First draft of 'Flotilla' is done

Greetings - I've obviously been deficient in maintaining the kind of blog updates that keep regular users online. But if you've come this far, you'll be glad to know that I've completed the first draft of my first novel - "Flotilla". I committed to having the first draft complete by the end of the year and this weekend I just started dashing toward the finish line. I stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning, alternating between beer, ice cream and coffee to keep my energy going [note: I would not advocate this as a long-term health nutrition plan].

Other news since I last updated you: I got a rejection from a major sci-fi publishing house (surprise, surprise) and I'm perfectly fine with it. J.K. Rowling was rejected 12 times before the first Harry Potter book was published so I simply chalk it up to being part of the process. I'm moving onto the next step of the project, which was to get the beast printed out in submission format (turning 190 pages of text into 380), which ended up being very expensive - cost me $100 to print 3 copies of the novel at Kinko's.

I AM EXHAUSTED. That's what I wanted to say more than anything else. This has been a tremendous project and I'm completely burnt at this moment but I'm glad I have this big, fat wad of typescript to show for it. I printed out 3 copies but I have the whole beast on PDF if anyone else wants to volunteer to read a 380-page PDF file :).

I'm taking a break from writing - here or anywhere else.

90,000 words...

...that is all.

We're Too Rich To Die!

Slate has this "is this the end of Star Wars" article up today and I wanted to mention it briefly before I go help a user with something... Although I'm not a fan of what Star Wars has become, I don't think the end is anytime soon. Simply put, it's too big of a juggernaut to just roll over and die - this week, or next, this year or next - they'll still be stumbling along 20 years from now and you can quote me.

When you get to be big enough, your own personal wealth and brand power transcend a person's opinion. Given enough money and slick marketing, any bad product can continue to perform profitably in this market - just look at Ford and GM. Bad quarters, layoff 100,000 people? No problem! We'll be back next year -- we're too rich to die! Star Wars has become the Ford of sci-fi and the GM of pop culture. Everyone knows they could be doing better but they've become too large and too much of a big company to be out there on the cutting edge. You can't manage your way to the creativity that launched the original Model T or the Millennium Falcon - those ideas were created in a place that first built a box around itself and said "Management - STAY OUT".

But what do you do when you become the big cheese? How do you get to start over again? I'm not trying to be smart or rhetorical -- I would genuinely like to know.

More Novel News

78K words, folks - 78,000 words. I'm still trying to crank as much as I can and I want to get this draft complete as quickly as I can. I'm still keen to show you what it is that I have been doing and ignoring all updates here to accomplish. Thanks for your patience.

Flotilla - The First Chapter

Chapter One –Is This Thing On?

-= Journal Entry =-

My name is Jim Westfield – I think I might get killed here pretty quick so I want to put these notes down for anyone who might find them. My speech-to-text thing here is working pretty well, here, thank God; gives me something to talk to besides my sister. If you happen to find them, please contact Rick Westfield or Theresa Bowman and tell them what’s happened to us. I have no idea where they are – Theresa is my mom and she lives in West Covina so I’m hoping that if there’s any central evacuation place for Los Angeles that you can find her there. Rick Westfield is my Dad, he was taken ashore and we’re trying to find him right now.

Me and my sister, we’re on board this old beast of a yacht, the Horner C. It is my Dad’s boat and although I spent a lot of time keeping it clean, I’ve never driven (sailed?) it before. I have almost zero experience at how things work when the boat is under power even though I’ve been at sea for over six months in the past two years.

Right now, it’s about 2230 and the weather is pretty bad. I’m hoping that the boat can handle it but it’s gonna be a real close race. We’re shipping water up to the bridge door and the wind is blowing this boat like a kite all over the ocean. I can’t hold my course to more than 2 or 3 degrees and that might either be the wind or the fact that this old tub hasn’t really moved in over 10 years. I’m watching the GPS, the compass and Nancy all at once. She’s sitting next to me at the map table, her eyes are as big as saucers but her mouth is nothing more than a small scar in her head. I’m so scared that I’ve already pissed myself once.

The world has changed in a week, man; I don’t know how else to say it. At first we were watching the news and they were saying that it was a virus of some kind and that was bad enough. But then more news started rolling in…there were coordinated and simultaneous attacks in several major cities. We couldn’t figure out if we were looking at some kind of terror attack but then it just kept getting worse and worse.

We listened to it all – the riots in the Bay Area, Phoenix and St. Louis. The bug that was killing people in Baltimore and here in LA. Dirty bombs in Reno, Plano and Vicksburg. Because everyone on the Colony had family in one of those places, we were all riveted to the feed hoping to find out that they were okay. Our hopes started to dwindle as we caught the reports of the shootings. They were killing people because other people thought they might have been sick. Nobody bothered to check first, they just started shooting.

Even though we were out of danger, as in not about to die of the plague or nuclear contamination we had other problems. The Colony itself is…well…strange. Because it’s strange, the problems you experience here are also strange. It takes a while to understand it but it’s become both my home and the most dangerous place on earth. Dad had gotten himself into the middle of something that I still don’t know the half of…now he’s gone and I think some drug pirates are trying to kill me.

They took Dad when they went ashore looking for survivors. I thought it was a bad idea but they didn’t give him a choice. Dad’s last words to us both, along with a quick hug, were: “If you don’t hear from me in three days, send a message to your mom. If you don’t hear from me in four, take the boat, the docks and anyone else you can and go north. There are a bunch of islands near the Puget Sound that are mostly uninhabited. You can dock there and stay for a while. If things go okay, I’ll find you there and we will be together again.” That was a week ago.

Three days later, we were leaving messages for Mom that we never heard a response to. Meanwhile, me and Nancy were dodging some really bad trouble from some scummy people my Dad screwed over. Six days later I was breaking down our little dock system for transport and trying to ignore the fact that it was my 15th birthday. We got out of there just by the skin of our teeth and that’s no lie.

I’m still dealing with all of this…five days ago our world was more or less normal. I’m doing this speech-to-text thing and posting it thing directly to a blog page. Hopefully someone will find it. I’ll post our coordinates as we go and if you haven’t seen a post from us in more than 24 hours, will you call the Coast Guard (assuming we still have one) or something? Our coordinates on the Colony were 33 10'01 N / 120 07'32 W – so I’ll use that as a starting point.

-= Journal Ends =-

Three weeks before the first attacks came, the day started with light that was streaming through the porthole and creating wavy designs on the bulkhead. Jim lay there in his bunk, listening to the thumps through the stateroom walls as either his father or his sister Dad or Nancy moved about in the salon overhead. In a few minutes, Jim could hear cartoons. Was Dad still asleep? His father, Rick, wasn’t so rigid about get-up times but it was understood that when the day was started it did not end until the job was finished. Depending on the work their chores could last only a couple of hours but other times they could go all day.
Jim’s bed was cozy and warm and he lay there for a few more minutes, just soaking up the peace and quiet. Jim dozed off again but was brought abruptly awake by the squawk of the intercom right next to his head. His father’s voice rasped through the speaker.

“Jim, get up.”

Jim pretended to be asleep, “Huh? Wha, dad?”

“Knock it off…Get up.” The intercom clicked off. How does he know? Jim wondered to himself. Kicking off the covers, he got up and stripped off his sleep attire – boxers and a tank top – and then changed into his wetsuit. The cold, damp neoprene made him shudder as though he were being electrocuted. Catching a look at himself in the mirror, he saw a gawky kid who hasn’t quite grown into his body. Jim was of average height and had arms and legs that were starting to see the benefit of hours of swimming – not exactly ‘hot’ but not ‘hopeless’ either.

Breakfast was starting to go cold in the galley. Jim used a spatula to cut off a section of the scrambled eggs still in the pan and poured off the last cup of coffee in the 12-cup pot. The empty pot told him that his father had been up for hours, now. Jim made a fresh pot of coffee while watching people on the neighboring boats through the galley windows.

