Smashwords.Com and www.Amazon.Com
Purchase the paperback at www.splitoakpress.com

* * *

Like ·  ·

An Onager Encore

WHAT FICTION ASKS US TO REMEMBER

By Jeanne Mackin

Think of history as narrative. Think of historical fiction as expanded narrative, history with all the trimmings, with cause and effect, speculation, personalization. Think of expanded narrative as the story teller reaching out to you, saying, ‘pay attention. This is important.” Or as novelist Jeanette Winterson repeats over and over in The Passion, ‘Trust me. I’m telling you a story,’ and then as she relates a Napoleonic narrative of a Venetian woman who walks on water, you do believe her even as you know she is lying through her teeth, because that is what novelists do. But this important: you don’t believe that Venetian women necessarily walk on water (though it would be a convenient skill, considering global warming and the state of Venetian canals) but you do believe Winterson’s message that love changes us, that war changes us and that war is not conducive to happy endings, because that is what her story is really about.

We best believe what we remember, and narrative is about memory: giving memories in the form of stories, receiving memories and adding them to our personal stores. But historical fiction, as memory creation, asks us to do the impossible, to remember experiences we can’t possibly have had, to ‘remember’ the smell of the rosebush growing outside Hester Prynne‘s jail in Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter, to remember crouching in darkness outside the mead hall, the perpetual outsider, as John Gardner’s Grendel does; to remember the sensation of the earthquake that begins the action of Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica; to remember the wild vines strangling the decaying plantation in Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. All of those things were before our times; yet having read them, we remember them.

There is a relationship between memory and freedom, asserts Dr. Chris Nunn, author of De La Mettrie’s Ghost: the Story of Decisions. Nunn examines free will and the decision making process and ultimately concludes that “stories…are the mediators of free choice.” He argues that people whose ‘memories are more malleable should, other things being equal, be less prone to conditions like milleniarianism “{belief that the world will end on a given date simply because of the date} and other forms of private or mass delusion. People with flexible memories are less gullible…“thanks to its intimate relationship with the memory process, consciousness can to some extent determine its own future.”

Call me an idealist, but perhaps fiction can prevent us from making even bigger and more dangerous idiots of ourselves than the species already has. Perhaps historical fiction keeps our memories malleable by constantly recreating and adding to those memories; perhaps there is a connection between fiction, memory and freedom. Gardner’s Grendel can be read as an early eco-novel, among other things: “They {man} hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange.”

In Jean Rhys’ post colonial devastation in Wide Sargasso Sea, the destructive misery of failed empire comes home to roost in a suicidal conflagration: “I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draft for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage.”

Richard Hughes’ incredibly convincing narrative of the connections between entitlement and violence in A High Wind in Jamaica reveals how a lack of self-responsibility so easily leads to murder and how that violence estranges us: “Mr. Thornton made no attempt to answer her questions: he even shrank back, physically from touching his child Emily..Was it Conceivable she as such an idiot as really not to know what it was all about? Could she possibly not know what she had done? He stole a look at her innocent little face, even the tear-stains now gone. What was he to think?”

Murdered pirates, decaying plantations, mead halls, Napoleon’s roasted chickens…artificial memories bestowed by historical fiction, but who’s to say that an artificial memory is less meaningful than mundane ones? De La Mettrie argues that memories become encoded in neurons and have physical properties, so why can’t the memories acquired in a reading of fiction matter as much as the memory of today’s first cup of coffee and who poured it for you? Read, and remember. Is it possible to also understand something from what is given us by the memories in fiction? “The pastis the present, isn’t it? It’s the future,too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us,” Eugene O’Neill tells us in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Perhaps what fiction most asks us to remember is that memory keeps us human, and if we remember enough and remember well, we can add an e to human.