Two older gay guys lived on the Key West Forever – they grew calamari and tuna. The younger one was over 50 and a built like a small grizzly bear. He reminded Jim of Mickey Rooney for some reason. The other guy was tall and thin with no qualms about doing naked yoga positions on their back deck. It was something that Rick never got used to. Jim knew that Naked Yoga Guy was into the whole neo-hippy thing…tan as an Indian with a salt-and-pepper mullet and never without the silver and turquoise pendant around his neck even if he was wearing nothing else.

An aluminum fishing boat buzzed by, but Jim didn’t recognize the passengers. There were almost a thousand people who lived in the colony and it was hard to keep track of everyone. Some people tried the fishing business for a few months and then packed up and went home. Others stayed for long periods of time and they became the nucleus of what was otherwise a pretty strange community. Dad called the gay guys The Furleys, for some reason. They were long-timers, which in this case meant that they had lived on the colony for over three years. The life ain’t easy, Dad was fond of saying. He himself had been with this colony for over seven years, which made him almost a founding partner.

Jim ate his breakfast sitting at the small table in the galley. The eggs and sausage he was eating didn’t come from a chicken or a hog but were culture-produced and then shipped here. After breakfast, Jim sat at the captain’s chair and put his feet up on the console to enjoy the quiet as long as it lasted. He sipped from a cup of the fresh stuff he had just made; it was strong enough to pass as espresso. Over his shoulder, Rick entered the boat from the rear deck without a word and made his way forward into the galley. Rick insisted that the small table next to the galley was called the “mess area” and it took weeks for Jim to learn that it was a term that had nothing to do with its current state of cleanliness. Jim thought it was odd that Rick was so gung-ho about learning nautical terms when nobody else around them seemed to care. Getting hung up enough to debate technical terms while the rest of your life is hanging in ruins was just another one of those idiosyncrasies that Jim knew better than to discuss. It wasn’t the only thing that drove him crazy about the old man. Coffee in hand, Rick took a long orbit around the table to swat Jim’s feet off of the console before sitting down.

“We’re losing some fish,” he said as a greeting. Rick flipped through the pages of a three-week-old LA Times that someone had left on the table while eating another plate of breakfast. Getting no response, he looked up over his glasses at Jim. “Are those rips in Pen 3 fixed yet?”

Jim didn’t answer immediately: to respond too quickly indicates guilt. After a moment he flipped the captain’s chair around to face his dad. “I did – I fixed ‘em and checked the whole net from end to end.”

“Then why are we losing fish?”

“Who says we are?”

“My fish-finder has the whole group counted – between last night and this morning we lost like 50 of them. I think the net’s ripped – get down there and check it again.”

Jim shrugged but didn’t say anything back. What would be the point? An argument with Dad was a risky bet just on the face of it; Rick could keep it going for hours or days if he wanted to. Arguing with him when you weren’t sure of your ground was like sticking your arm into a wood chipper and hoping to get it back in one piece. Jim knew that his dad rarely went underwater himself when Jim was aboard and that his fish finder wasn’t the most reliable piece of technology in the world. As Jim was going to work on first two pens anyway, checking out the third wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Being with Rick had taught Jim to pick his battles. Jim took his coffee into the salon where Nancy ate delicately from one sausage as she watched her morning cartoons. Soon Rick appeared and shooed his children out to take care of the chores he had assigned to them.

Outside on the docks, Jim and Nancy started getting set up for some underwater work. The family had four pens that held fish – Dad was working on deploying a fifth but it would be a while before he gets the nets installed (Please see Appendix B – Dad’s Home Improvement Never Gets Done). The nets got ripped occasionally – predators trying to get in or a boat might run too close. All you needed was a basic hookah rig along with a wetsuit and you’re ready to go under the water. You will stay there, sometimes for hours at a time to fix any rips or tears. The process time is consuming but it wasn’t difficult and their father was pretty cheap; most tears were closed with zip-ties or industrial staples.

Most of the pen patrol tasks fell to Jim but he didn’t mind. It isn’t every kid that gets to spend his summer getting scuba-certified. They made you pass a basic scuba safety course in the first month onboard and the company had a program to get certified as a commercial diver if you were interested. Jim was in the water or under it about three or four hours a day…his fingers were permanently raisined from the water and his allergies had completely cleared up from having his sinuses constantly in salt water.

Jim finished strapping on his fins and his face mask by the time the hookah rig was pumping enough air. A small music deck pumps music through underwater speakers so Jim would have something to listen to while working. Jim jumped into the water, feeling the momentary shock that comes from jumping into the Pacific that early in the morning. The rule is, just let it go numb and then you’re okay – just be sure to get out if your hands start looking like a cadaver’s. Peeing in your suit helps, too.

This was the second summer that Jim had spent on board. The previous summer he spent by himself with his father and this summer his sister had come out to join them. To her credit, Nancy had quickly learned the esoteric aspects of fish farming. On ‘Pen Patrol’, their name for the underwater maintenance, the rule was that you couldn’t go under alone in case there was a problem and you needed help. Nancy had taken over as his line tender since she had first come aboard and Jim swam pens that would hold the Seaworld whale show with room left over. He attached a small line to his belt that they would tug on to tell each other what was happening. Jim and Nancy followed the Colony-approved system of tugs worked out: 1 tug was are you okay? One tug back meant, yeah – everything’s cool. Two tugs meant come up – you’re needed up here, three meant get your butt up here, pronto. If Jim tugged two tugs, it meant coming up soon and if Jim tugged three times, Nance yelled for dad.

Reggae thumped through Jim’s chest as he completed his search. It took about fifteen minutes to work his way down the entire net of Pen 3 with no rips found. The clouds of tilapia that were inside the nets swarmed around him but didn’t look any different from two days ago when Jim saw them last. Sometimes a single fish will die, float for a while and then sink to the net below. Predators, sharks among other things, will be swimming below and bite at it taking a chunk of net along with them…hence the rips. Jim saw a single dead tilapia lying on the bottom of the net and swam it back up to the edge of the net where he reached up and out of the water to flick it over to the sea side.

“Find any rips?” Nancy asked as Jim climbed out of the water.

Jim sat down next to her on the deck, pulling off his face mask and sweeping the water from his face. “Nope, no rips,” Jim replied, gasping as he said it. “Stupid fish-finder. Why can’t he get new sensing equipment?”

“He doesn’t know it’s broke,” Nancy said.

“I don’t think it’s broke. It just doesn’t work.”

“No, it’s broke,” Nancy said. She looked over at Jim slyly and Jim eyed her suspiciously.

“What do you mean?”

“I was playing around with it and it dropped onto the deck. You can’t tell that I did but I think it’s broken.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed and Nancy could tell instantly what he was thinking of doing. “Just don’t tell him, okay?”

“I just swam all of Pen Three for-“

“You don’t want Dad to know about you and Stacy do you?” Bang…now the game had changed. Nancy had walked in during a delicate moment with his girlfriend a few days ago and now Jim was aware what the price for keeping her mouth shut would be. Not that it mattered much to his dad what Jim and Stacy did but her father was violently protective of his daughter and Jim knew it. He shook his head in defeat and gave her a gentle thump on the head that turned into a neck squeeze. She was twelve but she could blackmail you better than mom. The squeeze was his common gesture of affection for his sister, one that said “I won’t like it but I’ll do it…be glad I love you.”

Jim’s relationship with Stacy was semi-serious. Stacy lived on the Seas of Cheese in a berth on the other side of the Colony, away from the Horner and grew tilapia like the Horner did. The Seas of Cheese served as a Colony ‘shake down’ boat and occasionally swapped tenants as people either moved back home or found more permanent lodgings and her parents had decided to try life as fish farmers. Her parents did not, however, have the benefit of Rick’s fish-tending experience. Previous tenants had at one point dumped sewage near the Horner pens – practically a capital crime on the Colony. The incident happened over two years ago and was forgotten by almost everyone. Rick however, could hold a grudge and it’s made the SoC a target for his ire ever since.