                              ***********************

Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels including The Sweet By and By and The Frenchwoman.  She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Goddard College.  Her latest novel The Beautiful American is forthcoming in June of 2014. You can read about it on her web site: JeanneMackin.com

                              *****************************

The Underage Driver

a short story by Sasha Thurmond

MY MOTHER BEGAN letting me slowly cruise around our driveway when I was only ten years old. Her vehicle was a Woody Station Wagon large enough to accommodate myself, my three siblings, and numerous friends. Our driveway had two entrances, and was a veritable race course, complete with a steep uphill climb that fed into a flat parking area at one side of our house where there were three garages. Off of this, a shorter hill led to the back of our New England clapboard-gray, wood shakes house, with white shutters, trim, and soaring, white square columns in the front of the house. A gigantic circular drive, landscaped with pink and white rhododendron bushes flourished in the driveway interior. The driveway's second egress led out to the little traveled road we lived on. I dreamed of being old enough to maneuver around the U.S.A. in an automobile.

             My Mother drawled in her southern accent that she had "complete faith" in my siblings and myself, and frequently let us drive around our rambling driveway.

             One drawback for me was that I could barely reach the accelerator or brake. For a while, all was going fine. I respected my Mother's request to only drive when she was with me . . . unlike my older sister and brother who were allowed to navigate solo. Then one ill-fated day, when my Mother said I could stop the car in front of one of the three closed garage doors, my right leg floored the accelerator instead of the brake. "Wrong pedal" flashed through my mind as I careened through one post, smashing into the concrete wall beyond. So much for the new electric garage door my father had recently installed. My mother was aghast, and I was comatose and speechless ! have little idea what my mother said after that. Of course I was horrified that my father was going to kill me! He breathed fire like a dragon when he was angry. He was an acclaimed surgeon who was always busy saving people's lives. Thus, he was always under lots of pressures. He didn't need to come home and get overloaded with family problems or chaos

           In a panic, I decided to camp out beneath an awe inspiring, mammoth size willow tree on our property. It was a quarter mile in front of our humble abode,   Let my father chill out a while till he was done with dinner, or maybe even until after he left for work the following morning, or perhaps I should disappear altogether. I was spinning out of control. I mulled over the idea that just maybe I could be independent and a free spirit like Huckleberry Finn. However, right now I was just trying to  postpone my guaranteed punishment. I knew my driving days would be immediately terminated. They had just begun, and it felt awesome to be the one at the wheel while driving an automobile.

           Things were moving along nicely. Then, my champion field trial dog, Silver Tip, sniffed out my scent and ran through the curtain of willow tree branches that elegantly, kissed the ground and shielded me. I was overjoyed to have her company.This desperate plan was already getting to be a lot of fun. I had brought my horse books, comic books, detective stories, a strong flash light, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Silver Tip could eat some of them with me. Then, much later, I heard my father return from work. Next, a sonic boom exploded. I knew this sound . . . it was my Dad going ballistic, only it was much louder than usual.  The barrage swiftly moved into our house. Eventually everyone was screaming for me to high tail it home and face the music. Silver Tip and I were muffling our laughter, not that they could hear us since we were so far away. For some strange reason, this all made me feel more powerful, and very giddy. Finally my family went back inside and began eating without me. 

             Suddenly, Silver Tip froze in a point. Something was sneaking through the willow tree curtain, and heading toward my bag of vittles. Before a blink of an eye, the black and white ball spun around and began spraying us with something burning and stinky. It was a skunk!  I screamed at "Silver Tip" to forget about the skunk, and raced hastily back to the safety of our house . . . although I had quick misgivings that we may not be so safe there when my dad saw us The Venetian doors in the dining room were open, but we ran through the screen doors to get inside for refuge. Everything  burst into turmoil because of our frantic entry and pungent odor. My father ordered me and Silver Tip to take a bath in tomato juice immediately         

              While we were scrubbing off our skin, and hair, my mom told my father how the garage door, post, and front of her car got so mangled . . . and who was behind the wheel. He blew another gasket, and questioned how my mother could be so idiotic to let me drive her car. When Silver Tip and I were all dried off, we silently crept into my bed and pretended we were asleep. After dinner, my father peeked in on us, but quietly shut the door, and walked downstairs to fume at my mother some more. Eventually, I did fall asleep because I was exhausted from the drama. 

               The next morning, after my father had left for work, Silver Tip and I cautiously crept down stairs to feel out the situation. My mother promised to not let me drive anymore, but when I turned thirteen she again resumed allowing me to drive. My father spoke to me about the incident when he arrived home that evening, but he chose to forgo punishing me  My passionate plans to drive and explore the continent flourished I figured that Henry Ford would be proud of me.  