After Jim caught his breath, they moved over the first and second pens and started the whole process over again. Today’s pen chores took about three hours – right until lunch. After lunch they scrubbed and swabbed up as best they could – the Horner cleans up well but it is work. They finished with the chores with about two hours of daylight left and Dad took them in the launch, an old wakeboard rig dubbed Horner C Minor to the company admin ship, the Phoenix. Some Colony folk pointed out to Rick that there was no ‘C Minor’ only to get a World-Class stink-eye and growls about minding their own business.

Rick surprised Jim greatly by treating the two of them to dinner and a movie on board the Phoenix. A couple of hours of recreation on a ship that features a restaurant and a movie theatre can do wonders for the morale of two tired, hungry kids. While they joked and laughed over dinner they looked almost like the Pac Fish brochure pictures of a ‘happy Colony family’. As they motored back home in the C Minor, the sun flared and then dipped into the Pacific. The clouds on the horizon were gradually painted gold and then red before finally fading into the darkness.

Flotilla - Half of A Synopsis

This is the first half of the synopsis I'm sending to literary agents. I don't want to give away how the entire book goes but wanted to share where I am with you.

What if you had to become a man at the edge of the world? Jim Westfield enjoyed being a slacker in suburban LA until his father moved them to the Colony, an experimental fishing community over a hundred miles off the Pacific Coast. Jim's flirtation with drugs and alcohol thrusts him into a dangerous world. Dodging the sharks, drug smugglers and pirates in a place where the nearest cop or sailor is a hundred miles away, Jim will grow up fast ... too fast. Does hardship turn you into a man or a monster? Is there a difference?

Before all of this, before Jim came to the Colony and before he completed a two-week stay in a rehab center for alcohol, Jim was just normal kid. He was simply a suburban teenage white kid in Los Angeles with his mother, his sister and his step-father. Other than his missing dad, the ex-con with multiple felonies, things were fine…sort of. It may have taken five years, but when Rick reappears again, Jim and his father both start a tenuous process to rebuild their relationship. While that happens, Jim starts down a bad path; He starts waking up in strange places because of his binge drinking. It becomes obvious to his parents and step-Dad that Jim needs more structure and direction in his life. Where else could Jim find it except by spending his summer out on the open ocean enduring back-breaking labor?

Jim is sent to the Colony on the same day he leaves his alcohol-treatment…Adjusting to life in such a strange place would be a story in and of itself. Jim has to endure the hazing and mild abuse that goes with the territory in such a far-off place. You wake up at 4:30 to tend to your crop of fish and spend the rest of the day working at the floating gun range or participating in your dad’s zany, semi-legal scams. Or maybe you run a scam or four of your own and hope the old man doesn’t find out. You observe the weirdness of the free-sprits who treat their life on the Colony as a massive performance-art piece. You’ll deal with the obvious nutters, the cut-throat drug operations that a few bad apples insist on running and the pioneer-types who just want to make an honest living. You’ll sit back at watch the show while you slowly come to the truth: That it runs at all is a testament to the human spirit and the desperation of the human flotsam that populates a place like this.

The Flotilla Cast - Rick Westfield

"He stood five-foot-eight but broad in the shoulder. He stood in a wide stance on the dock that I found somewhat predatory."

Rick Westfield is a recovering drug addict, an ex-con and a failed college professor; everything you look for in a father. After years of being a ‘deadbeat Dad’ and a guest of the state, Rick and Jim are thrown together in the strange experience of the Colony. His past is never far behind him, but that doesn’t prevent him from giving Jim some appropriate guidance and direction even if it’s usually by threat of violence.

Trying to stay away from the failures of his past and build a successful future on the bare, ragged edge of humanity, Rick still suffers from his own ability to get into trouble much more often than he gets out of it. His past is the millstone that he so desperately does not want to place around the neck of his own children.

"'So let this be a lesson to you, kiddies,' Rick would lecture the wood paneling in the lounge. Coming down or sobering up always left him in a semi-fugue state…’twilight time’ he called it. He’d deal with his depression by delivering the next installment in a lecture series entitled 'How Not to Screw Up Like Your Old Man'. He wasn’t talking to anyone; he knew he was talking to the wall. It felt better than sitting there with your head burning over and over every mistake you’ve made. It felt better than trying to write it all down. Rick would sit down with a cold drink, stare at the wall and just let rip. A confessional worthy of a cable-ready documentary if they ever cared to drag a camera crew out this far…"

The Flotilla Cast - Jim Westfield

"Catching a look at himself in the mirror, Jim saw a kid who was about average height but with a deepening chest. Blonde hair that was crew-cut-short and eyes that were either blue or grey depending on the light. Jim wasn’t built to be a surfer and he wasn’t hitting the weights enough to let his arms and legs fill out like they should. In short, Jim was like just about every other teenage kid who hasn’t quite grown into his body."

Jim Westfield is a teenager at the crossroads – he can either continue down the path of alcohol and drugs or he can shape up and take his first steps toward becoming a man. He wasn’t getting that kind of help on shore but out here on the ocean where everyone does a grown man’s day of work, the help is there and usually in the form of his estranged father or any number of adults who found the structure of shore life too restrictive for their taste.

Jim’s experiences don’t change the fact that he wants to do the right thing and senses that he’s capable of more than getting drunk or high without the slightest idea about how to go about it. He gets frustrated and bitter, he screws up and acts out but unlike the soft and easy consequences he’s enjoyed back on land the Colony and the sea will provide the most harsh and direct wake-up call of all.

The Flotilla Cast - Miguel Herrera

Miguel Herrera is a cool customer, a good friend and a dangerous enemy. Jim gets to see all three sides during his time on the Colony. He runs a floating gun range - the Barco de Arma - in among the other semi-legal business enterprises he is involved in. Jim's dad, Rick, is frequently Miguel's partner-in-crime.

The door slid open and a short, squat Mexican peered out at us. “’Sup?” he inquired.

Dad pointed at me. “El burro,” he said. The Mexican grinned.

“The mule?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the Mexican replied. “I just rented you.” He grabbed me by the shirt front and pulled me inside before I could say another word.

It's usually when Jim or Rick are in over their head that Miguel's ability to solve problems manifests itself. Even if you don't like Miguel - you don't want to mess with him. There are a lot of people who figured that out the hard way.

"Miguel was angry, Jim could see. The difference between Miguel and his Old Man was that Rick would shout and bluster. Miguel, on the other hand, was the cool bank-robber-type who would ask everyone to stay calm while holding a submachine gun. You didn’t want to mess with either of them but somehow Miguel seemed a little more dangerous."

'Zona Trash

Mix was drinking a dead man's beer. He sipped from a pony bottle of Miller Genuine Draft that his uncle-in-law kept in the refrigerator by the case. Cheap beer, the kind that a Monty Python fan would call "Making love in a canoe"; it's only saving grace was that it was cold and there were plenty of it left over. He was sitting in Bob's back yard, concrete under a fiberglass patio, the only thing left of the sunset was a stripe of green at the horizon.

The heat in Glendale reminded Mix of being in a sauna – the baking heat minus the tangy smell of heated wood. The cicadas were deafening. The pool lights cut through the green, half-drained swimming pool of his uncle and reminded him of everything that he hated about visiting this place. Uncle Bob wasn't his wife's favorite uncle…He wasn't anyone's favorite uncle. Or father, or son, or brother, or friend. Bob was Bob and a lifetime of poor lifestyle choices had finally caused him to cash it in on the cereal aisle of the local Fry's. His heart beat its last right between the Golden Grahams and the Lucky Charms

A dog roop-roop-roop'ed near by and Mix could hear Ranchero music echoing from a car window out on the street. The street was quiet again after a minute. The silence seemed to be pregnant and it got under your skin after a while. You were waiting for something to explode but somehow it never did.

"Duncan?" a voice called from inside and Mix turned.

"Yeah?"

"I'm putting the baby down, come say good night," his wife's voice floated out from somewhere inside. Walking into the house was like stepping into a steam room on top of a sauna – the swamp cooler had been broken and the house still held the heat of the day.

The kid was sweating as he slept on the couch – you could see tiny beads on his brow. It was after 9 o'clock and they were still divvying up old momentos, clothes and going through Bob's papers. They were checking to see if he had any money socked away that would help pay for the funeral. Briefly, Mix kissed his son's forehead and walked outside again – time for another cruise.

She heard his keys jingling at the door and caught him before he left. "Where are you going this time?" she asked him.

"Just out," Mix replied, he tried to keep it light but he knew his eyes would give too much away.

"Can't you see we need your help here?" she demanded.

"I've been sitting on the back porch for the last hour drinking Bob's beer," he said. "What to you want?'

"And while you're doing that, we're sweating our fannies off (she cleaned it up for the sake of Grandma when she visited) trying to figure out how to pay for Bob's casket!" She was getting shrill and he knew the whole house was listening, even if he couldn't see them. If he could hear her call from outside, well, the whole house was one big sound box, wasn't it? There wasn't any point in arguing – he might have done it if he was at home. But he wasn't home and the normal rules of their relationship had been temporarily suspended. Her sister came silently into the room and stood behind her with her arms crossed. Mix turned, opened the front door and left. This wasn't the time or place to argue about it…an hour of driving seemed to clear the air.

The air seemed freer out here in the front yard – maybe because out here you got away from the smell of stale cigarettes and fossilized grease. Bob's house reflected one of the realities of old male bachelors: they didn't age well. As Mix pulled away, his cell phone vibrated in the cargo pocket of his shorts. It was her, calling to continue the argument. He let it go to voicemail, knowing it would just make it worse when they spoke again. He needed the break more then the fight.

He'd take hour-long cruises throughout the city. With the tunes and the AC cranked in their rented Dodge crackerbox, he'd explore Tempe, Mesa or Scottsdale. Rock or pop, he was positively allergic to country music and this was another point of contention with his in-laws. For fun, he'd try to get lost – the squared-off grid made that almost impossible. The natural beauty of the red rock mixed obliquely with the grungy strip malls down on McDowell. The lights were timed in the downtown area and he could go for miles without having to stop.

At random, he'd turn down a side street looking to see if the view got any better…it never did. Miles of dusty tract houses with dirt yards, or low-maintenance yards or drought-resistant grass that look a lot like crab grass. Pickups in the driveway with paint-splattered beds and trees in the yard with trunks painted a solid white. Lawn gnomes that looked like they were picked up on sale back in 1976. It was a different place, to be sure, and a different culture, too. It could be either a curse or a blessing but family was family. You turned a blind eye to the alcoholism or the cousin doing some time in county.

"It's a different place, man," Carlton said.

His time running out on the cruise but still not able to bear going back, Mix called a friend who'd moved out to Gilbert about a year and a half ago. Some nice subdivision house that cost about half of what he would have spent in Sacto – he transferred out of Roseville to join a new team with HP. Mix had to admit, it was nice. Carlton had a massive house while Mix was feeling hemmed in by the thousand square feet he shared with his wife and the rug rat.

Carlton lit a smoke as soon as he stepped out into the yard. Mix was watching the heat lightning as it crackled in the eastern sky. Carlton's Zippo clinked and he sucked at the Camel hungrily. "Geographically, it's closer to the West Coast but culturally, it's closer to the Midwest," he said.

"Family is family is family," Mix said bitterly.

"Yup. It's what holds them together."

"The hand you hold is the hand that holds you down."

Carlton looked puzzled. "Now where have I heard that before?"

"It's a line from an Everclear song," Mix replied.

"Oh, right." He punctuated his statement with a burp and took another pull from his beer. "Anyway – the point is that they got a way of doing things that, just by living and breathing you put a wrench into."

"So how is it that you survive?" Mix asked.

"Oh, I don't go down there," Carlton replied. "Are you kidding? I wouldn't last an hour."

"My family's not racist…" Mix felt obligated to defend them. They might be poor and surly, but they weren't bigots.

"I didn't say they were. People do things for a lot of reasons besides being i'gnant Crackas." Carlton smiled as he said it…he wasn't a 'Street' kind of guy but Mix liked him for being able to drop into it in a heartbeat and then back out of it again like it had never been there. "If you aren't from here, you get treated differently. If you aren't from here and you're doing better than they are – you might as well be giving them the finger every time you walk into the room. They put up with you 'cuz you married into their family but they wouldn't be as patient with me."

"Like guys from South Boston," Mix said.

"Nah – Southie guys'd kill you," Carlton said. "You'd just disappear. Out here it's more like 'Death by Trailer Park Rec Room'. You'll be eating Jello salad and cold fried chicken at that 23^rd baby shower and then just snap and shoot yourself."

Mix considered all of this. He always suspected that this was how it went but never had anyone confirm it for him. "Weird," is all he said.

"'Zona Trash," Carlton said, mid-puff.

"Huh?"

"'Zona trash," Carlton said. "You've seen white trash in California. White trash in Arizona is a whole 'nother ball game."

"Yeah, but these guys aren't racist," Mix said.

"They are to people outside of their area," Carlton said. "White, Black or Chinese – if you grew up here, you're cool. Everyone else is suspect."

"So how do you do it?"

"I just hate people," Carlton replied, pointing the hot end of his cancer stick at Mix. "I make them work to get along with me. You work to get along with other people and that's what makes you stupid."

"Stupid?"

That's right, stupid," Carlton repeated.

"Screw you, man!" Mix was getting pissed.

"Exactly…if you said that to them at the start you wouldn't be here." Carlton stared calmly at Mix. "Am I moving too quickly?"

Mix calmed down – Carlton usually behaved like this when he knew something that Mix didn't. For a long minute, all you could hear in the backyard were the cicadas. The perfumed smell of orange trees mixed with the dry, dusty smell of the wind. It was time to listen.

"Yes," Mix replied.

"Look. You went out here, being a nice guy and saying 'Hey, let's be family!' They didn't know what to do about that. Truth is, neither did you. Things aren't working out the way you hoped and so your response is 'be nicer'. That's not working out so hot and now you're essentially out of ideas. You can't be Santa Claus and you don't want to be a jerk, either."

"So?"

"So my point is, stop trying. It's not going anywhere. Just take care of you and your family, man."

"But they're my family, Carlton!"

"No…no, they're not," Carlton peered at Mix. "Could you count on these people in a crisis, Mix?"

Silence fell over them…it wasn't something Mix had thought about. He knew the answer but was afraid to voice it before now. "No, I guess not."

"Would you go to them if you needed help because you lost your job? House burned down? Baby was sick?"

"No."

"You guys get together for visits and dinners and stuff?"

"I'm here now, aren't I?"

"On a regular basis?"

"…No."

"That's not family, man. That's more of what you'd call 'an acquaintance'. Family's there for you and not to just ask you to show up and pay for some greaseball's funeral."

"But they don't know how to do it-"

"People will only treat you as well as you expect them to." Carlton's beer was sweating and he paused to drain it. "If you don't care enough about yourself to insist on a certain behavior, why should they?" He stood and went back into the house, calling back over his shoulder, "Want another beer?"

"Sure." Mix sat there, gazing toward the hairy collection of radio towers on South Mountain. His cell phone buzzed again in his shorts – it was her again. "Yeah?"

"Where are you?" she was ticked.

"Out," he replied. "I'll be back in a few."

"Well, we're done for the day so as soon as you can make it – I'd like to go back to the hotel," she bit the end off of every word.

"Whatever," he said, and hung up. His phone buzzed again almost immediately and he shut it off. He needed time to digest and think…introspection was something he couldn't do in Bob's house.

"Reciprocal altruism," Carlton said as a greeting when Mix went into the house. "Your family understands it instinctively but it seems you need a few lessons."

"What is it?"

"Look it up," Carlton said. "I can't give you the whole story." Mix and Carlton made small talk long enough to finish the beers and Duncan was on his way back to Bob's house a few minutes later. The heat burned off the alcohol and he barely felt them. He kept digging himself deeper into the pit, no matter which way he turned…Might as well be comfortable.

He slid to a stop in front of Bob's house a few minutes later. She was standing at the door with her sister, he could see that them stop their conversation to watch him. When those two get together, it's like lions watching a gazelle, he thought.