*  *  *

Where it all happened.

                                                                  

SASHA THURMOND is an artist and writer who lives on a farm in South Carolina with her horse and numerous other animals. She has a MFA degree in fine art from Cornell University.

*  *  *

New York, 1981

an excerpt from
THE ICE LENS, A Heathen Romance
by Paul West
a novel coming soon from Onager Editions

ONCE  YOU KNOW what you’re doing you can start all the way up at the Arctic Circle. I did once. Then, as the season changes, you work your way downriver and, as it gets warmer and warmer, even in that time of year, you keep your nose and head clear by chewing a strong mint. One of those that burn. I always ask my employers for a long scoop with plenty of flex in it so that, when I bend over the pool to scoop up the frogs. I can get the right amount of traction, if that’s what it’s called. The moment arm is long enough, anyway, between where you apply the force and the place you hold the pole at. Then in one graceful lunge you can fling the frog high into the trees, out of the pool into the greenery. Yes, my beauty, there’s an art even to that. I see them now as they soar, catching the sunlight on their backs, and I sometimes hear the birdlike flutter they make as they fall through the branches and the little plop as they land, wondering what the hell happened. They’re not tree frogs after all, they know that.

  The trouble is, they keep on coming back. It must be the same frogs. How many frogs can you have in the area of one pool? And it took me a while to figure it out. Then I saw. They weren’t coming back for the pale blue water, ever more lucid than I was, which might rank as bubbly in the kingdom of the frogs, but for the flight. They really liked flying, sweetheart, but what bit of them registers anything at all told them it was grand to sail through the air like that, not having to swim or to try. So, all down the Hudson, there have been frogs starting little flying clubs, soaring clubs, until of course winter closes everything down. Not that they have clubhouses or lapel pins. These are frogs after all, with proud and trivial imaginations. It may take them a day to get back to the water, only to be fished out again and launched; but it’s worth the long haul after the concussion of landing, then the tussle through long grass or bracken, and the night march up the lawn until, plop, there they all are, ready to be sent into space. The chlorine water can’t be that nice, can it? You can tell the old hands from the beginners. The old hands try to get on to the mesh of the scoop before you’ve landed them whereas the others dive away, not having known the joys of flight. If the word can get around among frogs, it never seems to. Only the old stagers know what’s coming, and all the others must think they’re pure wacko, heading for the pool only to be thrown out of it. Time and again. I guess their landing gear is good, from long practice. Kind of rubbery anyway: that’s what they are. They bounce and they look quite streamlined whereas your toad makes more friction in the air. It is mainly frogs, anyway.

So you see, precious, as I work my way back south from late August on, there’s lots of frogs for company, and I sometimes feel like the president of All American Airlines as I go about my chores, getting some of them up to two hundred feet. The wait for the little dry splash of their landing can be really long, and you sometimes wonder if they’re coming down at all. I like this better than the movement northward, when I have to leave at the beginning of the season as all the pools open up their hearts and begin to twinkle. Heading north with a cold heart is a wild thing to have to do each year. Or it was. I never worked on indoor pools. And outdoors are hardly worth it, only for the frogs, I suppose, although there are certain effects of light, I mean light-effects, I might give an arm and a leg for on a temporary basis. When big lozenges of skyblue float on the bottom as if they were breeding or just jostling one another. When toward evening the water surface looks violet and you could go lick it and get a purple taste. That kind of thing. Maybe that’s what the frogs come for first of all, until they get to fly. North or south, it’s confusing.

Sometimes I’ve seen half a dozen of them waiting by the pool wall for me to net them and hurl them skyward. Six in one go? You may well ask. I have never done it, maybe because being a bit simple-minded or at least single-minded I can attend to only one frog at a time, although a group launch isn’t out of the question, honey, if I could only get those already in the scoop to sit still while I catch the rest.