"Where have you been?" Beatrice, his sister-in-law asked. Before, he would have answered immediately and the fight would have been on. He felt a little better-equipped and simply stared silently at her. It was the longest two minutes of his life, he decided. Not speaking and not running…he had never tried it before. She was becoming visibly upset at his lack of response and finally flared out a "Well?"

He stared another half of a minute. "Let's go," he said to his wife. Without another word, he turned back to the car. He didn't need to look behind him to see her caught between the two of them. It wasn't what he wanted, of course, but there wasn't another way.

The next several days were very tense and he spent as much time as possible out of the house. Bob had no assets and his funeral was going to be very spare. Mix suggested a simple cremation but this was shouted down, literally. When this happened, he skipped shouting back. Shrugging his shoulders, he turned and left…when he came back it was as if nothing had ever happened. No one raised their voice to him again, however. As the 'guy from California', he was dreading getting pinched to cover some of the costs. This trip had been expensive, in more ways than one.

"You make it sound like they're bad people," Mix said to Carlton before he left that evening.

"They're not bad people, Mix. They're just people. These are they rules they follow to get along in this world."

"And their world is based on keeping their heads in the sand?"

"If that's what it takes."

"That doesn't work for me," Mix said.

"Me neither." Carlton started humming the 'Diff'rent Strokes' theme song.

"What is that?"

"'Diff'rent Strokes', dude." An ominous silence followed. "Don't you know 'Diff'rent Strokes? Gary Coleman?"

"The paycheck cashing guy?"

"I need a beer," Carlton said, heading for the fridge.

Quick Preview and an Update

Greetings, folks. The novel is still in progress [63,000 words and climbing] and I wanted to give you a quick-hit to enjoy...

[[[ Chapter 14 - Journal Entry – Nancy Arrives ]]]

When my sister was 2 and I was 6, I asked my mom to shave my head so I could be like her. She got diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Ewing’s Sarcoma, and she lost her hair to chemo so I shaved my head to be like Nancy.

The cancer was back when Mom was still seeing Dad and Nancy was the product of a conjugal visit. I’m not saying anything; I was a prison baby, too. We three were living with my grandparents while Mom went to school and paid for it by doing nights at a video store over in Sunland. She’s finishing her third year and then the doctor drops the atom bomb on us: bone cancer and she might lose her leg.

They all started acting weird, Mom and Grandma were crying and Grandpa was out in the back yard. Rather than let us see him cry, he was viciously attacking the lemon tree with an old pair of hedge clippers. I came to understand that something had gone wrong when Mom had to quit her job and we spent days in different offices filing paperwork so that she could get her daughter treatment for her cancer. When you’re poor and you’re on state assistance, getting any kind of medical is difficult and when it’s cancer it’s darn near impossible. Mom attacked the problem like anything else – she made it her full-time job. Paperwork, calling offices, sending letters and even threatening to call every TV station in LA – she made sure that they didn’t let Nancy down when it came to getting any kind of decent care.

Mom became rabid on the topic and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. Even when she’s cranky or rambling like a wino, I remember that look in her eye when she reached across a counter and grabbed an oncologist by his tie. I have no idea what she said to the man but it got him to switch out Nancy’s meds.

As Nancy’s treatment started and she was miserable, cranky and tired all the time – it really threw our house into a mess. Her little curls started falling out and she cried because it hurts to lose your hair. So one day, I asked Mom could I shave my head? She looked at me oddly – why did I want to do that? I just shrugged and said “I dunno…make Nancy feel less weird, I guess.” Her eyes filled with tears and she pulled me close. She kissed the top of my head and sent me to Grandpa.

I thought he might be upset himself – he’s been cutting my hair out on the back porch every month for several years – but for some reason he just smiled and said “Sure, sport.” He drew on the old bedsheet that was my barber apron for a long time and then took the guard off of his old Wahl clippers. In the warm evening air with the smell of lemon blossoms all around us, he shaved my little head back to a fuzzy cue ball. Mom and Grandma laughed and cried at the same time – I held Nancy up and we took a picture of both of us chrome-domes. Mom keeps the picture in a scrap book somewhere.

I’m just telling you this so that later on, when you ask why I’m freaking out because the Colony just turned into the Wild West, I can say “I love my little sister” and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I guess I love her. As much as anyone can…Nancy can be kind of a pain.

Current Status - 59,000 Words and Counting

Completed another chapter and I'm fleshing out another one I started a while back.  The count is 59,000 words and a novel length manuscript is somewhere between 100 and 120,000 words.  I'm silent here because I'm writing elsewhere.  Thank you for your kind words and good wishes.

~ D

My 2 Cents…

Not that you really knew it – but I’ve broken with sci-fi tradition and declared my contempt for the Star Wars franchise after ‘Attack of the Clones’ appeared, going on 4 years ago.  It hasn’t gotten better over time and although I hate being right, it appears the new round of animated Star Wars stories – I’m sure you’ve seen “The Clone Wars” trailer right before Dark Knight – isn’t any better.  Who better to tell us this than Harry Knowles of “Ain’t It Cool News"?

The downside of the issue is what Knowles and Valleywag.com have talked about – Lucasfilm doesn’t take criticism of their movies lying down.  Knowles retracted his review of Clone Wars after being threatened with exile from future advance screenings of Lucasfilm productions.  Star Wars movies have become one of those things that are ‘cool to hate’ among the more sophisticated.  I just get depressed as I contemplate a major inspiration of my own creative projects look and sound like they were constructed, directed and produced by homeless winos.  I can smell the groupthink from here.

Quick Progress Update

I’ve learned since we talked last that publishing companies expect a novel manuscript to be anywhere from 80 to 100,000 words in length.  I was keeping track of my progress by counting pages – shows what I know.  I went back and did a word count against every chapter (since I keep them separate and I back them up to Gmail).  I’ve got over 50,000 words written.  Thought you’d like to know how it was going.

Everybody and Everything

Taking a few minutes before I hit the rack; only I would be dumb enough to book a gym trainer at 6am on a Saturday morning.  A vicious reminder of the busy life of a geek and a writer who happen to share the same body.

Where are you now, Christopher Lloyd?  I was making my friend laugh doing Chris Lloyd as the Klingon captain in Star Trek III and now I put the Regal Cinemas Cell Phone Policy Trainer on my phone as a ring tone.  I'm buzzing with all kinds of possibilities and what I need right now is a good night's rest.  Exhausted is me...none of this will make sense in the AM.  I need to finish the book.

Perhaps I Should Explain...

"4 stories in one day??" Not really.

A great booster to my own journey was the site Indiebloggers.org. As you can see by following the link, it's now no more than a parked page on Godaddy. I have no way of knowing what happened and I have no way of contacting them. Meantime, the four stories I had 'published' there lost their visibility and I wanted a way to ensure you could still read them - thus I posted them yesterday.

So here's the scoop - I have several persons who have kindly volunteered to serve as Editors and a test audience for the novel ['Flotilla' - in case you were wondering what the title was]. I'm continuing to pound on that and Thursday I fired it off into the void to a publishing house to see what might become of it. Meanwhile, I have a day job and a personal life AND I have to keep cranking on this thing, so that's what is happening when I'm not here.

I read something the other day that aptly describes the situation. It comes to us from Ralph Waldo Emerson courtesy ZenHabits.Net:

“Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

I guess my own perception of the matter is rapidly giving way to the reality and this is not a bad thing. Working with an art is still work - there's aspects of it that still require you to get in there and just TYPE. This thing won't write itself and at the end of the day, someone has to do it. So it's work but it's work worth doing - does that make sense? When I'm doing my day job [Information Technology] - if I were a true Geek I'd be happy engineering solutions and solving problems. The reverse is true: Most of the time I'm so frustrated I want to scream; this is not what I want to be doing with my life and this is not how I want to be spending my time.

As I told my wife the other day [Sorry, girls...he's married] - "The only way out is through." I have to see this through - I'm stressed out and I'm tired but I would be in even more karmic debt if I skipped out on this opportunity. I have to get this done, just to see how the story ends...and no, I'm not talking about the novel when I say that.

Love, Life and Death at the Launderland

Love, Life and Death at the Launderland

By Daniel Haight

“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is the theme song for depression – he decided. The sweat rolled in fat drops along the small of his back as he stood in line, buying a coke and a few other things to justify asking the clerk at the Drug Barn for part of his change to be a roll of quarters. He hadn’t learned yet that the clerk didn’t really care. The Drug Barn was never crowded, never empty. It was always filled with the sad, tired and/or depressed people that always found themselves in a cut-rate drug store at ten of five on a Monday afternoon. Don’t these people have lives, he wondered.

These people…better amend that, pal. There’s no longer any difference between them and you.

He got his change, ones and fives instead of quarters, and walked back to the Laundromat. Years had worn down the brick sidewalks and thousands of laundry loads had ground lint into the cracks. The bedspread was waiting. He’d never owned a bedspread that couldn’t be washed in a normal washing machine, before he met Carolyn. Now that she had moved back home, he didn’t have it in him to toss it. The comforting bulk of it made that empty spot next to him on the bed feel less total. Less overwhelming. Less massive.

Massive. Now, that was a good word. Massive was a word he’d heard a lot lately. Massive layoff, massive debt, massive depression and finally, massive legal bills following the divorce. Yessir, a cavalcade of misery featuring the Massive Four! Massive Four sounded like a band that would have played in a bar in the Haight during the FSM years. Psychedelic versions of pop covers a specialty.

The Launderland was a horseshoe-shaped facility that was bisected by the rooms for the laundry folding service. Linoleum walls, linoleum tile floors. The drab colors made the cheap flyers offering baby-sitting services in Spanish seem exciting by comparison. The air was thick and heavy with the smell of detergent. A black woman transferred clothes from the washer to the dryer while holding a running conversation with someone on her cell phone. A small Indian woman and a small Indian man in an azure blue turban folded laundry and spoke softly to each other in Urdu.

Duffy walked in from the back parking lot. Allegedly, he worked for the Launderland and its sister location. Maybe he was just another casualty of the fixed-income demographic with nowhere else to go. He wore a white t-shirt that was so thin you could see his strappy a-shirt underneath when he sweated. He was sweating right now.

He thought of the guy he remembered from high school and community college that he met in the mall food court this afternoon. Fat, he looked like a stand-in for Ethan Embry. He wore a black felt bowler in the same style that he remembered from years ago. It was replaced as it became sun-faded or “smelly”. Just graduated from CSU East Bay with a degree in Philosophy. He played bass in a community college theatre in Alameda and cheerfully referred to himself as ‘a bum’.

Hume was his favorite philosopher, he said.

You’re so pedestrian, Jim replied. Not that he knew Hume from Hubert Humphery; sometimes you could pull it off if you had the knack. It got a laugh from his buddy on the other side of the table. They were eating from twin bowls of Manchu Wok and it was all Jim could do not to burst into tears at the realization that even cheap Chinese food was beyond his budget these days.

What are your plans, he asked.

I have none, was his breezy reply. It made for two of them. When he laughed, his teeth in the front had been worn down until they looked like molars. He said he played bass, right? Not sax…

Back at the Launderland, Duffy was shuffling between cartloads of laundry. He spoke to some people and you could tell how rich or poor people were by their responses. The upper crust types were slightly afraid of Duffy. It showed by how they immediately moved to positions of defense on the cheap Formica benches. The more down-to-earth types welcomed him or at the very least were more polite.

Jim took a leak in the propped-open pay toilet. He’d be doggoned if he was going to pay a quarter to take a piss. There were plenty of trees out back. The mirror over the sink was so tagged and scratched that he could hardly see his face. Other inked-up messages were faded from a scrub brush. He washed his hands and used his wadded-up paper towels to open the door again. Who knew how many hobos used this place for their apartment?

It was amazing how quickly his dignity left him. A year ago, he was piloting his 5-series through a twenty-acre lot of cars and depositing his life a day at a time at the job. The job that seemed so secure, offered so many benefits that he never really thought about. Life at the job for the past four years seemed to roll with a calm assuredness to it. Every two weeks, the paycheck was deposited in his account and he wrote out the checks when he got tired of asking Carolyn to do it. He wore hundred-dollar slacks every day of the week.

The slacks, he needed to get cleaned or pressed or whatever. That callback he got this morning was the first major ray of light he’d had in a while. Rays of light were so rare that he actually found a red clay pencil and drew a big ‘X’ through the date. He took fifteen minutes to find the directions to the interview and wrote them down on a Steno pad rather than use up his ink cartridges in his down-to-the-nub inkjet.

Why were things like pants or cars such marks of success? Why did he think about stuff like that so much? You’re really pathetic, you know that? People in Southeast Asia would be selling themselves, their sisters and their children into perpetual sex slavery for the opportunities that he somehow had yet to take advantage of.

PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THE FOLDING TABLES – THE TABLES ARE FOR FOLDING LAUNDRY.

Red or blue 8 ½ x 11 sheets in binder-protectors were thumb-tacked to the wall. He was wearing this tie-dyed shirt that he bought from a street fair just because he had to buy a tie-dyed shirt. For reasons that now are obscure, he’d jauntily reply and then wonder later on why they found him to be so strange.

I should have been an anthropologist, I love studying people.

No one pretended at the Launderland. They couldn’t, really. They were airing their dirty laundry in public, what more was there to hide? No one ever invented a dignified way to be at the Laundromat but Jim was beyond dignity. He was even beyond finding a plastic bottle of booze to make himself forget his troubles.

The thought you really do drink too much was quickly followed by laundry perpetually falling in the dryer is vaguely hypnotic. Jim took another pull from his bottle of diet Coke. He’d drank so many sodas that they now tasted bilious to him. Sweet, fizzy, disgusting. My kingdom for a drink of water.

Duffy had driven trucks for 51 years before retiring. He’d been at the Laundromat at six in the morning and it was now past five in the afternoon. He’ll get a few hours of sleep, he said, and then he’ll check on the other one. He got ten dollars an hour for that job.

Jim began to hate Duffy.

Sure, it was wrong, but Jim hated Duffy anyway. Did Duffy even have a resume? How was his interview style? Jim had three different versions of his resume, had his name in with a dozen head-hunting places and checked Dice and Monster morning, noon and night. Duffy wore a cell phone on his hip and a greasy truckers cap over his wispy and non-existent hair. The comforter was almost dry.

He played a goofy knock-off of Street Fighter II in the front of the place. The players made Engrish statements like “I hate Evil – so sue me!” after chopping the loser in half with his cartoon katana.

Dead men don’t sue.

Life was made of little moments like this. Moments of time where Jim did something he didn’t want to do and had too much time to contemplate all the things he used to do instead of this. Outside, the Jeep sat patiently for him. Carolyn had left him that much – she said she didn’t want to worry about re-smogging and re-registering it back in her home state. The pine trees bordering the lot reminded him of vacations as a kid in the mountains. The general store in the middle of a stand of sugar pines where he ate an Eskimo Pie while sitting on the wide, worn front porch.

He folded the dry bedspread and with it under one arm and a cup he used to carry laundry soap in his other. He carried it like a highball having to mentally remind himself not to take a sip. The Jeep clattered to life and carried him home to wait out the rest of the day and prepare himself for whatever would come tomorrow.

Mad Season

Mad Season

We knew he was in trouble when we caught him suddenly singing "Come Together" by the Beatles in Chinese.

He doesn't speak Chinese.

I could hear the high-pitched tonal notes coming over the cube wall. At first I thought it was a goof; Tom's got a weird sense of humor. I could understand from his pitch and the pace of the song that he was doing 'Come Together'...I wouldn't have known it otherwise. Thing was...it was articulate...seemed to sound right, like a Chinese guy who karaoked the Beatles on a regular basis.

I was looking at Stacy's monitor, trying to figure out how she had screwed her desktop up this time when Tom started. At first we did the "What is that" amused smirk. When it didn't stop, I peeked over the cube wall to ask Tom if he was okay.