Those frogs amaze me. They wait all night for an airlift the next day. The pool owners amaze me more though. They ask if they can use the skimmer after me, but most of them don’t have the knack, the timing, the muscle coordination, that sweep of the pole I have developed over the years like a fisherman casting far out over the waters. Then, of course, you have kids and they want to stand under the trees to catch the frogs when they fall. But how would they do that? A frog will pitter and patter from branch to branch, going this way and that, before it reaches the ground, and you can’t tell them apart from the leaves, except when the year is well on its way. If I was going to stay in the job, precious, I’d buy my own skimmer and then I’d always get it right instead of being at the mercy of whatever pool things you find from home to home. When there are no frogs I move on fast. When there are a lot, I tend to linger, overcleaning the pool, fussing with baskets and the pH.

I go upriver slowly, but, rejoicing, I come home fast, back to the city, which is always a winter place to me, whereas I associate the river with summer. I open their pools, I find the leaks, I fire the boilers, I trim the filters, I fold up the covers and stow them away, I clean up the ladders and the floats. I hardly have time, in May and September, to write my sweetheart saying I am overcome with work; but you never bug me, do you, you leave me to my job. You are hardly likely to unstick yourself to come and help. That'd be too much, you'd be too much of a honey if you ever did that. I like being alone with the frogs.

*   *   *

PAUL WEST is the author of 50 books. He has received awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Prize for Fiction and the Halperin-Kaminsky Prize. He was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. He has also been a runner-up for the National Book Circle Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

             *   *   *

A Letter from Richard Russo

An Open Letter to My Fellow Authors

It’s all changing, right before our eyes. Not just publishing, but the writing life itself, our ability to make a living from authorship. Even in the best of times, which these are not, most writers have to supplement their writing incomes by teaching, or throwing up sheet-rock, or cage fighting. It wasn’t always so, but for the last two decades I’ve lived the life most writers dream of: I write novels and stories, as well as the occasional screenplay, and every now and then I hit the road for a week or two and give talks. In short, I’m one of the blessed, and not just in terms of my occupation. My health is good, my children grown, their educations paid for. I’m sixty-four, which sucks, but it also means that nothing that happens in publishing—for good or ill—is going to affect me nearly as much as it affects younger writers, especially those who haven’t made their names yet. Even if the e-price of my next novel is $1.99, I won’t have to go back to cage fighting.

Still, if it turns out that I’ve enjoyed the best the writing life has to offer, that those who follow, even the most brilliant, will have to settle for less, that won’t make me happy and I suspect it won’t cheer other writers who’ve been as fortunate as I. It’s these writers, in particular, that I’m addressing here. Not everyone believes, as I do, that the writing life is endangered by the downward pressure of e-book pricing, by the relentless, ongoing erosion of copyright protection, by the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, by spineless publishers who won’t stand up to them, by the “information wants to be free” crowd who believe that art should be cheap or free and treated as a commodity, by internet search engines who are all too happy to direct people to on-line sites that sell pirated (read “stolen”) books, and even by militant librarians who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to “lend” our e-books without restriction. But those of us who are alarmed by these trends have a duty, I think, to defend and protect the writing life that’s been good to us, not just on behalf of younger writers who will not have our advantages if we don’t, but also on behalf of readers, whose imaginative lives will be diminished if authorship becomes untenable as a profession.

I know, I know. Some insist that there’s never been a better time to be an author. Self-publishing has democratized the process, they argue, and authors can now earn royalties of up to seventy percent, where once we had to settle for what traditional publishers told us was our share. Anecdotal evidence is marshaled in support of this view (statistical evidence to follow). Those of us who are alarmed, we’re told, are, well, alarmists. Time will tell who’s right, but surely it can’t be a good idea for writers to stand on the sidelines while our collective fate is decided by others. Especially when we consider who those others are. Entities like Google and Apple and Amazon are rich and powerful enough to influence governments, and every day they demonstrate their willingness to wield that enormous power. Books and authors are a tiny but not insignificant part of the larger battle being waged between these companies, a battleground that includes the movie, music, and newspaper industries. I think it’s fair to say that to a greater or lesser degree, those other industries have all gotten their asses kicked, just as we’re getting ours kicked now. And not just in the courts. Somehow, we’re even losing the war for hearts and minds. When we defend copyright, we’re seen as greedy. When we justly sue, we’re seen as litigious. When we attempt to defend the physical book and stores that sell them, we’re seen as Luddites. Our altruism, when we’re able to summon it, is too often seen as self-serving.