Tom was wearing his usual outfit - the uniform, I called it - grey slacks, a white button-down dress shirt with the sleeves carefully folded back to the elbows. He was wearing a dark red tie made out of shiny rayon or silk, it was slightly askew as he sat leaned back in his office chair singing. His eyes were closed, the dark scraps of hair he usually combed carefully over his scalp were becoming rumpled as he bopped along.

"Tom?" I said. He didn't seem to notice, his voice was loud enough for us to hear and it seemed to be growing louder. He was really getting into the parts where John would be going "One and one and one is three!" I left Stacy's cube and walked into Tom's at that point. As I approached, he was growing louder and louder. His feet were stomping in time to the music and rings of sweat were showing underneath his armpits as he continued to move in time with the music.

"Tom!" I said, reaching out to him. Other people had figured out something was up and were standing outside of his cube. Just as I was about to touch him, he exploded from the chair, stomping in time to the music and hollering the music...still in Chinese. We jumped, not expecting him to do that and even more confused by all of this. Just as I was about to say 'Call Security and tell them we have a 5150...' he suddenly changed to English as he finished the song.

"Got to be good-looking cuz he's so hard to see!"

Tom's eyes were open - he stared at us wide-eyed. The kind of look you get when the deer is 6 inches from your hood or the religious guy has 'gotten the sperrit'. The pistol he had been carrying jammed into the back of his pants - the one none of us knew about - was suddenly in his hands. He stared wide-eyed at the flickering lights and the drop ceiling as he screamed out the last line.

"COME TOGETHER...RIGHT NOW...OVER ME!"

He blew his mind out...but not in a car.

Jamming the muzzle under his jaw, he pulled the trigger and gave me a memory I will never, ever be able to forget.

Chaos ensued. People were screaming - running around. I didn't see it but someone was evidently around the corner puking into a trash can. His body dropped to the floor, slumping against the back cabinets like a marionette that suddenly had its strings cut. The blood was still draining from Tom's nose in a red waterfall and I looked down to see some blood had rained down onto me.

Shut up, Peter Gabriel...Don't tell me about red rain.

The next hour or so I'm surrounded. Cops, all of the executive team that was in the building when it happened, my boss, EMTs and anyone else who wanted to gawk at Tom's blood and brain matter on my shirt front. I told the story, retold the story, again and again until I was just numb to the details. I was very numb, I knew that I was in shock. My head was buzzing and I had a pain in my shoulder. I just didn't want to talk to anyone, see anyone. They finally let me clean up in a Men's room, lent me a new shirt out of the stock of Polo shirts in Marketing and put me in a small conference room in HR. I didn't ask about Stacy - she was standing behind me when it happened. I wouldn't hear anything about that for a couple of days.

Barry, the head of the cafe, slipped in with a medium-sized soda cup. It was full of coke, but as soon as I tasted it I could tell he'd added something. He smiled slightly, cocked an eyebrow and then left without a word. They have bottles of various alcohol in the back that they use for taste - vodka, triple sec, tequila. He'd put in enough tequila to take the edge off but no one else would really know. Bless you, Barry - you're a prince among men.

What had happened to Tom? Everyone wanted to know the answer to that question. Who knew what had come over him, what made him bring a gun to the office and then end it without so much as a suicide note. If this hadn't happened to me, I'd be involved anyway. One of the jobs I do for Legal and HR is to do 'forensic checks' on employee machines. Check them over for anything - take a snapshot of the drive and turn it over to someone else. Since I was busying wearing Tom's brains, they brought David in, another guy from Client Services, to handle it. Between the cops and Legal, they let him slip in and ask me some technical questions about the snapshot process.

I'm numb, I said. I want to go home. They finally let me leave about 4 hours later. My boss called me on the way home and then again later in the day. I would be replaying everything in my head for the rest of the night. It's hard, I guess, for everyone. I guess Tom was under a lot of pressure. Maybe he was getting divorced, laid off and sued all in the same day. Maybe he didn't need that much of a reason. We're all feeling pretty close to gone out here - it's starting to feel like a mad season.

(Just Like) Starting Over

(Just Like) Starting Over

Items needed for starting your life over at 38:

• A new futon.
• Kitchen utensils (don’t forget the garlic press…hah!)
• That repro poster of Metropolis that you couldn’t talk yourself into buying.
• TV / DVD combo player.
• Subscriptions to Maxim, The Onion and Men’s Health

He caught himself staring at the list he’d magneted to the fridge with a real estate agents smiling face on it. Chewing on a piece of Mexican white cheese, he stared at the face while trying to figure out for the millionth time why their smiling faces frightened him so much.

The boy would be visiting on Saturday and he knew she’d be there to drop him off. She offered to do it in a neutral place but he loftily said “no, no – my place will be fine”. She muttered “whatever” and hung up. He played the Allman Brothers and drank a beer in the shower. He washed his dish and put it away in the cupboard. He took the trash with him when he left for work – the complex he had moved into was curiously silent for those several minutes – he could feel the heat building to one of those scorching summer days. The contrast of the dry, stale air coming from the AC felt good and he left the radio off. The swish of air, the muted thrum of the engine – it gave him the space to think all those thoughts he was afraid to have when the lights were out and he was alone.

He still banged awake at 2 in the morning, heart thudding and sweat beading on his brow. What the heck was he gonna do now? 38, divorced and staring down the barrel at alimony and child support. The awkwardness of his son’s visits – the inevitable moment when his son would look up at him and say, “Why did you have to leave Mom?”

• Frozen chicken breasts
• Hibachi
• Nerf Football

His clothes were piled on the floor of his living room and he slept on a futon pad that he still needed to buy the frame for. His dirty laundry was piling in one corner – he was going to have to make a run to the complex Laundromat before long and needed to buy a roll of quarters.

• Laundry detergent
• Bleach
• Fabric softener
• Beer

Driving to work was the worst time – he wanted to call her up. There wasn’t anything else to say, he just wanted to hear her voice – to feel her knowing he was at the other end of the line. It felt like emotional chicken; he wanted her to know he wasn’t afraid. Let her take everything I’ve got…I’ve still got me…it’ll be better this time – my life is a do-over.

He listened to The Velvet Underground.

He listened to Ugly Kid Joe.

He bought a heavy bag.

He took a drive after work on Friday to Pigeon Point and fell asleep behind the wheel watching the sun go down. When he woke, the fog had crept in and he made the drive back over the summit with his high-beams stabbing the night.

Total Loss. Total Failure. The words kept reverberating in his ears when no one else was speaking. To prevent them from bothering him too often, he left the TV on and played his radio at a volume that annoyed the old lady downstairs. She left notes on his door and he used it to focus his rage – how dare she tell him what to do? The resident manager was an older Russian guy who had seen it all. In his thick Gorki accent, he tells him to call him “Joe”.

“I know how it is,” Joe is saying. “You’re just getting back to your feet, yah? Just take it easy on the sound, she is saying she’ll call the cops and then I can’t do anything.”

He bought a bicycle – he takes long rides. His thinning sandy hair is cropped close to his head and he browses personal ads on Craigslist.

No, he thinks after a couple of weeks. There are no normal girls out there.

When the boy visited – he packed their Saturday full of trips to the zoo and a ball game at night. The boy fell asleep on the drive home, his five-year-old shoulders were slumped under the burden of Mommy-and-Daddy-love-you-but-they-don’t-love-each-other. He could never get used to sleeping next to him as an infant but let him sleep on the futon rather than the floor. The boy twitched and jerked in his sleep – just as he did when he was a baby…He didn’t move, just let the boy sleep and attempted to doze with the scent of his son’s hair filling his nose.

His performance at work was just coming out of the post-divorce slump his boss had told him would happen. A sympathetic man, he was gay and had never been attached to anyone permanently or as long as he had. Therefore it all sounded like the same things he’d read in Who Moved My Cheese? “I knew this would happen,” he said. “I’ve seen it three times before…every guy going through a divorce needs about 4 months to turn around and figure their lives out again.”

• Thai Green Curry Paste
• Pasta
• Pinot Noir
• Chocolate-covered Espresso Beans

He experimented with his cooking and with his clothes and with his hair. There was no one to give him the eye or to say “Uhhhmmm…” in that tone he’d hated so much. He could banish the concept of potpourri from his life with no fear of reprisal. He watched late-night episodes of corny TV shows and drank wine out of a Mason jar that started life as a spaghetti sauce container before he washed off the label.