But here’s the thing. What the Apples and Googles and Amazons and Netflixes of the world all have in common (in addition to their quest for world domination), is that they’re all starved for content, and for that they need us. Which means we have a say in all this. Everything in the digital age may feel new and may seem to operate under new rules, but the conversation about the relationship between art and commerce is age-old, and artists must be part of it. To that end we’d do well to speak with one voice, though it’s here we demonstrate our greatest weakness. Writers are notoriously independent cusses, hard to wrangle. We spend our mostly solitary days filling up blank pieces of paper with words. We must like it that way, or we wouldn’t do it. But while it’s pretty to think that our odd way of life will endure, there’s no guarantee. The writing life is ours to defend. Protecting it also happens to be the mission of the Authors Guild, which I myself did not join until last year, when the light switch in my cave finally got tripped. Are you a member? If not, please consider becoming one. We’re badly outgunned and in need of reinforcements. If the writing life has done well by you, as it has by me, here’s your chance to return the favor. Do it now, because there’s such a thing as being too late.

Richard Russo
December 2013

Click here for the Guild application form.

This posting courtesy of The Authors Guild, 31 E 32nd St., Fl 7, New York, NY 10016  

*      *      *

A Excerpt from Foozler Runs

GEORGE'S RESTAURANT

by Stephen Poleskie

from Fozzler Runs, a novel, published by Onager Editions

“BEST RESTAURANT AROUND these parts. . . .” the man behind the desk in the tiny, smoke filled motel office boasts, pointing to a picture of the place on the calendar hanging behind him. He should have added that it was the only restaurant, at least in walking distance.

           A huge green dragon winks on and off, alternating with the words GEORGE’S in red neon and RESTAURANT in blue neon. This must be in some reference to Saint George, Johnny supposes, or perhaps there are dragons here in this Pennsylvania wilderness that he is not aware of. High stepping in his low sneakers, Foozler has made his way through the quarter mile of wet snow, suffering the splashing of the eighteen wheelers rushing past on the roadway. While these monsters are dressed in enough lights to illuminate a small city, only the usual two headlights in front are useful as an aid to the driver’s forward vision. Not expecting to see anyone tramping along the highway in the snow, Johnny has received several snow baths along with his close shaves.

            Not wanting anymore traffic violations, Johnny has left his car at the motel. He felt the walk would do him good. The moisture working its way through his thin canvas shoes tells him he has made yet another wrong decision.

            “Aachoo!”

            “God bless you, honey. . . . Are you catching a cold?” the waitress says, returning with Johnny’s cup of tea. He had rejected her earlier offering of coffee. Coffee always appears automatically in these truck-stop diners; asking for tea means you are different, deserving of a good wait.

           “Aachoo!” Johnny sputters again, covering his mouth with his hand. “It’s not a cold. I just got my socks wet. . . .”

            “Better take them off then,” the waitress suggests to John’s surprise. “I wouldn’t want you to catch a cold. Give me your socks then. I’ll hang them over the grill there. They’ll dry off while you’re eating.”

            Perhaps he is old-fashioned, but Foozler still appreciates the constraint of manners. Despite all the other odd things he may have done before, Johnny never takes his socks off in a restaurant.

            Foozler looks around at the men sitting around him at the counter—tired truck drivers, stocky, mostly bearded men, wearing baseball caps turned around the correct way with words like MACK and PETERBILT printed on them. The drivers’ inevitably overweigh midsections are wrapped in wide, black elastic belts designed to support their backs and kidneys. The sour odor of sweat, from long days of fatigue and fear, radiates off their bodies.

            The truckers snap-inhale their cigarettes, then exhale the smoke out their nostrils in twin plumes. Are these the dragons of GEORGE’S? John wonders. With elbows digging into the Formica counter top, the drivers sit there staring into their black coffee with glazed eyes, a base, almost bestial expression on their faces. Having eaten, they have attained one of the few goals in their daily lives, and are quietly waiting for their dinner, and their Quaaludes, to digest so they can get back on the road.

            “Woowoo! Hey Marie . . . how come you never offered to dry my socks?” the big man sitting next to Foozler says, winking at him. Johnny hopes the man is only winking at his own joke.