This is great…this is so liberating.

He started back at the gym. Going back to the gym after not going for several years has several different stages. First, you feel completely intimidated by the gym rats who were so much more in shape. Then, as you start feeling those pounds coming off, you start noticing the hot chicks who may or may not be looking for a date. You’re still not in their league but it’s nice to dream all the same.

That first alimony/child support payment hits and it’s a bear. You remember screaming at your lawyer, “It’s costing me more than when we were together!” before slamming the phone down. Yes, yes it is – welcome to California Divorce Law. You thought those guys who were divorced and complaining about how much it sucked were kidding.

On Saturday mornings he wakes up with needles behind his eyes and a pile of Michelob longnecks to remind him about the night before. He didn’t mean to drink that much – her sister-in-law called him and although she started out the conversation with “I don’t want to take sides” it was clear she did have a side, it wasn’t yours and now you can add “Worthless Pig” to the list of names people are calling you.

For about five minutes, he seriously considers suicide.

Does anyone else do this, he wonders to himself as he idly considers the least messy, least painful way to drop down the rabbit hole. Why not? She’s taken everything else – might as well leave her with a nice painful reminder of what her ‘emotional violence’ can do to other people. The final middle-finger-salute. So long, sweetie – I’ve just said something and you can’t say anything back to me now…hope you enjoy explaining it to the boy.

The whole episode leaves him feeling very unsettled – enough to write the local suicide hotline in dry-erase on his fridge. He doesn’t title it – who needs to explain that one away? I’m doing fine – just ignore this phone number here…it’s no reflection on how I’m doing – I write random phone numbers down all the time. Ha ha.

The heavy bag and the mitts are getting a lot of use – he smashes a hole in it and duct-tapes it shut; that only holds for two or three days. He makes sure it’s out of sight when she drops the Boy off.

It’s weird how divorce focuses you on the quality of raising your kid, he realizes. Before – he left her to do the doctor visits, the shots, the PTA conferences. Now it doesn’t matter if the teacher has already met with her – he’ll meet on his own and he will be involved with the Boy’s education.

“Good for you…you’re such a great parent (*sarcasm*),” she writes in a recent email. His attorney is getting tired of being forwarded these little barbs, he finds out. Turns out, you can say all kinds of mean things to each other that have absolutely no bearing on how the divorce turns out. It doesn’t mean anything, Lawyer Bob, says.

“Face it,” Bob says one afternoon. “The fact that you guys don’t get along isn’t a surprise to the judge. It has no bearing on how well she’ll do having full custody. You get what you got – that might change later but this stuff,” he gestures to the 15 or 20 emails he was forwarded and printed out for the file, “doesn’t mean anything.”

For that bit of information, he paid $300.

• Liquid Drain-O
• Cottage Cheese
• Fried Pork Rinds
• Beer
• California Salad Mix

Six months later and still no dates. He begins attending a nearby church divorce support group. Some of the women look date-able and his stories about not being around his boy seem to strike a chord. One agrees to meet up but not for drinks. “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” she says. “That’s why he left me.”

• Self-help books
• Book shelves (particle board with oak veneer)
• Futon frame
• 15 Western and Action DVDs

One day, the transmission on his Jeep decides to go and he’s stuck for a ride to work. Post-divorce issues like this are what makes him the most depressed about breaking up. He mentally goes through the list of his co-workers who live nearby and might be in a position to give him a lift. It’s a toss-up between the emotionally brittle maintenance tech and the guy in Sales. The brittle guy is in recovery – the 12-step-speak is exhausting after a while, he decides. The guy in Sales would be awkward to ask a favor of, you can only call someone a putz to his face so many times.

In the end, the brittle maintenance guy jumps at the chance to give him a ride to work. He gets to listen to how management has it in for him, right-wing talk radio discussions and the latest in home medical cures that the drug industry doesn’t want you to know about. He’s exhausted by the time he arrives for work.

$2500 to rebuild the transmission – he throws it on his credit card. His budget is only good for the minimum payment and he hasn’t the slightest idea when he could pay it off. Credit card counselors seem to sense this and fill his mailbox with ads for improving his credit score.

In lieu of therapy, he’s taken to talking with some of the other gym rats. One in particular, a grizzled veteran of 65 years speaks with authority. He’s sympathetic – in his time he was putting away a quart of Jack a day. You move on, he says. Nobody says this, but the suggestion isn’t too deeply buried. You need to move on.

At 38 years old, he just expected to have this figured out. He sure wasn’t planning on this when they got married – even during the dish-tossing days that marked their second or third year. They had some crackerjack fights, boy – but they were sticking it out and the boy seemed to strengthen their resolve. When the divorce papers were served – he was at work and the sudden shock of them, the hey-this-must-be-a-joke-no-wait-it-isn’t, the universal cream-pie-in-the-face feeling left him feeling like a child once again.

We’re all children when the lights go out.

When you’re staring at the lights that climb the wall as cars go by in the night. When you’re staring at the green LED of the clock radio as it goes from 12:30 to 4:45am. When you’re in the fetal position on the floor of your bathroom – crying and playing the music loud so that no one will hear. Yes, we are all children. The thing that makes us children is that feeling that you’ve never felt before, the ones you used to feel all the time when you were younger. And now, after all this time, after all the yeah-yeah-yeahs of the past 15 years – she’s giving you that mad, out-of-control feeling that only comes when you are feeling something for the very first time.

Utter loss.

You’re surprised to know just how vulnerable you can still feel. Are men supposed to feel this way? Did John Wayne feel like this? After one too many hangovers, you know the answer isn’t at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Nihilism was never much of a policy. The nagging doubts are something that only you can resolve – you’re sure not going to admit to them to your friends and least of all, to her. There’s a whole subsection of malehood being accessed here and the way you were raised leaves you completely unprepared on how to proceed.

In a moment of weakness, you call her. You’re drunk and lonely. You’re planning to beg her to come back – or let you come back to her. You made a cute couple once – it could work again, couldn’t it? There may or may not be tears; you haven’t decide. The drunkenness is by design – you wouldn’t dare make this much of a fool of yourself sober. She takes your call calmly…she’s been waiting for it, no doubt. After gibbering mindlessly, saying whatever is on your mind, she interrupts you with a single piece of information. It’s touching, she says, but I’ve met someone.

There isn’t enough booze in the world to deal with this.

He hangs up suddenly – another whiskey-fueled cryfest ensues. He calls in sick to work the next day and spends it drinking water and slamming punch after punch into the heavy bag. Somehow – being away from work is worse. The daytime TV schedule does nothing to improve his mood. However bad this is, he’s gotta move on – to stay here is slow suicide.

Several months go by, of course. The nights aren’t looking as dark and you and the boy have developed your own ‘happiness ritual’. Lazy Sundays that start with breakfast at the coffee shop around the corner and a trip to the batting cages. Or sometimes you’re going to the zoo. Or sometimes you’re just driving somewhere and there’s nothing more to it than being together in a single moment of time. You can start to look at him and see his mother’s features and not feel that single stab just below your breastbone.

Just before you drop him off, you tell him to tell his mother ‘hello’ for you. He gives you a significant look but says, “sure”, with all the resilience that a six-year-old can muster. It’s getting close to summertime and with school letting out soon, maybe everyone can take a trip together. You, the boy, his mom and the new guy in her life.

There isn’t anyone in your life right now. Save the boy and the constant presence of your former relationship. You’re not misogynistic enough to pretend that your relationship didn’t matter. It did matter – it still does. Even if that relationship is now only about the boy and whether he’s okay. She still needs you and even if you wish you’d never met her sometimes, there’s still the little guy and your love for him is larger than that.

You’re cleaning up on Saturday afternoon and a half-erased phone number is on your whiteboard. It takes you a minute to remember what it is. When you do remember it, you stand there staring at it in rueful reflection for like a minute.

And then, you reach out and erase it completely.