          “Aaachoo!” Johnny tries to stifle his sudden sneeze into a handkerchief, not so much out of politeness, as no one here seems to care much about being polite, but rather not to draw anymore attention to himself.

            “Hey dude, give Marie your socks . . . next it’ll be your shirt and your pants . . . then who knows . . . har, har, har,” the man next to him says, jabbing his elbow into Johnny’s ribs with a force that surprises him.

            Tossing wrinkled dollar bills on the counter, the MACK and PETERBILT hat wearers get up to leave. They suck on toothpicks as they swagger toward the door: “Watch yer socks, buddy . . . don’t let Marie put them on the grill . . . she might just serve them up to the next customer that comes in here, har, har, har, har. . . .”

            With a roar of exhaust and a grinding of gears the two truckers rattle off into the still falling snow. Six other chrome and steel leviathans idle in the parking lot under the amber floodlights. The diesel engines are never shut off on cold nights like this for fear they will not restart, and also to keep their drivers warm, who are sleeping in the bunks behind the cab.

            The temperature outside has fallen to the lower double figures. Cold air, blown in through the open door, runs across the floor, finding Johnny’s feet.

            “AAAaacchhhooooo!” Johnny sneezes again, louder than before.

            “Really! You better take those socks off, honey, and let me dry them before you catch your death.” Marie says. She puts her hand on Johnny’s arm, leaving her touch linger longer than just a casual contact.

            Wanting to avoid any further comment, and perhaps because he is beginning to fear he may actually be catching a cold, Johnny reluctantly removes his foot coverings and hands them over the counter.

            Marie wrings the damp fabric into the dish sink, then moving aside a few hand towels, hangs the socks on a small rack below the grill. She wipes her hands once on her apron, picks up a breaded fish fillet that has been thawing on the counter, pats it three times, and then plops it into a pot of boiling grease.

            Well at least it’s my fish sandwich, Johnny thinks.

            “So . . . what brings you out on a night like this, honey?” Marie asks, trying to sound off-handed. “I mean, I can tell you’re not a driver . . . and you’re not from around here.” Marie stirs the fish patty with her thongs. A white cumulus of grease escapes up the vent.

            “I’m from New York.”

            “New York! Wow, that’s a great town.”

           “Not the city . . .  upstate. My tires are worn down; they made me get off the Interstate. I was heading south.”

            “Jeez . . . my tires aren’t too good either. I hope I am going to be able to get home. The cook and the other waitress have already left . . . they’re all going to a Mardi Gras party. Another girl was supposed to come in, but she hasn’t shown up. It must be the snow.”

            Marie places Johnny’s fish sandwich in front of him, her head leaning closer to him than necessary. “You enjoy your dinner now, honey. I’ll be right back to see if you need anything else. . . .” she says, patting his hand.

            Marie makes her rounds of the other customers, asking the ubiquitous question: “Is everything okay here?”

           One of the truck drivers mutters something to the waitress that Johnny cannot hear, and laughs, a vulgar kind of laugh. Paranoid, Foozler wonders if something might have been said about him.

            “Oh, you get otta here. . . .” Marie responds, dismissing the man with a wave of her hand and walking away.

           The fish burger actually tastes good. But then Johnny has not eaten anything all day. He covers the fries with ketchup, trying to conceal their origin as flavorless potato pulp forced into crinkle shaped molds.

            “God! It’s too quiet around her . . . especially since it’s Mardi Gras,” Marie announces, leaning over the counter to get to the jukebox selector mounted in front of Johnny. Her body is so close to his that he can smell her scent. She flips through the selections, brushing her arm against Foozler again, slowly, purposefully. John can see her breasts, squeezed together, creating a white valley in the pink V of her uniform. She presses the letter C, and then the number 9. “Now here’s one I really like. . . .”

            Signaled from this remote source the huge juke box at the end of the room, the kind you don’t see anymore, a real classic, all glass, and chrome, and neon lights, begins its robot-like action of spinning the disk.

            Na, na, nah. Now baby, I may be lower than a green snakes belly . . . but you could carry a jar of jelly . . . underneath me while standing up wearing your high-heel sneakers. . . . Na, na, nah. Now baby, I may be lower than a green snakes belly. . . .”  The song blares on, bouncing out lyrics from another era, a sensibility that has passed.

           Johnny’s mind gropes back to a dingy recording studio in New York City. Marijuana smoke fills the room, empty Scotch bottles line the counter tops. He has been there for the past twelve hours, with only cold pizza to eat. The band was arguing. They didn’t want a song—the one that was being played on the jukebox this very moment—on the album that they were making.

           It was not a song they had written. Nevertheless, the producer wanted it included; he owed a favor to the songwriter, or was screwing him, or something like that. Their manager had compromised, claiming the song was not really that bad, actually rather kind of catchy. They had tried six or seven versions of the song, about 36 takes, each one more pitiful than the last. But the song “Snake’s Belly” arguably one of the worst songs ever written, somehow had caught on, and became The Artful Foozler’s only runaway nationwide hit. Johnny has not heard the tune played on a jukebox in a good many years.

            “That’s The Art Foozler!” Johnny blurts out.

            “Yeah . . . I love ‘em,” Marie says. She is doing a little dance, a kind of twist, between the counter, getting into the music, shaking her body, feeling the beat, lost in the rhythm, no longer a middle-aged woman, but a teenager again.

            “Woo! Wooh! Go for it Marie!” someone shouts. Other customers are clapping their hands.

           Johnny can see Marie’s nipples standing out on her shaking breasts. He feels a firmness growing between his legs, a heat he has not felt since his wife’s death. Marie keeps bouncing, smiling; she is dancing just for him.

            “. . .snake’s bbeelllllyyyyyyyyy. . . . Yeah!!!”

            The music stops; the frisson passes.

            “Whew!” Marie says, wiping her hair from in front of her face.

           The truck drivers applaud politely, and then go back to smoking and staring at the dregs in their coffee cups.

          “Oh god. . . . excuse me,” Marie says to Johnny. A ripple of sweat runs down her neck and disappears into the crevasse of her breasts. “I just got carried away there for a moment. It’s The Artful Foozler . . . they are my favorite-ever group. Actually, they’re still pretty popular around here, the jukebox plays “oldies.”  But you don’t hear anything about them anymore. I read years ago that the lead singer killed himself, and then the group broke up. Have you ever heard of them?”

            “Heard of them,” Johnny replies. Although he fancies himself a humble man, Foozler is vainglorious to the point of wanting to be envied. “Hand me two of those spoons there. . . .”

            Tapping the spoons on the counter top, Johnny beats out the exact drum solo that they just heard on the record.

           Marie tilts her head and listens intently. “Hey! You are good. Then you have heard The Artful Foozler before. . . .”

            “Heard them! I was one of them!”

            “What do you mean?” Marie says, placing her arm on John.
            “I’m Johnny Foozler . . . I started the group, and was the drummer!” he exclaims.

            “Ya don’t say?!”

            Marie places both her arms on Johnny. Close up, almost intimate, she stares into his face, trying to recall an image from a record jacket, a group of carefree young boys, with long hair and sun glasses. They were trying to look arrogant and self-confident, when in reality they were actually diffident and insecure. Marie superimposes the various images over Johnny’s no longer young face, his head bristling with a short and unkempt shock of gray hair, tufts bristling too long on his eyebrows, and from the openings of his nostrils.

            “Jeez. I know which one you are,” Marie exclaims, stepping back from John. “Like, you’re the one with the big nose!”

            “The big nose? . . .” Johnny repeats, sounding offended. Yes, his nose did appear a little too large back then, however, over the years his face has grown up to match his nose, and there are women who think him even more handsome now than when he was younger.

            “Oh! I didn’t mean it that way,” Marie retreats. “I mean your nose wasn’t ugly big, it just was . . . well . . . bigger than any one of the other guys in the group; if you know what I mean. Oh god . . . what am I saying, eh . . . anyway, I’m really pleased to meet you. What did you say your name was, again?”

            “Johnny . . . Johnny Foozler, the one with the big nose. I was the drummer.”

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STEPHEN POLESKIE is a writer and artist, he has published six novels and numerous short stories. His artworks are in many major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Galley in London. He is currently a professor emeritus at Cornell University.

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